MUSSOLINI WAS SUMMARILY SHOT ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY:  Hitler committed suicide two days later.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO HERB PEDERSON:  I still listen to Wheatstraw Suite and Copperfields all the time.

“PARTS UNKNOWN” TRAVELING FOOD CRITIC VENTURES TO EXOTIC … WEST VIRGINIA: And for a liberal Anthony Bourdain sounds like not such a bad guy. He actually likes going to new places, meeting new people and getting to know them (even when they’re “only” his own countrymen). He says, “You know, the contempt with which we speak of West Virginia in the political circles that I’m inclined to vote with I think is sort of disgraceful and counterproductive and unlovely. A little understanding and a little empathy — the ability to walk in someone else’s shoes for a few minutes — has got to be a good thing.” With a few more like Bourdain, maybe the Republic will survive after all.

U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS DECLARES THAT “GOALS” ARE REALLY EVIL “QUOTAS”—But only when they apply to goals the Commissioners don’t like.  When they are applied to liberal goals, like racial balancing, they’re still golden.

IS TRUMP A GREAT DEREGULATOR? Jeff Jacoby says yes and no:

[W]hile Trump deserves credit for eliminating red tape, it will take a far more aggressive effort, and significant help from Congress, to effect any lasting drainage of the regulatory swamp. In 2017, even this most regulation-averse administration signed off on 3,281 new federal rules, and another 1,834 were in the pipeline at year’s end. If Trump truly intends to be the Deregulator-in-Chief, he has a lot more work to do.

In other words: Faster, please.

THIS IS GOING TO BACKFIRE:  Press release:  “Minnesota Department of Human Rights Reaches Agreements with Ten School Districts, Charter Schools to Reduce Disparities in Suspensions for Students with Disabilities, Students of Color, Charges Files Against 2 Districts.”

For a sense of why this is a very bad idea, read The Department of Education’s Obama-Era Initiative on Racial Disparities in School Discipline:  Wrong for Students and Teachers, Wrong on the Law.  It focuses more on federal law, but the problems are about the same.

THE LAWSUIT AGAINST HARVARD FOR DISCRIMINATING AGAINST ASIAN AMERICANS IN ADMISSIONS IS PROCEEDING: Harvard has now appointed an Asian-American attorney to defend its diversity policy. And the U.S. Department of Justice has taken an interest in the case.

The thing that always gets me about race-preferential admissions policies that disadvantage Asian American and white applicants is that, when all is said and done, those policies disadvantage their so-called beneficiaries too. A “Dubious Expediency”: How Race-Preferential Admissions Policies on Campus Hurt Minority Students discusses the evidence.

But the beat goes on. Nobody likes to admit that a policy they’ve been following for 50 years isn’t working.

TRUMP SHOULD PARDON JACK JOHNSON:  And while we’re thinking about, we should think sympathetic thoughts about Frank Lloyd Wright and Charlie Chaplin too.  All got ensnared in the vaguely-worded Mann Act.

NO REGRETS:  Today would have been Supreme Court Justice William Brennan’s 112th birthday.  He was perhaps the Court’s most liberal Justice.  He also has a claim to be being its most unreflective Justice.  After his retirement, he was asked in an interview whether there were any cases where, in retrospect, he might have voted differently.  Brennan gave a startling response:  “Hell, no,” he replied. “I never thought I was wrong.” 

“THIS MAKES ME FEEL LIKE I WANT TO PUNCH THE NEXT ASIAN PERSON I SEE IN THE FACE”:  That was California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia’s reaction to Asian opposition to the proposed repeal of California’s Proposition 209.  Nasty.

AT THE VOLOKH CONSPIRACY:  I talk about apprenticeships back in the old days–when they’d throw runaway apprentices in jail.

DON’T FREE MUMIA:  Today is the 64th birthday of Mumia Abu-Jamal–convicted murderer of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and cause célèbre of the Left.  Mumia’s conviction was in 1982, and he spent decades on death row.   Despite a massive “Free Mumia” legal and media campaign by leftwing activists and clueless celebrities, his conviction has always been affirmed.  But his sentence wasn’t.  Citing procedural irregularities in the penalty phase of the trial, a federal judge vacated the death sentence in 2001.  The case took a few more twists and turns, including an order by the Supreme Court to the Third Circuit to reconsider the decision to vacate the death penalty.  In 2011, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania decided too much time has passed to hold a trial on the sentencing issue again.  That left Mumia with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

You can say a lot of things about Mumia–like he’s a better journalist than your average convicted murderer or his image sold a lot of t-shirts.  But you can’t say he was innocent.

