[Oh, all right, not “evil,” exactly, but I just wanted to use that clip from the Ethics Alarms Clip Archive because it always made Grace laugh. For an indisputably great director, Hitchcock allowed some pretty awful acting in his films periodically. ]

I was about to declare the legal gossip and now full-time Democratic Party and Woke World mouthpiece the Unethical Website of the Month, a title it deserves, frankly, every month, but decided to check its Ethics Alarms dossier. Not only would that designation make it the only website to be so honored twice, “Above the Law” has been an ethics dunce multiple times, issued the most misleading headline of the month once (well, just once when I bothered to flag it). Two of its most frequent writers, Joe Patrice and Kathryn Rubino, have been hit with flagrant ethics foul calls here, and that doesn’t even include the reign of terror and hysteria by Elie Mystal, the anti-white racist Harvard lawyer who was the most prominent voice at ABL until he left for “The Nation,” apparently because ABL wasn’t quite communist enough for him.

“Above the Law” isn’t the worst website out there, of course, but it is by far the worst supposedly respectable website. Yesterday, a legal ethics blog authored by a legal ethics specialist I know cited Above the Law as an authority on one legal controversy, and that did it: I won’t be going back there again. For a legal ethicist to admit to following “Above the Law” is the equivalent of a political analyst revealing that he or she watches MSNBC or follows NewsMax. It’s as disqualifying as opinion columnists quoting Kamala Harris, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Bill Maher, Joy Behar or Mike Lindell to support their positions.

What triggered my realization that ABL deserved special enshrinement was what should have been a fairly uncontroversial story, except that it didn’t really belong on a website dedicated to legal stories and issues. A Southern pastor called Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson “Judge Jumanji Jungle Lips” and said that what comes out of her lips is “jungle monkey sense.” Nice! And this was worthy of ABL’s attention because…? Oh! It was important because the pastor supports Donald Trump! I get it! See, that proves Donald Trump is a racist, in the reasoning of the sage “Above the Law” legal minds. That kind of argument would rank an F in any law student brief in America, and Joe Patrice, who wrote the piece, knows it. He just doesn’t care, because ideologues and Democratic operatives don’t believe in honesty and fairness.

Patrice’s article reveals its real objective in the head-blowing introduction:

When Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was first nominated to the United States Supreme Court, then-Georgetown instructor posted about the nominee (at that point between Jackson and Leondra Kruger) as “lesser black women.” It wasn’t exactly unexpected. When Sonia Sotomayor was nominated, Chicago law professor Todd Henderson called her “a second-class intellect” only nominated for her “Latinaness,” even though he’s the tier of intellect that writes fan fiction about Elon Musk’s legal genius so off base that even Musk retreated from his nonsense stand almost immediately afterward.

The point is, these ostensibly qualified conservatives stumble all over themselves not just to downplay a Democratic nominee’s accomplishments or qualifications, but to draw a direct line to their ethnicity as the source of their shortcomings. And the shortcoming is never, “I have grave doubts about their dormant commerce clause jurisprudence,” it’s that they’re “lesser” and “second-class.” They never construct any specific, coherent critique beyond “minorities and women are dumb and undeserving.” Or at least some women and minorities are. When Amy Coney Barrett took half the record Jackson had and parlayed it to the Supreme Court, these guys didn’t seem to have any issues.

It’s all about building a narrative to give succor to even more odious voices to let their — inevitably Confederate — flags fly.

Ethics Verdict: Joe Patrice is scum. His “then-Georgetown instructor” is distinguished legal scholar Illya Shapiro, who was abused by Georgetown Law Center. Shapiro was tarred as racist for making the entirely accurate observation that President Biden’s openly limiting his pool of potential nominees to fill a SCOTUS vacancy to only two black female judges of moderate ability was not a responsible way to find the most qualified candidate, or even the most qualified minority candidate. Not only does the “Above the Law” hack job omit mentioning Shapiro’s name—it looks like it was excised at the last minute by a house lawyer worried about defamation—he grossly misrepresents what Shapiro wrote.

Of course, Justice Sotomayor is a second-class legal intellect, as any objective reader of her opinions will quickly realize. Also of course, she was nominated for her “Latinness”; President Obama made that clear from the outset, as did she, with her annoying blather about being a “wise Latina.” Patrice stoops low by defaulting to an ad hominem attack and absurd reasoning to rebut Professor Henderson’s accurate analysis based on his assessment of the conduct and ability of Sotomayor’s critic.

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that Patrice and his fellow travelers have been impugning the ability of Clarence Thomas for decades without any of Thomas’s defenders calling them “racist.”

Patrice cries “Racism!” when there was nothing racist or biased about the criticism at issue. His position, now enshrined as standard issue Axis cant, is that any criticism of a less than inspiring hire or appointment whose elevation was based on color and ethnicity rather than merit is per se racist. Patrice goes even further, equating accurate assessments of Justice Jackson and Justice Sotomayor to the projectile verbal vomit issuing from a real life parody of the kinds of characters who populate “In the Heat of the Night.”

No responsible, honest, ethical publication would allow such swill as Patrice’s story to escape the shredder. “Above the Law” is even worse than I thought it was, and that’s quite an accomplishment.