Ok, here's why I am confident that the 14th Amendment confers birthright citizenship to all but a small subset of people born in the United States.

/1 Text:

The 14th Amendment says: born here + subject to U.S. jurisdiction = citizen.

It does not say: born here + parents domiciled here = citizen.

/2

If you represent someone convicted of murder, you owe them your best efforts. Today, the Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed a murder conviction where appellate counsel could not have taken more than 15 minutes to write the brief.

gasupreme.us/wp-content/upl… The Statement of facts says the client was convicted, and helpfully pointed the court to the indictment.

Here is why James Comey is going to win:

1. The government must establish that "86 47" is a true threat.

2. True threats are “serious expression[s]” conveying that a speaker means to “commit an act of unlawful violence.

3. This ain't that.
Let's start with the basics. The vast majority of speech is protected. For speech to be prosecutable, it must fall into one of a small number of categories of speech unprotected at the time of the founding.

Here, it must be either a "true threat" or "incitement."

The one thing movies never get right about trials is the rules of evidence.

And I don't just mean whether the objections are accurate or the evidence is admissible.

Planning how you are going to get your evidence in, and keep their evidence out, is a big part of trial prep. So, for instance, this past week I had a DUI trial where the police officer who initially detained by client had pleaded guilty to DUI. IN FRONT OF ME.

Two weeks before the trial.

But under Rule 404, that sort of evidence is not normally admissible.

Roy Moore "dated" 14-year-old girls as a 30 something lawyer and was kicked out of a mall for being creepy. (Trump still endorsed him).

An ad ran on those facts, he sued, and an Alabama jury awarded him an 8 million dollar verdict.

Today, the 11th Circuit vacated it. /1 Here are the facts, as recounted by the 11th Circuit. Here's a link to the opinion:



/2 media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/f…

The alleged victim in this case, Kenneth Herring, blew through a red light and slammed into a semi-trailer, hard enough to make it tilt. An off-duty officer who approached him noticed that he seemed impaired.

/1

https://twitter.com/AnnaBower/status/2035059208010207433

Hannah Payne witnessed the accident. And she waited around for 20 minutes, just in case the officer needed her to be a witness. But eventually, Herring's behavior grew more erratic.

He started mumbling to himself. Pacing. The officer told him not to go back into his car. /2

If you're stopped by police, timeless advice:

1. Be nice, and polite, even if the cop is a jerk. Especially if the cop is a jerk, because if the cop comes off as a jerk on body cam, the jury may acquit you for this and no other reason. 2. Hand over your license and registration is asked. You may have some sort of technical argument for why you don't have to. That argument is going to land you in jail for no personal benefit. Just hand them over.

Ok, so there are two kinds of lawyers when you're alleging ineffective assistance of counsel.

The first type of lawyer is your Brian Steel type. Scrupulously honest, amazing at his job, cares tremendously about his client.

/1

https://twitter.com/Electradyne112/status/2008961728998994298

This is the EASIEST kind of lawyer to allege ineffectiveness against. If you point out something he didn't think of, he's going to say "gosh I didn't think of that and it was not strategic."

Because the fact is, we all miss stuff all the time.

Matt Taibbi: It is libel to say that I refuse to criticize billionaires for money and recognition

Also Matt Taibbi:

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/2005425981860020374

I read the lawsuit looking for a provably false statement of fact, and as far as I can tell, it's that Taibbi made more money during the Twitter files saga.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

Here's the 315,000 vote issue as I understand it.

315,000 people voted early in Fulton County. Someone should have signed the machine count tallies, to show they were verified.

/1 If a Fulton County employee had done this, I am skeptical that the people claiming fraud would have said "oh damn, they signed off on the counts? I guess that means everything was above board."

Chances are, the fraud theorists would say Fulton just lied when they signed. /2

It was 2011, and 200 people were gathering in South Atlanta for a repast, (a big post-funeral meal) setting up tablecloths and getting coolers.