PURE VERMONT:  A reference to Vermont’s famous maple syrup?  Or a call for genocide?  Evidently the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights agrees with its newly-reappointed Chair of the Vermont State Advisory Committee that it’s fair to construe it as the latter.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:  The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, of which I am a member, will hold a briefing on hate crimes on Friday, May 11 at the Commission’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The briefing will include an open forum at which members of the public are invited to share their experiences and views. Those who are unable to attend the briefing or who wish to elaborate more fully upon their oral comments are invited to submit written comments to the Commission.

If you or a close family member has been the victim of a hate crime, or if you or a close family member has personal experience of an alleged hate crime that was later shown to be a hoax, please share your experience with us. How crimes get classified as hate crimes or not hate crimes is an important subject of interest to the Commission. If you or a close family member has been involved in a crime that was classified as a hate crime, but you believe should not have been (or a crime that was not classified as a hate crime, but you believe should have been), again, let us hear from you. Currently, the federal hate crimes statute covers race, color, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. If you or a close family member has been the victim of a violent bias crime on some other status basis that you believe should be covered by the law, let us know about that too.

We are also interested in hearing from law enforcement about which crimes are or are not reported to the FBI as hate crimes and how law enforcement officers are instructed to make that determination.

Details regarding the oral comment period are available here, and you may send written comments to . If you would like to communicate with me about Commission business, the prefix on my Commission address begins with gheriot. Don’t use the comment section here.

SHIRLEY TEMPLE WOULD HAVE TURNED 90 TODAY:  If you think of her only as a cute little child star, then you don’t know enough about Shirley Temple Black.  As ambassador to Czechoslovakia, she was a real star, unafraid to lend moral support to the Velvet Revolution (sometimes against the advice of the Foreign Service staffers).  My grandmother thought she was adorable.  But the people who adored her the most were the Czechs.

FLASHBACK: Remember when the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether race-preferential affirmative action policies at colleges and universities were MANDATORY? The case was Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary. The April 22, 2014 decision came out okay: Michigan voters were permitted to prohibit racial preferences.   But there were dissents by Sotomayor and Ginsburg.

If you are wondering about the respondent’s peculiar name, the answer is that, yes, they were very serious about the “By Any Means Necessary” part. “BAMN” (as it calls itself) is a violent offshoot of the Revolutionary Workers League. But even offshoots of the Revolutionary Workers League make it into the Supreme Court sometimes.

Pre-decision, I wrote a short essay about the case (and a bit about BAMN) in The Parade of Horribles Lives.

JOHN FUND WARNS:  Blind faith in one’s ideological “team” members can be dangerous, whether it’s faith in Andrew McCabe for the liberals or Steve Stockman for the conservatives.

SENATE DEAL TO CONFIRM EEOC NOMINEES?:  That’s what Paul Mirengoff hears.  A deal could package Chai Feldblum (originally an Obama-appointee) and Trump nominees Daniel Gade (a non-lawyer disabled vet) and Janet Dillon (General Counsel to Burlington Stores).

JEFF JACOBY THINKS WE USE THE F-WORD TOO MUCH IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE:  Ordinarily, I would agree with him wholeheartedly.  But he leads with the example of Red Sox Designated Hitter David “Big Papi” Ortiz just after the Boston Marathon massacre.  At the first home game after the incident, just hours after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had been apprehended, there was a ceremony honoring the victims and first responders.  Big Papi took the microphone: “We want to thank you, Mayor Menino, Governor Patrick, the whole police department for the great job they did this past week,” he said.  “This is our f**king city.  And nobody’s going to dictate our freedom.  Stay strong,” he said.

If the f-word has any place in public discourse, that has to be it.   Among other things, Big Papi can lay claim to the baseball exception to all otherwise-applicable rules of etiquette.  (I kind of remember reading in Emily Post that such an exception exists, didn’t I?)  Moreover, the far more egregious obscenity had occurred earlier in the week.

