You didn’t take the bar exam. That’s probably because you didn’t go to law school. Good for you. Law school is hard. Your first year is an elaborate hazing ritual in which we law professors pull out your brain and put it back in upside down. We make you read…

When a man’s head has been blown off with a shotgun, you’d expect there to be more of a mess. But a 12-gauge to the temple, at close range, can be surgically precise. I was a third-year law student, still in my 20s, when I learned that. Our clinic director…

The true story of a tragic club fire that never happened — “Stumpy’s gonna breathe fire.” “Do what?” “Yeah, Stumpy’s gonna breathe fire. On stage.” A long pause. We stare at the road. “What the fuck are you talking about?” “Well, we don’t exactly know how he’s gonna do it yet, but there’s that middle part in ‘Godzilla’ where it’s just drums…

The U.S. criminal legal system is racist. By now, this proposition is so well established that it’s hard to believe anyone disagrees with it. Mass incarceration shifted the prison demographic from more than 70 percent white to nearly 70 percent Black and Latinx by 1989. In certain areas of the…

This is an abridged version of a keynote address I delivered at the University of Kentucky’s OUTLaw chapter banquet earlier this year. It’s a tough time to be a law student right now, especially if you’re in Kentucky’s LGBTQIA+ community. I wanted to tell students how powerful they truly are…

The old man, at the end of an expensive dinner attended by campaign donors, foreign dignitaries, and policy engineers, fell and cracked his head open. That would normally be the end of an old man. But this old man had fallen in such a way that the back of his…

The Varsity Blues scandal is in the news again, this time after its mastermind-turned-FBI informant, Rick Singer, was sentenced following a plea deal. The scandal first captured public attention when Lori Loughlin, the actress best known for her role as Aunt Becky on Full House, along with Desperate Housewives star…

An opinion columnist should not simply share stuff they’ve been thinking about. Readers have every right to expect an op-ed writer to purvey informed opinions; to answer the big questions of the day not with Kerouac-style riffing, but with reasoned logic supported by research, interviews, statistics, and whatever else it…

In the little-discussed sister city to my hometown, located in a lesser-known republic on an obscure continent, the number of hospitals has become a problem. Not because there are too few, but because there are too many. …