The Post-Partisan Emporium

Sam Bankman-Fried’s Criminal Trial Judge Is Married to Law Partner of Firm that Arranged the FTX-BlockFi Deal By  Pam Martens and Russ Martens Last week the New York Times  did a puff piece  on the judge that will be presiding over the Sam Bankman-Fried criminal trial in the Federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. The judge is Ronnie Abrams. The narrative at the New York Times is that Abrams’ “husband, Greg Andres, is an accomplished former Brooklyn federal prosecutor….” Our take is that Greg Andres is part of Ronnie Abrams’ immediate household and a law partner of Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, a law firm that has problematic ties to Bankman-Fried’s bankrupt crypto exchange, FTX, and another crypto firm it became enmeshed with, BlockFi, which is also now in bankruptcy. According to the Davis Polk website, the following occurred in July of this year: “Davis Polk advised BlockFi, Inc. as borrower under a $400 million loan facility provided by West Realm Shires Inc, an affiliate of FTX-US

State Power And the temptation of anarchism Carlos Ramalhete Image © Nieuw I do understand anarchists. Even more so rich anarchists. In a way, a First-World anarchist is like someone who only knew an abusive father, and ends up rejecting the very concept of family. If I lived in a place where all laws a Modern state tries to promulgate were enforced, the anarchist temptation would be indeed strong. Fortunately, I live in a country whose language has no expression for “law enforcement”, and where laws can “stick” (that is, be accepted and obeyed) or not. Most of them don’t, and absolutely nobody in Brazil would ever consider the possibility of mistaking mere State-promulgated laws for moral precepts. The problem, though, is not laws by themselves, but the whole package: the function of the State, its powers, its limits if any, what  Law  (or  a   law ) happens to be, and so on. As always, there is a long story; a quite big chunk of History leading to the present situation. That’s the st

The Takeover of America's Legal System The kids didn't grow out of it. Aaron Sibarium (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call) If you are a Common Sense reader, you are by now highly aware of the phenomenon of institutional capture. From the start, we have covered the ongoing saga of how America’s most important institutions have been transformed by an illiberal ideology—and have come to betray their own missions. Medicine .  Hollywood .  Education . The reason we exist is because of the  takeover of newspapers  like The New York Times. Ok, so we’ve lost a lot. A whole lot. But at least we haven’t lost the law. That’s how we comforted ourselves. The law would be the bulwark against this nonsense. The rest we could work on building anew. But what if the country’s legal system was changing just like everything else? Today, Aaron Sibarium, a reporter who has consistently been  ahead of the pack  on this beat, offers a groundbreaking piece on how the legal system in America, as one prominent li