The Return of Legal Vigilantism with David Noll and Jon Michaels

Episode Notes

Transcript

David Noll:

The broad lesson of the book is that there’s incredible power in the states through state laws that mobilize particular types of vigilantism or political action. Even though we think that the long-term solution to this problem is new, stronger federal civil rights protections, we realize that those aren’t going to come out of thin air. It has to be a model for those. Our basic pitch is that blue states or states that have divided government need to recognize the threat and they need to recognize that they have as much power as the states that are unleashing vigilantes to force this culture war agenda.

Announcer:

That’s today’s guest on SideBar, David Noll, professor of law at Rutgers Law School. Also on today’s program. Jon Michaels, professor of law at UCLA School of Law. SideBar is brought to you by Monterey College of Law, San Luis Obispo College of Law, Kern County College of Law, empire College of Law, located in Santa Rosa and the colleges of law with campuses in Santa Barbara and Ventura. Welcome to SideBar discussions with local, state and national experts about protecting our most critical individual and civil rights Co-hosts Law Deans Jackie Gardina, and Mitch Winick

Jackie Gardina:

Mitch. Over the past two years, we have hosted SideBar episodes on specific issues such as Florida’s Don’t say Gay Law Book bans, abortion bans and voter suppression laws. What we haven’t addressed is how these are not isolated issues, but part of a larger national political movement. Today we have the opportunity to connect these efforts and to discuss how legislatures are deputizing citizens to enforce these laws against fellow citizens, often with significant costs.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie, many of us are concerned that there’s just too little discussion about this apparent strategy to roll back civil, political and privacy rights and to subvert American democracy. As you indicated, this is a theme that we’ve explored on individual topics here on SideBar, but what is emerging are the efforts of certain well-funded, organized right-wing lawyers, politicians, and judges to intentionally disenfranchise large segments of our communities. They’re using local and state legislatures and hand-selected judges at both the state and federal levels to employ what our guests today have labeled a modern day vigilante justice.

Jackie Gardina:

We are very pleased to invite back to SideBar David Knoll, who is a professor of law at Rutgers Law School. He’s a scholar of legal institutions and procedure. David was one of our first guests on SideBar and his episodes on the topic of vigilante justice continue to be one of our most downloaded topics,

Mitch Winick:

Jackie. Today we get a twofer co-author of their new book, vigilante Nation, how State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy is Jon Michaels. Jon is a professor of law at UCLA School of Law. His scholarly and teaching interests include constitutional law, administrative law, the separation of powers and presidential powers. Welcome back to SideBar David and welcome to SideBar

Jackie Gardina:

Jon.

David Noll:

Thanks for having us,

Jackie Gardina:

David and Jon. First let me just say that your book is so well done and incredibly accessible. I’ve been struggling, however, with how to frame this discussion. You lay it out so well in your book, but it has a lot of moving parts to it, and I wanted to make sure we laid a foundation for our listeners, especially those without legal training. So let me just start with a basic question. What prompted you to write the book? Why did you think it was important to reach an audience beyond those who might see your original law review article? David?

David Noll:

Well, again, thanks so much for having us on. We got interested in this back in 2021 when Texas and other states were beginning to enact laws that used vigilantes to go after abortion providers and schools that permitted trans kids to use gender appropriate restrooms. At the time, our colleagues in the legal academy were almost obsessed with how these schemes allowed states to avoid judicial review because they were using private actors to bring lawsuits. It was difficult for somebody challenging one of these laws to bring an action in court to obtain a ruling on its constitutionality, but we saw something much larger happening, and in our view, this wasn’t so much about judicial review, although manipulating judicial review was certainly part of the story. We saw this as part of a broader story involving the kind of tactics that we saw on January 6th, namely political leaders using vigilantes to impose their will regardless of the level of popular support that they enjoyed.

So we started digging and we started thinking and looking, is this the only area where MAGA lawyers and lawmakers were seeking to mobilize vigilantes or is there a broader movement? Is there a broader effort to institutionalize and legalize the kind of attacks that we saw on January 6th? And the basic claim of the book is that over the past decade and particularly since January 6th, there’s been an effort to normalize legalize and institutionalize vigilantism, and we wrote the book because as you say, we think that this is an underexplored aspect of Trumpism and the MAGA movement, and it’s just incredibly important for people to understand as they’re trying to make sense of what’s going on in our politics and what’s happening in our courts.

