Gen. Michael Flynn (Photo by the Defense Department via Wikimedia)
* Nancy Gertner and Laurence Tribe take Alan Dershowitz to task for his unorthodox analysis of the sentencing proceedings of General Michael Flynn. [Boston Globe]
* In this elegant essay, Jane Chong uses two notable new books — To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment, by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz, and the updated edition of Charles Black’s classic, Impeachment: A Handbook, with a new preface and additional chapters by by Philip Bobbitt (affiliate links) — as the jumping-off point for reflections on impeachment, law, and politics. [Los Angeles Review of Books]
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* Judges often struggle when it comes to sentencing — and that’s as it should be, according to veteran defense lawyer and former prosecutor Joel Cohen. [New York Law Journal]
* Yes, more of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees have been rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association compared to the nominees of his four most-recent predecessors — but as Patrick Gregory explains, there are some reasons for this (most notably, the Trump Administration’s decision to stop giving the ABA a sneak peek at nominees, which allowed past administrations to simply pull nominees the ABA deemed unqualified). [Big Law Business]
* Jonathan Adler has many problems with the recent ruling by Judge Reed O’Connor (N.D. Tex.) on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act — including the fact that Judge O’Connor ruled in the first place. [Volokh Conspiracy / Reason]
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* Former public defender Stephen Cooper flags an issue that many reporters probably haven’t thought much about: “When Will Journalism Grapple With the Ethics of Interviewing Mentally Ill Arrestees?” [CounterPunch]
* As 2018 draws to a close, the U.S. Chamber offers up its annual list of the year’s Top 10 Most Ridiculous Lawsuits.
[Faces of Lawsuit Abuse]
* Looking ahead to 2019, the new year could ring in new legislation that could help lower drug prices by facilitating the timely entry of generics into the market, as Alaric DeArment reports. [MedCity News]
David Lat is editor at large and founding editor of Above the Law, as well as the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at [email protected].