Chauvin’s chance of a successful appeal - John Hinderaker

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• Catch Me On Laura Ingraham Tonight
• A personal note on Walter Mondale
• The Chauvin verdict
• This Week in Cancel Culture
• The Declining Relevance of Legal Scholarship

Catch Me On Laura Ingraham Tonight Posted: 20 Apr 2021 04:41 PM PDT (John Hinderaker) I will be on the Laura Ingraham show on Fox News tonight at 10 Eastern, 9 Central, talking about the Chauvin verdict. Alan Dershowitz and I will be on at the top of the hour. I think the focus will be on Chauvin’s chance of a successful appeal, but that could change by show time. The only way to know for sure is to tune in! I will post my thoughts on the verdict here, in much more depth, tomorrow.

A personal note on Walter Mondale Posted: 20 Apr 2021 04:38 PM PDT (Scott Johnson) Former Vice President Walter Mondale died on Monday at the age of 93. His death brought back a flood of memories to me. I want to offer these personal notes on the occasion of his death. I talked my way into an internship in then Minnesota Senator Mondale’s Washington office in the summer of 1969, just after I graduated from high school in St. Paul. I had gone to hear Mondale speak at an event that spring and tracked him down outside the building afterwards. I told Mondale that Syd Berde, his former chief deputy when he served as Minnesota Attorney General, had called him and recommended me to him. That’s what I had been given to understand, although I’m not sure it was accurate. (Mr. Berde was the father of my classmate Chuck Berde, by far the smartest student in our class. Chuck told me that his father had called Mondale on my behalf, as I had requested.) However, Mondale didn’t disagree. It didn’t take more than a mention of Mr. Berde for Mondale to tell me to call Mike Berman, the manager of his office in Washington. I called Mike and arranged a start-up date. Working for Mondale that summer was a life-changing experience. I found him to be a decent, honest, and surprisingly candid boss. He had me performing the traditional functions of an intern at the time. During my first day on the job, Mike asked me to go to the vendor outside the Senate Office Building and buy rum-soaked crooks for Mondale. It’s a cigar I haven’t heard of before or since. Mondale kept a so-called first-name file of friends and supporters under Mike’s jurisdiction. When letters came in with the salutation “Dear Fritz,” we had to check them against the file and make sure that responses were not signed with the office autopen. My job was to sign them “Fritz,” in Mondale’s cursive style. I got pretty good at it, too. I enjoyed it all. According to Hegel’s famous adage, “No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.” These may be the only two sentences by Hegel that I think I understand. Although I had a valet’s perspective on Mondale, and although my politics have changed considerably since that summer, I have nothing but good to say about him as a man. Mondale came up in the Minnesota DFL as a protégé of Hubert Humphrey. Indeed, as a precocious young man, Mondale served as a Young DFL anti-Communist organizer in Humphrey’s struggle to throw the Communists out of the DFL. See John Earl Haynes’s invaluable Dubious Alliance: The Making of Minnesota’s DFL Party (1984). Mister, we could use a man like the young Walter Mondale again. Back in 1969, the Senate held real hearings and exchanges of substance took place on the Senate floor. With his encouragement, I played hooky on occasion to take them in. One day I was surprised to see Louisiana Senator Russell Long mercilessly interrogating Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire on Proxmire’s criticism of the oil depletion allowance. I thought Long may have had the better of the argument but was surprised at how bitter and unrelenting he was. When I asked Mondale about it, Mondale simply observed: “Russell was drunk.” During his service as vice president Mondale attended the official celebration of the new University of Minnesota Law School building on the west bank of the campus in January 1978, I think. I was a second-year student and a member of the law school student council at the time. and had the honor of greeting him with his Secret Service contingent when he arrived. The following year the council solicited items for a fund-raising auction. Mondale had made his name in part as an ardent advocate of campaign-finance “reform,” but he contributed an autographed copy of his January 1956 Minnesota Law Review note opposing Minnesota’s then current campaign finance reform law (“Minnesota Corrupt Practices Act: A Critique of the Fixed Campaign Expenditure Limitations”). It is an intelligent and insightful piece that remains relevant to the larger issue and seemed to me, given his about face on the subject, a characteristically humorous contribution to the auction. (I’m the proud owner.) In May 2001 the law school building was named Walter F. Mondale Hall in his honor. After Mondale’s last public service, as ambassador to Japan in the Clinton administration, he returned to the Twin Cities to work at the Dorsey and Whitney law firm. Although he sought unsuccessfully to return to his old job as Senator after Paul Wellstone’s death in 2002, he wasn’t wedded to Washington. He had a life and family in Minneapolis. Our paths crossed occasionally in the downtown Minneapolis skyway. He would always take the time to stop and chat with me in his candid style. I asked him during one such chat about Steven Gillon’s The Democrats’ Dilemma: Walter F. Mondale and the Liberal Legacy (1992). Mondale had arranged for Gillon to have unconditional access to archives and former staffers to facilitate his work on the book. The book reflected a liberal’s disillusion with aspects of Mondale’s career, and Mondale was disappointed by it in turn, but he was a big boy who never lost his gift for self-deprecation. Gillon relates that when he first approached Mondale in 1986 about his desire to write the book, Mondale asked him, “Who would want to read a book about me?” Gillon responded that Mondale’s career served as a prism for viewing American recent American politics (recent as of 1986). Mondale laconically commented: “So maybe Lane Kirkland will buy a copy.” Lane Kirkland and me, I guess. Mondale to the contrary notwithstanding, it’s a valuable book about a politician of rare grace and integrity. When my youngest daughter graduated from college in 2010, we went to dinner with the family of her boyfriend (now fiancée). Former Ambassador to Rumania (1994-1997) Alfred Moses is his grandfather. In the Carter White House he served as special counsel and special advisor to Carter as well as lead counsel to Carter in the Billygate hearings. I asked him whom he respected most among his colleagues in the Carter administration. He answered without hesitation: “Fritz Mondale.” RIP.