Mitch Winick:

So David and Jon, when you use the term vigilante, those of us who remember old Western movies envision the mob of local citizens sometimes deputized, sometimes not tracking down the alleged perpetrator and absent any legal or judicial process dispensing what they call justice or frontier justice frequently at the end of a rope, their actions make no effort to fall within the judicial system or the law. However, in your book you describe what you call legal vigilantism, how can it be vigilantism if it’s within the law? What do you mean by that term?

Jon Michaels:

The sheriff and the posse and the dynamic on the big screen is exactly the image we expect many to have that is American vigilantism at times. Maybe it’s set in an urban setting like Charles Bronson and Death Wish, but this idea about the law has abandoned us or the law has never reached this particular space, and so it’s up to us to take the law into our own hands. We kind of push against that, and we say that as long as we’re thinking along those lines, then it’s very easy to suggest that the state is not involved, that if anything, it’s just a lack of capacity rather than some type of coordination or complicity. What we’re identifying here and which we draw on a very different set of lessons about political violence in the United States is either the state legislature has authorized actors to stand in their place or essentially in their place through enforcement, through activities that we might otherwise think should be prescribed or subject to criminal or civil penalties and taking off the constraints that we usually impose on private actors precisely because we want the government and the government alone to be enforcement precisely because we think the government will do it neutrally and safely.

And we’ve kind of taken a lot of those constraints off, and the analogy that we draw is not to Charles Bronson and not to the posses in the Wild West, but it’s to what happened in both Antebellum times under the fugitive slave laws and also what happened under Jim Crow where the courts, especially the federal courts, made a big distinction of saying, well, we will perhaps reluctantly, but we will enforce penalties against state actors, the mayor, the governor, the sheriff for suppressing the rights of say, newly freed black men and women, but these reconstruction laws that were supposed to be put in place to guarantee the equality of everyone post civil war, they’re not going to apply to private. And so what we saw in that period of time is the shackles of private actors are released and private actors could do the enforcement often under the very explicit authority. So that’s the history we want to connect with, which is as deep as fraught and in truth, much uglier than when it’s simply a lack of state capacity that warranted private actors to take the law in their own hands.

Jackie Gardina:

I want to dive down a little bit deeper on that so people understand how this is playing out in the real world and what its impact is.

David Noll:

Going back to the vigilante idea, what’s happening is states are setting up these schemes where lending out a Tony Morrison book and all of a sudden they have to get lawyers, their employment is threatened, potentially being threatened with criminal prosecution. So these schemes quite deliberately work through what lawyers call in terrorem threats the threat of punitive proceedings by threatening people with these draconian penalties because the objective ultimately is to not even need the vigilantes to have people be so terrorized and so fearful that they are censoring, that they’re refusing to do their jobs. We’re seeing reports of people fleeing jurisdictions that have put these schemes into place just because it becomes so oppressive to say, be an elementary school librarian in a community where the vigilantes are coming for you.

Mitch Winick:

Is it too far to extend this to what was recently seen in Arlington National Cemetery where someone just doing their job, enforcing the rules of a national hollowed ground refused to actually defend themselves using the existing legal system because they were afraid, as they said, MAGA hordes might single them out and come after them. Is that a different aspect of this or does that fit within the same concern?

Jon Michaels:

The closer analogy I would draw there is to the types of threats and fears and changed behavior we might associate with election administration officials in 2020 election administrators, often Republican, often long-term Republicans deeply embedded in very small sea conservative towns were finding themselves threatened and harassed by members of their community. They must have surely not done their job because they’re not doing everything that Donald Trump and the right-wing media wants them to do, which would be to refuse to certify results, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What we saw there was the realization of some of the fears that underlie the explanation in Arlington from last week. We saw hoards of people surround people’s homes stay in a kind of menacing formations around public spaces, and that wasn’t just in conservative towns, that was in major cities in Las Vegas and Phoenix and Detroit. What we saw in those contexts were genuine fear on the part of either physical threats, doxing campaigns to harass people, taking it beyond the individual who was the decision maker and going after their family members really dirty, scary tactics that were used with reckless abandon.

