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Fair, but at the risk of going full Diogenes and regardless of his politics and morality, the practicing attorneys are charlatans, too. The difference between him and a Kennedy School professor and Obama alum that's never practiced law is just a bunch of W-2s, not whether he's more trustworthy or even more knowledgeable.
That might seem, at first glance, like a really expansive claim. But Ken White's a practicing criminal attorney - an ex-federal-prosecutor, as he repeatedly points out to anyone who doubts his bonafides - that has written that "if all else fails, punch him in the balls" is "within shouting distance of prosecutable in the U.S.", who argued that Epstein didn't kill himself by giving a long list of other prisoners almost all of which didn't kill themselves, and argued that the Snowden charges would have required the United States government "to prove that it is harmful to release accurate information about how it is spying on us, and how it is misleading us about spying on us" (when the text White posted of the statute showed they could just prove harm from any of the literal thousands of other specific things that Snowden had already been known to have divulged).
I'll point out that last one not because I had to dig that far back to find a third example (and believe me, it's tempting to just go reverse down his timeline) but because it shows he was fucking it up then. Worse, everyone else -- ClarkHat, Glenn Reynolds, lawfareblog, several actual practicing defense lawyers, me -- bought it. Hook, line, and sinker. Because we were naive, or stupid, or because we liked the politics, and the morality, and the whatever. And at the risk of stretching a metaphor, it's a claim that's equivalent to an IT guy that thinks you use rollover cables to connect two switches to each other, or a pilot that thinks you steer with the yoke on the ground. Maybe just a little concerning if it were an intern's first day on the job, but not the sort of mistake experts should get to make.
There's a fascinating philosophical question about whether he's intentionally turning the stupid on and off like a mask, if he's some pretense of competent when he's at his day job, or whether he's an idiot savant who reverse-rainmans himself by giving shitty legal theories in such a compelling way that observers are persuaded to agree with him. But since he's also the man who codified the Rule of Goats, I don't have to care. Nor is it just him, even if he's a particularly easy one to document.
But worse than that, it's not like anyone in the real world acts like any of these guys are the charlatans they obviously are. William Baude's at the nexus of both stuffed-shirt 'qualifications' and no-neck academic onanism that you justly criticize the Volokh sphere. The paper he's going to be famous for the rest of his life used Vallandigham as an example he picked to explain why the 14th Amendment required removing names from ballots, without ever noting or disclaiming that Vallandigham ran for Senate after the ratification of the 14th Amendment with his name getting on the ballot. No one cares. Not even in a kayfabe sense, where okay MSNBC is bread-and-circuses, but the important resources of governments and courts just throw this in with the pro se sovereign citizens. Ken White wasn't telling everyone Baude was a conman; no one in the Volokh circles cares (even today after Baude lost) that he's a putz. And it's not just the normies or the talking heads who overlook that these credentials are useless. Hell, I brought it up here with AshLael and ymeskhout - a real public defender - and no one of them said 'oh, sure, he's a swindler, why do you care about the Yalies' in response.
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