The Chauvin verdict Posted: 20 Apr 2021 02:51 PM PDT (Scott Johnson) The jury rendered guilty verdicts on all three charges against former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin a few minutes ago. The charges were brought in an atmosphere of mob justice on May 29 and June 3, within days of the death of George Floyd this past May 25. He will be sentenced on the second-degree murder charge that was the most serious of the three. Chauvin was repeatedly declared guilty of murder by Governor Tim “tear down this” Walz, Attorney General and former Nation of Islam race hustler Keith Ellison in press conferences broadcast statewide in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s death. Walz called another press conference for the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul to do it again yesterday as the Chauvin jury retired to deliberate of course we had the invaluable contribution of Mad Maxine Waters to add to the mix as well. Mad Maxine demanded a conviction of Chauvin on first degree murder, a charge which the prosecutors had somehow failed to bring. The courthouse where the trial occurred visibly manifested the atmosphere. The 24-story courthouse building was ringed with bricks and razor wire in advance of the trial. Soldiers and law enforcement authorities have protected the building over the past six weeks. But for the trial the building was essentially closed for reasons of security. Any reasonable observer might question whether Derek Chauvin could receive, or did receive, a fair trial in Hennepin County. I certainly do. In his order denying Chauvin’s motion for a change of venue, Judge Cahill acknowledged the problem but deemed it irremediable by a change of venue. I doubt that too, but the defense more or less left it there. I watched the trial from jury selection through the verdicts today. I gave my assessment of the case in advance of the verdicts on Sunday in “Random thoughts on the Chauvin trial.” I won’t repeat them here. Contrary to my understanding of the case before trial and my predisposition to support law enforcement, I thought the prosecution introduced powerful evidence against Chauvin and that the defense case was thin and weak. Indeed, the defense argument that CO poisoning from the squad car’s exhaust contributed to Floyd’s death proved to be an exploding cigar of an argument, just to take one small example. That’s the way I saw it anyway. God save us from the clowns, cowards, and opportunists seeking to turn this case to their own uses.