Jackie Gardina:

I want to dive a little bit deeper because one of the things I think you guys do so effectively in the book is tie all these disparate concepts together into a whole, and you actually call it the playbook for legal vigilantism and it involves four types to center, courthouse, street and electoral. And what’s so striking is that I can easily identify current examples for each type, but I think it would be worthwhile to spend a few minutes talking about each one separately so that our listeners can better understand each of them and how they’re being employed and hopefully recognize when it’s happening in their own local or state governments. So let’s start with the center vigilantism. What is it and how does it work? What’s an example,

David Noll:

What we call the center vigilantism? The idea is to give lone dissenters the power to effectively set policy for their communities. So this really started during covid when figures like kin invited parents to flout public health rules that had been set by school boards, public health authorities and so forth. But this idea that you create a scheme that allows the individual dissenter to override democratic decisions or decisions set by expert regulators has moved to other spaces, most notably book bans like we were talking about earlier, where sort of the basic design of these schemes is to invite random citizens to police inappropriate content, and the way that they work is that you generally have a scheme that invites people to snitch or invites people to report on objectionable material and then a whole set of consequences follow from that. So for example, in Florida, books are immediately pulled from shelves.

There are no investigation. The mere filing of a complaint causes books to be pulled from a district’s shelves pending review by the local school board. If the local school board decides that, no, this is a frivolous complaint, it’s actually fine for a high school library to be lending out books by Tony Morrison, the dissenter can take a further appeal to the state board of education, which is stacked with appointees by Governor DeSantis, and if that board agrees with the dissenter, then the book is banned statewide. We used to have the idea that if you disagreed with policies on religious or conscientious grounds, you could opt out, they could be excused from class and we would all live and let live and things would work that way. What these schemes are doing is that they’re taking that old idea of the right to opt out instead of giving somebody the right to exempt themselves from policies that apply to everybody, that person has the authority to set policy for everybody else, and we call it vigilantism because there’s really no other word for it. There’s no other word for this kind of bullying that occurs when the most extreme element of the community is given the authority to override decisions by democratically elected boards, by regulatory agencies that the government has sought and effectively impose their will on their community.

Jackie Gardina:

Let’s move on to courthouse vigilantism. What is it and how does it work? What’s an example of it?

David Noll:

So the most famous example of this is Texas’s SB eight, the bounty hunter anti-abortion statute. The idea is to give ordinary people the right to monitor and surveil what’s happening in their communities for deviations from MAGA orthodoxy. SB eight for example, does that by giving any person, could be someone from Texas, could be someone from outside of Texas, the right to sue a doctor who performs an abortion, or anyone who aids or AB vets or intends to aid or a bet the performance of an abortion. And so what’s this doing is the right, it’s taking the idea of a private right of action, which is we want to be clear, extremely common in law. We’re not saying that people can’t be given rights that are enforceable in courts, but it used that and engages in a kind of leight of hand to say that people are always going to be watching.

You should not even attempt to do anything that could be construed as violating this law because whenever there is an anti-abortion extremist in the community, in the waiting room working at an insurer, there’s the possibility that these crippling legal proceedings will be initiated as a result of that. And we’ve seen that spread to different areas, right? We’ve seen these schemes used against teachers against librarians. This tool which started as kind of a hack for getting ahead of the Supreme Court before it overturned roe, the potential of this as a way of really sort of imposing authoritarian control on communities has been realized and we’re seeing these schemes spread to different areas.

Jackie Gardina:

We are going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors and when we return, we’ll continue our discussion with David Knoll and Jon Michaels authors of Vigilante Nation, how state sponsored terror threatens our democracy

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Jackie Gardina:

Street vigilantism. How does that work in, what’s an example of it?

David Noll:

That’s probably the most intuitive form of vigilantism that it encompassed this things like menacing protestors, ramming people with your car, engaging in physical violence, the prototypical vigilantism that we think about when you say the word vigilante,

Jackie Gardina:

You also identify electoral. So what is that and how does that work?

David Noll:

Electoral vigilantism is the use of vigilantes to control who votes and how the votes are counted. As an example of this, we use a county in California, Shasta County, where a far right militia through the use of threats, intimidation, coercion, protest that bordered on political violence effectively took over the county government and once they were in charge of the county, government started directing government resources to the militia that had taken over the government creating a sort of vicious circle of vigilantism where now in the style of reminiscent of Jim Crow, the government and the militia were working together to advance the same agenda.

Mitch Winick:

Okay, so now you’ve talked about the four subsets, but you also talk about these all come together with a cumulative effect on democracy. It’s not just one incident here or one community there or one law over in this jurisdiction. What do you guys feel that the cumulative effect on our democracy of all these different types of vigilantism is having or is going to have?

