A $1000 Fine for a Billionaire’s Violation of a Judicial Gag Order?

 

In a personal injury case, punitive damages, if awarded, are calibrated to cause pain to the defendant. Rich defendant, higher punitives. In some European countries criminal are sentenced to “day fines,” confiscating, each day, so much of the defendant’s income as would reduce all defendants, rich or poor, to roughly the same standard of living from income: something a little above subsistence.

To have any effect on Trump’s behavior and to have any hope of securing witnesses and court personnel from intimidation, a meaningful deterrent is needed. If it is financial in nature, it has to be a high dollar amount.  

If 4 weren’t even, would it be a prime number?

This counterfactual conditional, you may think, is a little hard to evaluate. The counterfactual, you might say, is underdefined by its very nature. You might even go so far as to say that 4’s not being even, being a contradiction, could authorize any conclusion. It might be a teacup.

The Moral Metaphysics of the Right to Life Movement

“Life Begins at Conception” is a favorite meme of forced birth theorists. What they understand it to mean, is not at all what it says. What it means is that important human rights, rights that trump the rights of the woman, begin at conception.

The Flat Out Biological Mistake of the Alabama Supreme Court in the Frozen Embryo Case

“[a]ll parties to these cases, like all members of this Court , agree that an unborn child is a genetically unique human being whose life began at fertilization and ends at death.: In LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine  ___ So. 3^rd ____ (Ala. 2024) (opinion of the Court by J. Mitchel)(emphasis added).

Alabama’s Hastily Enacted IVF Providers Protection Act Is Unconstitutional

 The Alabama Constitution’s 2022 Sanctity of Unborn Life Amendment “acknowledges, declares, and affirms that it is the public policy of this state to ensure the protection of the rights of the unborn child in all manners and measures lawful and appropriate.”

The Trump Trials: Hung Juries and Jury Nullification

What happens if there is a diehard MAGA juror for one of Trump’s trials?

The Convict President: Trump & the 25th Amendment Shuffle

Let us suppose that Trump is convicted in the Washington D.C. case  and the New York case, but in the latter only of a misdemeanor. (See Conjectures & Arguments, Philosophy & Law: Legal Problems of the New York Criminal Case against Trump.) In the Florida case he benefits either from postponement until after the election from the hand of his appointee Judge Canon or from her Judgment of Acquittal (Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 29, which, when granted after the jury is sworn, is unappealable).