Tell Me It’s Not About Race

The pace of legal news in the third year of the Trump administration is dizzying; sometimes it seems as if our legal system is shaking itself to pieces, like a car driven too fast too long. So you can be forgiven if you missed two news developments earlier this month: first, a decision by a federal district court in California to dismiss federal indictments against four members of the neofascist Rise Above Movement (RAM), and, second, a petition for rehearing of a decision upholding a federal civil suit in Louisiana against DeRay Mckesson, one of the organizers of the Black Lives Matter movement.

There is no universe in which both of these decisions are correct. The California judgment was right; the Louisiana decision was grievously, horribly, scandalously wrong. One can only hope that the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will heed the wisdom of the California district court (and