Jon Michaels:

I think the cumulative effect is still to felt, but we’re already starting to see patterns and patterns that are very disconcerting for those who are concerned with what’s going on and patterns that confirm the success of the vigilante playbook, and we’re seeing some of the stuff we’ve already talked about, but we’re seeing people withdrawing from public engagement. It’s just the cost of participation is too high, it’s too high physically, it’s too high emotionally, it’s too high professionally, it might be too high medically. So one is the public space is changing, voices are quieter or voices are absent. We’re also seeing people leaving or at least thinking about leaving communities because life in a vigilante jurisdiction has become very hard, and that’s not just the specific targets like vulnerable women who need abortion or children whose families want their demographic histories represented in the educational curriculum as well. You’re seeing professionals leave, you’re seeing doctors leave. It’s simply not worth it to practice certain fields of medicine in the state of Texas, you’re seeing professionals leave because they don’t want the hassle. The states are trying to figure out ways to get to those people who leave the state anyway, but even before that was happening, it just doesn’t feel right that your rights can’t be vindicated in the community in which you’re paying taxes and you’re setting down roots and being a productive member of society.

David Noll:

I think one of the most concerning things about this development is that you’re seeing basic civil rights balkanize depending on what state you’re in. For most of my life, the assumption has been that as Americans, you enjoy a basic set of civil rights and that if you get a job in Texas or in Arkansas or in Oregon, those will be respected, and it hasn’t really been since the end of Jim Crow that moving from one state to another had such a dramatic effect on the rights that you enjoyed and really your ability to go about your everyday life and the freedoms that you enjoyed. There is this sense in which the use of these tactics is causing the creation of two America, although we’re all citizens of the United States, people have fundamentally different rights. As on the one hand, our baseline of federal rights has slipped as the Supreme Court has attacked it. On the other hand, states have stepped into the void to enact these retrograde and regressive policies that are seeking to control civil rights and civil liberties.

Jackie Gardina:

I just want to go back to something that Jon said about how sometimes leaving the state with the restrictive policies is not enough, that those states are attempting to reach across state borders, to enforce their laws against someone who may have moved and gotten an abortion in a different state, gotten transgender treatment in another state, whatever the case may be, and I’m just curious, you relate that back to the Fugitive Slave Act. I want people to understand what that means to have a state attempt to enforce their laws against you for actions in another state.

David Noll:

The reason that we see a connection to the Fugitive Slave Act with what’s going on today is that there’s a very deliberate effort to restrict movement between the states. Now, we don’t now have federal legislation that extends the power of vigilantes from red states that are enacting these regimes nationwide in the way that the Fugitive Slave Act did. Although that’s very much something that’s a possibility if Trump wins a second term as president, but what you’re seeing is a similar impulse to legally restrict people from moving from one state to another in order to enjoy basic liberties that they could not exercise in their home jurisdiction. Perhaps the most striking example of this is that Jonathan Mitchell, the attorney who wrote SB eight and is deeply involved in anti-abortion vigilante efforts, is involved in a lawsuit going after a woman who went to Colorado to secure an abortion, and right, what we see is an effort to use the legal machinery of Texas to penalize somebody for having the temerity to cross state lines and engage in activities that were legal in the state where they occurred as a legal matter. The hook for that is, oh, you did something in Texas, and that’s within Texas’s power to control. And so someone like Mitchell would say, we’re not actually regulating extra territorially, we’re just regulating you up until you get on the plane in Texas. But it’s a clear effort to extend the terrorizing effect of vigilante enforcement under regimes like SBA to other states.

Mitch Winick:

What you’re pointing out is these are not theoretical, philosophical academic issues. What you’ve just pointed out is a very real effort in a very specific case to apply these principles.

David Noll:

That’s right. That’s a real case. They’re fighting about access to discovery and access to the records that can be obtained. There’s other lawmakers who want to make it easier, both for private actors and for police to get the medical records of people who cross state lines in circles. On the right. There is now this concept of trafficking. Anything that you escape your state to do in another state is trafficking. There’s an attempt to frame it that way to justify the imposition of penalties when people cross state lines. We should really be thinking about this as one of the next possible phases of the vigilante movement. If Trump wins, and particularly if there’s Republican majorities in Congress, we can expect to see copycat legislation at the federal level. If Trump doesn’t win and vigilante schemes don’t expand to the federal level, what you’re going to see is more and more aggressive efforts to really push at state borders and to extend the reach of these regimes into other states because the people who are behind them are outraged at the possibility that other states might have different policies because they’re so committed to what they see as the values and the morals that these laws enforce.