IN THE SIXTIES, STUDENT ACTIVISTS KNEW WHAT “VIOLENCE” MEANT: And they weren’t shy about threatening it. On this day in 1969, a gang of rifle-toting Cornell students marched out of the building that they had been occupying for days. The country was shocked by the incident and mesmerized by the photographs documenting it. Donald Alexander Downs tells the story of that harrowing day (and the spineless university leadership that led up to it) in Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University.

These days one gets accused of violence for merely disagreeing with students. On the surface that might sound almost comforting. Your right of free expression might be threatened, but surely social justice warriors who are so very sensitive to the power of words that sting would be dedicated to non-violence themselves, wouldn’t they? Well … uh … don’t count on it.

GET ME OUT OF HERE:  Attorney General Sessions is being criticized for establishing a policy under which Immigration Administrative Law Judges will be evaluated in part on their efficiency in deciding cases (even though I understand this is a common basis for evaluating ALJs across the federal bureaucracy).  Interestingly, when I visited immigration detention centers for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the most common complaint of detainees was that the decision making system was taking too long. No one I spoke to had any serious complaints about conditions at the detention centers.

ONCE AGAIN I OVERHEARD A DISCUSSION (this time on a flight from San Diego to Chicago) about how to encourage more minority students into STEM fields. This seems to be everywhere these days. Once again the answer can be found in Want to Be a Doctor? A Scientist? An Engineer? An Affirmative Action Leg Up May Hurt Your Chances. Note that the logic applies not just to affirmative action beneficiaries, but to legacy beneficiaries, athletes or anyone who is admitted to a competitive school on the basis of a special preference.

IS THE CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY THE NEXT STARBUCKS?: “Police handcuff black woman at San Diego Democratic Party meeting, which ends in disarray.”

SURPRISE! STUDENTS WHO MISBEHAVE A LOT GET DISCIPLINED MORE OFTEN THAN OTHER STUDENTS: It’s really stunning when one hears of school districts getting in trouble because they discipline disabled students at higher rates than non-disabled students. The problem is that we DEFINE students who chronically misbehave as “disabled.” So, of course, they get disciplined more often than non-disabled students. How could they not? Teachers have to maintain order in the classroom if any learning is to take place.  The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held a briefing on this and other discipline-related topics recently. It had a certain Alice-in-Wonderland feel to it.

For my law review article of the racial aspects of the topic, read The Department of Education’s Obama-Era Initiative on Racial Disparities in School Discipline: Wrong for Students and Teachers, Wrong on the Law.

A REAL LIBERTARIAN MOMENT:  HAPPY 75^th BIRTHDAY TO UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LAW PROFESSOR RICHARD A. EPSTEIN*:

I am not the only person I know who affectionately refers to Richard as “the smartest person in the world,” and … well … we’re really not joking.  There may be more lively minds out there somewhere.  But I haven’t found them.

My alma mater, the University of Chicago Law School, will be celebrating Richard and his many accomplishments this weekend, and I hope to be on hand to help. I wrote this little recollection for the book the Law School is preparing for him:

It was late September, 1978—my first day of law school.  Sure, I was a little scared.  But mostly I was feeling confident … maybe even a little full of myself.  I was a law student at the University of Chicago for goodness sake.  What could be better?

I was going to defend the Constitution …

I was going to let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream …

And I had a gorgeous leather briefcase to prove it.

The only problem on that sunny Hyde Park morning was that I hadn’t really worked out the details on all that justice stuff.   But I would.  I knew I would. The combination of the University of Chicago and that briefcase really seemed unbeatable.

Then came Richard Epstein, speaking rapidly and in perfectly formed paragraphs. His subject was the grand old case of Pierson v. Post.   He took great delight in showing that I couldn’t even settle on the just solution to a dispute over a dead fox (with or without my wonderful briefcase).  As for defending the Constitution, that would need to be put on hold … maybe even indefinitely.

That morning was the last time I remember feeling confident about anything.

Incidentally, I still have the briefcase. It’s the only remnant of my pre-Epstein self.

*Yes, I know that Richard’s primary affiliation these days is with New York University.  But as a University of Chicago alumna I refuse to acknowledge it.