ArcaMax

I was blessed.

On my first day as his law clerk on the D.C. Circuit, Judge J. Skelly Wright, who had hired me sight unseen when I was elected president of the Harvard Law Review, told me that Justice Brennan would not do the same. True, he always hired Judge Wright's Harvard clerk sight unseen, and he had never passed on a Harvard Law Review ...Read more

After all the pundits declared him the loser in his first debate, after almost two weeks of backpedaling and explaining, Joe Biden still leads the field among likely Democratic primary voters. At least that's what the latest national polls say. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, one of the best, was released on Thursday and found that 26 ...Read more

Alexander Acosta, as the U.S. attorney in Miami, was responsible for cutting the deal that allowed notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to get away with a slap on the wrist.

In yet another example of the vital importance of old-fashioned investigative journalism (aka "fake news"), the Miami Herald in February detailed the agreement that ...Read more

It was a very good night for California Sen. Kamala Harris. And, for those listening, a strong showing for Sen. Michael Bennett and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. The night before, Sen. Elizabeth Warren owned the stage.

But the real story coming out of this week's debates was not who won but who lost. Much easier to call that one.

It was Bernie and ...Read more

It happens. A golden boy comes to Washington and spends too much time at Bullfeathers, the bar where congressmen and young staff members have frolicked since I was a young staffer. Back at home, wherever that is, he's the war hero who made good, the devoted father and son, the regular guy. Back home is where his wife and kids are. In Washington,...Read more

No one had a worse campaign debut than Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Pocahontas.

Why was she listed as Native American in law school directories in the '80s and '90s, as she was rocketing her way up the law school rankings, from Rutgers to Houston to Texas to Penn to Harvard?

How could such a brilliant person be so stupid as to take, ...Read more

"What makes family law so difficult?" I ask Laura Wasser, one of Los Angeles' -- and America's -- most famous divorce lawyers. "Money and kids," she says without hesitation. "Kids and money," echoes Phyllis Bersch, who practiced with Wasser's dad for many years before joining up with her own daughter, Rachel Juarez.

I have a third candidate for...Read more

Of course he was for the Hyde Amendment, the federal law that blocks Medicaid funding from being used for abortion. He even fought against a rape and incest exception. He proposed his own Biden amendment to block foreign aid from being used for biomedical research related to abortion. He was one of two Democrats who supported an effort to allow ...Read more

Judy Jarvis was my best friend for 19 years. She was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. If it matters, I never saw her smoke a cigarette; if it matters, her internist had failed to give her an annual chest X-ray. All that mattered to me, as I raced from Los Angeles to the hospital in Boston, was that my best friend was dying, and I was ...Read more

I knew him back when we were both law clerks fresh out of school -- he for one of the most conservative members of the D.C. Circuit, I for one of its leading liberals.

He was a smart guy. Honorable. Someone you disagreed with but respected.

As a young Justice Department lawyer, he wrote legal memos justifying the United States' invasion of ...Read more

"Why not?" she asked.

We're looking for a nondescript generic white male Democrat, preferably a senator, and you ask why not the 37-year-old gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana?

How about this?

He's too young.

He's too inexperienced.

He's not just gay; he's out-of-the-closet gay, gay with a husband, a veritable First Man.

All of which is ...Read more

It's hard enough dealing with sexual misconduct by senior officials. But when the CEO is an alleged pig, much less one who is surrounded by like-minded figures, who do you complain to?

There is a very simple reason why (pick your favorite) got away with the worst kind of misconduct for decades and decades.

The reason is not -- is never -- that...Read more

First of all, it doesn't need to. Roe v. Wade has already been thoroughly decimated by a thousand different regulations, all of which the Supreme Court has, or will, uphold.

Second, the Alabama geniuses could not have been stupider in the way they set things up for the court.

And third, smart Republicans -- and that includes a chief justice ...Read more

In 1967, Justice John Marshall Harlan (one of the greats) wrote a concurring opinion that, to this day, establishes the constitutional test that protects our privacy from the government.

It happened that one Charles Katz went into a pay telephone booth to make two calls. In the days before cellphones, there were pay phones in translucent stalls...Read more

In the not-so-old days, the guerrilla battle against Roe v. Wade took the form of state laws that imposed endless obstacles in the face of women seeking to exercise their constitutional rights, from waiting periods to hospitalization requirements to exhaustive credentialing of clinics, not to mention repeated efforts to defund Planned Parenthood...Read more

The way for Democrats to win in 2020 is to follow the advice of the shrewdest Democrat in politics today:

--Don't be goaded by President Trump into a lengthy impeachment battle that will divide the country and ultimately be defeated by the Republican Senate.

--Don't go too far left and risk the moderate voters Democrats need to win.

It seems ...Read more

He met her in an anorexia forum when she was 15. When she was 16, he lured her to his home, where he kept her captive for a year, locking her in a cage and forcing her to have sex. He put her through water torture and controlled her food intake. When police finally rescued her (after she sent a photo of where she was to a woman she had met in ...Read more

Patrick Little. I had almost forgotten him.

It was just last year when the San Diego man was leading the Republican polls in his effort to unseat Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

He came into the Republican State Convention in San Diego riding on the momentum of a poll showing him to be the choice of 18 percent of the state's voters -- even though the ...Read more

There's hope for those of you 75 or over.

There is still time to be president of the United States. After all, Biden would be 78 at the inauguration. Bernie Sanders, his elder, would be 79. An 80-year-old in the White House? And, of course, Trump, should he win again, would be a youthful 74.

I like Joe Biden. Most people who have been around ...Read more

My friend Jack Corrigan, one of the smartest politicos/lawyers I know, saw it right away. He called it "the key punch-pulling passage in the report." It occurs on page two of volume two, where Robert Mueller says he and his team "determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes."...Read more