Jon Michaels:

So I think we want to be clear because I think a lot of the kind of historical understanding of America as a laboratory for democracy is this idea that let a bunch of different state experimentations flourish and people will choose how and where they live. The other reason of course, and I alluded to this earlier, is it’s financially onerous. Oftentimes, the folks who are least protected in a vigilante jurisdiction do not have a lot of private resources to put bulwarks around themselves in the state, and now you’re going to tell them to pack up and move.

Jackie Gardina:

We’re going to take another quick break to hear from our sponsors and when we return, we’ll continue our discussion with David Knoll and Jon Michaels authors of Vigilante Nation

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David Noll:

We use this phrase, vigilante democracy as we see it. The end goal isn’t to put in place in autocracy. What we mean by vigilante democracy is that you have a system that preserves the formal trappings of democracy. There’s regular elections. Congress continues to pass laws, but people are afraid to participate in it in the way that a real democracy requires. And that’s why we draw a comparison to the Jim Crow South because if you look at the statute books that Jim Crow legislatures enacted, there was some racial discrimination that was built into law, but there are other pieces of Jim Crow laws that were majestic in their equality. If you simply looked at the law books without understanding how they operated in practice, you would think maybe things weren’t so bad. We know the reality was different because there was a systematic denial of black Americans ability to exercise their rights under Jim Crow, and there’s something like that going on in vigilante democracy. Maybe you have the right to vote, but the board that counts the votes knows that if they get to the wrong result, vigilantes are going to be parked outside their house. And so all of this just has an incredibly corrosive effect on how we want our democracy to function, because even if people have formal rights, they become afraid to exercise them because of the threat of these various forms of vigilantism.

Mitch Winick:

David and Jon, much of what you’ve described is quite alarming, at least to some of us. Thankfully, you do provide some hope at the end of your book and a blueprint for action at the state and local level. We try to end each episode of SideBar with a call to action. If we believe that this is a well-funded organized movement that is challenging democracy, what can and should each of us be doing?

David Noll:

The broad lesson of the book is that there’s incredible power in the states through state laws that mobilize particular types of vigilantism or political action. And so even though we think that the long-term solution to this problem is new, stronger federal civil rights protections, we realize that those aren’t going to come out of thin air, and there has to be a model for those. Our basic pitch is that blue states or states that have divided government need to recognize the threat, and they need to recognize that they have as much power as the states that are unleashing vigilantes to force this culture war agenda. So we can start small, right? We can start with state protections for medical records or confidential information. We can start with state protections for the right to interstate travel right now, right? Texas might claim the authority to keep you from crossing state lines, and there’s no response to that from New York or California or Illinois or Minnesota. The first step is for blue states to recognize the power that they hold and to start doing in a more pro-democracy fashion, what the red states have been doing as they have unleashed vigilantism on the nation.

Jon Michaels:

I think that blue states should also think about how they can be hospitable sanctuaries, and ultimately the goal would be simply to provide safe haven in the way we would think about providing safe haven for people who are fleeing from dangerous or hostile circumstances anywhere else in the world, and make it feasible for people who cannot endure another year in the school district or under these circumstances to do so. And that requires not just kind of smart lawyering of the provisions that David was underscoring, but just a recognition in different places. New York, Massachusetts, California have recognized say that the federal government has been inadequate in its safety and health regulations. So they’ve sought leave to heightened protections, and I think we have to just recognize no matter who wins in November, there’s likelihood that the federal government will not be the stewards of change. The Biden administration has not done much at all on this issue, and so it is an opportunity for entrepreneurial blue state governors and legislators to say, I’m going to show the way forward, and yeah, it’s going to cost us extra money, but in the long run, it’s going to be really advantageous and in the future, maybe make our state much more vibrant in the same way we think about welcoming non-Americans into a community ultimately pays tremendous dividends both economically and culturally.