This Week in Cancel Culture Posted: 20 Apr 2021 01:17 PM PDT (Steven Hayward) It has been suggested that “cancel culture” won’t end until it comes for enough liberals, though I am doubtful. In any case, it is bemusing to see that the latest victim of cancel culture is the aggressively atheist and hyper-Darwinian Richard Dawkins, who has had his “Humanist of the Year Award” from 1996 rescinded by the American Humanist Association. Why, you ask? Here’s the AHA statement: Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values. His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient. His subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity. Consequently, the AHA Board has concluded that Richard Dawkins is no longer deserving of being honored by the AHA, and has voted to withdraw, effective immediately, the 1996 Humanist of the Year award. Here’s how The Guardian—hardly an anti-leftist source—reports on what Dawkins said to get his prestigious award rescinded by the august AHA: On Monday, it announced that it was withdrawing the award, referring to a tweet sent by Dawkins earlier this month, in which he compared trans people to Rachel Dolezal, the civil rights activist who posed as a black woman for years. “In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black,” wrote Dawson on Twitter. “Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.” [See below.] Dawkins later responded to criticism, writing: “I do not intend to disparage trans people. I see that my academic ‘Discuss’ question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this. It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue.” In 2015, Dawkins also wrote: “Is trans woman a woman? Purely semantic. If you define by chromosomes, no. If by self-identification, yes. I call her “she” out of courtesy.” He forgot to say “Orange man bad!” The irony here is that the American Humanist Association says it stands for “science” above all. Just not when it comes to biology apparently. Of course, Dawkins has also said mean things about Islam, so he’s a twofer in the PC-offending sweepstakes. But the Humanists seem to be overlooking this. I’ve never had any use for the guy, and thus it is fun watching a gang of pretentious pecksniffs going off on one of their own.

The Declining Relevance of Legal Scholarship Posted: 20 Apr 2021 08:45 AM PDT (Steven Hayward) It has been a long-running theme of mine that academic social science, which at its birth promised to bring “scientific” research to bear on solving practical human problems, is increasingly detached from the real world and of almost no use to the larger world. Partly this is because of defects or limitations of positivist social science, the overwhelming leftist bias of most academic social scientists, and the deliberate aloofness of many academics from the real world, where obscurity and hyper-specialization is now prized over engagement with the real world. (Just see what happens to professors like Harvard’s Steven Pinker who dare to publish a trade book that reaches a mass audience.) This is not a new problem. I have previously enjoyed citing Harvard graduate Robert F. Kennedy, who remarked in the early 1960s that “I majored in Government at Harvard and never learned anything which helped me in practical political situations or in overseas travel thereafter. How can universities answer this problem?” This is preface for noting an interesting new study about the declining influence of legal scholarship on the judiciary in ways that parallel the irrelevance of social science. “May It Please the Court: A Longitudinal Study of Judicial Citation to Academic Legal Periodicals,” by University of Buffalo School of Law professor Brian Detweiler, finds that there is a long-term decline in the number of law review articles cited in federal court opinions—especially from the most elite law schools such as Harvard and Yale. Meanwhile, citations from law reviews of lesser ranked law schools have held steady. What does that tell you? From the abstract: This study shows that as the percentage of reported cases citing to at least one academic law journal article has decreased since the mid-1970s, so too has the proportion of reported cases citing to the leading journals of the elite law schools included in this study. At the same time, citation rates for law reviews of exemplar schools for Tiers I-IV remained relatively stable throughout. And here are the charts:   In other words, real world judges are not finding law review articles by our top legal scholars to be of much use in crafting rulings. This ought to be a mild embarrassment to the elite legal academy, but won’t be. Law schools are professional schools, meant to educate members of the bar in the practicalities of the profession. Increasingly many law professors think of themselves more a political philosophers, and write accordingly.