The neighborhood was just saying a prayer when Javenski Hilton learned that a drug dealer had broken into his car. /1 Hilton knew the drug dealer. It was his girlfriend, Tomika Webb. She had loaned him some money so he could buy crack and share the profits with her, but he hadn't paid him back. /2

Notably, Governor Abbott pardoned a man who gunned down a veteran at a BLM march after trying to run over a woman in a wheelchair.

So, his views on acceptable behavior are a bit malleable.

https://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX/status/1967387427112395178

A straightforward example of unjustified political violence.

If you have hired a criminal defense attorney and he is requesting a bench trial, that is often a good time to get a second opinion. A bench trial is a trial in front of a judge with no jury.

It is almost impossible to appeal from that verdict, even if the judge admits inadmissible evidence or finds guilt where no evidence exists.

Appellate courts will just assume the judge knows best.

So, first off, this is bullshit. There was no evidence that Arbery ever posed as a jogger to rob people (this makes no sense?)

But, the thing is, the McMichaels admitted they didn't see Arbery commit a crime, but they still chased him with their car and shot him.

https://twitter.com/Tomhennessey69/status/1948750009899311448

If you chase someone with your car, that is aggravated assault. And you cannot be justified doing something once you commit a felony. You can't shoot an armed homeowner, for instance, if he tries to stop you from burglarizing his house.

The first thing to note about Trump's WSJ lawsuit is that he filed it federally in Florida.

In almost every jurisdiction, filing a lawsuit federally helps you avoid the anti-SLAPP statute.

But not in Florida. So, for instance, when Dan Bongino filed a lawsuit against the Daily Beast for saying he was fired, the Daily Beast filed an anti-SLAPP motion, even though it was in federal court.

And prevailed, because the suit was without merit.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

So my client is a paraplegic. One day, a Fulton County police department asked him to come down and answer a few questions.

A woman alleged that he KICKED her door down and assaulted her.

And they were calling him down to arrest him, not talk to him. The client had some pretty good objections. For instance, he is paraplegic. He is physically incapable of committing the crime as alleged.

Also, he had not seen the woman in ten years.

Ahhh, the police officer said, then how did she pick you out of a lineup?

There was a NYT op ed claiming that there's a good argument that the children of illegal immigrants don't get birthright citizenship.

Before I get into why it's wrong, first, I want to talk about all the ways we know that the 14th Amendment DOES provide such citizenship. First and foremost, there's the text of the 14th amendment:

It says that to become a citizen, you need only be born and subject to jursidiction.

And children of illegal immigrants can indeed be sued, jailed, or taxed, as needed.

This is one of my favorite historical stories.

In 1938, a Polish Jew living in Paris, Herschel Feibel Grynszpan, learned that his family had been arrested and deported.

He entered the German embassy, claiming to be a spy with valuable information, and shot an embassy official, Ernst vom Rath. The Germans, of course, claimed that this was an enormous outrage--just part of the historical plot of the Jews to destroy the Aryan race.

They planned a series of pogroms in response, to be carried out by government agents out of uniform, encouraging the public to join in.

Threatening to prosecute people for accurately reporting information about the government violates the first amendment.

https://twitter.com/samstein/status/1886462626332364838

In The Florida Star v. B. J. F, 491 U.S. 524, 526 (1989), a rape victim sued a newspaper for printing her name, arguing that it violated a Florida law protecting her privacy.

When a public official is corrupt, you don't need to doxx them. Who they are is publicly available.

https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1886420156416425986

And yet good reporters still often find out embarrassing, newsworthy stuff about these people.

The problem is that there's no good faith definition of "jurisdiction" under which illegal immigrants aren't subject to US jurisdiction.

They have to pay taxes. They can be convicted of crimes. They can be sued. They can be deported.

That's what jurisdiction is.

https://twitter.com/wanyeburkett/status/1882069509990654425

When you say we don't have "jurisdiction" over them you have to come up with some tortured definition where if you can imagine a law does not apply to illegal immigrants (or people here on a visa), that means no jurisidiction.