So I think we just need to recognize that this is a major issue. The other thing, I think we just have to have a more sensitive antennae to forms of private harassment and private violence, and the idea that how do we lower the temperature on civic engagement in a variety of context because we now see what it goes to. We see it goes to January 6th, we see it goes to these confrontations at school board meetings and at county officials office, and no one wants to serve. How are we going to fill the potholes? How are we going to make sure that we get rid of the mosquitoes in the summer? Those are issues that county health officials need to do regardless of what you think about the science of vaccines and regardless of what you think about who’s to blame for this issue or that issue, we have so much governance to do that. Finding ways to ensure that there’s less drama, turmoil, certainly kind of doxing and threatening and stuff like that has no real place in our civic society, and that’s a challenge because how do you counteract that? Communities haven’t been doing enough work on how do they reward good behavior as opposed to just trying to stop bad behavior. And so that’s, I think something for local communities to really have to dig deep on.

David Noll:

Just to tie it to the election, Jon’s colleague or Kason, many years ago introduced this wonderful phrase beyond the margin of litigation. He was talking about elections where certain elections are close enough, the results can be litigated because there’s a hope that if you get certain votes excluded or included, that can affect the result of an election. I think there’s a related idea beyond the margin of vigilantism, if there is a resounding defeat of MAGA politicians in November, it will not stop denials of the results. It will not stop conspiracy theories. It will not stop efforts to docks election officials. If the election results are resoundingly clear in one direction or another that makes a repeat of January 6th, much less likely as folks who read the book will see. We do not think that just vote is a solution to this where we think that blue states need to be engaged. We think that corporations needs to be engaged. At the same time, we recognize the power of mass political mobilization. And the optimistic story here is that the presidential election of 2024, unlike the presidential election of 2020, is beyond the margin of vigilantes, and that the results are so clear that there’s not really political space for an effort to disrupt it.

Jackie Gardina:

Jon and David, I think that’s a great place to end. And first, I want to congratulate you on your book Vigilante Democracy. It is really a great book, and I want to recommend it to all of our listeners, and just to thank you for the work you’re doing to shine a light on everything that’s happening because it’s so important for us to be aware of so that we can counter these types of efforts. So thank you

Mitch Winick:

David and Jon. Thanks for being here. This was exactly the conversation we had hoped to have.

David Noll:

Thanks for a great discussion.

Jackie Gardina:

So Mitch, one of the things I really appreciated about the book, as I said in the introduction, was how much it tied together, what we’re seeing every day happening, not just in how laws are passed or what laws are passed, but how people are engaging with each other around these laws. That idea of vigilantism, that idea of using threats of violence to get fellow citizens to not engage in democracy. It seems so prevalent right now, and I just thought David and Jon did a fantastic job of shining a light on those issues and hopefully bringing it to the forefront of what we’re talking about today.

Mitch Winick:

Jackie, I really appreciate what they’re doing and the conversation they’re bringing to the community, primarily because you and I, and most lawyers and many judges are vested in the rule of law. I mean, it’s what drives us. It’s what we believe is the core foundation of our democracy. And it worries me when I see patterns in which we are departing from the rule of law, and these guys have identified and put a word to it, a vigilante justice in which the system deteriorates and extra judicial or outside of the law efforts start randomly taking over. And then they bring to our attention the fact that it may not be so random that it could be part of a national movement to diminish the impact of the rule of law. So if that is true, these are very important conversations for us to have, and I appreciate them bringing it to our attention.

Jackie Gardina:

I just want to make one additional point. It’s actually legal vigilantism that the state is actually granting or deputizing individual citizens with the authority to bring litigation, to have the dissenter ability to overturn democratic rule. So I think what’s so scary about it is it’s not just individuals engaged in kind of mob rule. It’s that the state is backing that up with laws that either say it’s okay or give them the power to do that. And that’s the part that scares me the most because technically they are acting within the rule of law.

Mitch Winick:

And I must say that although David did mention that it’s not just about voting and provided other avenues of activity and actions we should take, since it is a legislative act that triggers many of these rights and activities. I do think it’s about voting, and I do think that should remain on our radar because we elect these state legislatures, and in some cases we elect the judges that make these decisions. So as many of our issues have pointed out, the upcoming November election is that much more important for all of these reasons.

Jackie Gardina:

Once again, I want to thank everyone who joined us today on SideBar, and as always, Mitch and I would love to know what’s on your mind. You can reach us at SideBar media.org.

Mitch Winick:

SideBar would not be possible without our producer, David Eakin, who composes and plays all of the music you hear on SideBar. Thank you also to Dina Dowsett who creates and coordinates sidebar’s. Social media marketing.

Jackie Gardina:

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Mitch Winick:

For more information about the California accredited Law schools, go to ca law schools.org. That’s ca law schools.org.