I’ve long noticed the peculiar fanaticism of the Bazelon legal dynasty to hatch ideas that raise the crime rate and get more black men murdered by other black men. There was David Bazelon, the most important judge in the country not on the Supreme Court during the Warren Court years. He was chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington and often conspired with the Supreme Court’s svengali William Brennan to tee up cases for the Warren Court to help more than double the murder rate in America from 1964-1975. Among many other bad ideas, Judge Bazelon came up with the Temporary Insanity defense.

And there are his granddaughters Emily and Lara Bazelon, both beavering away to bring back the bad old days of high crime rates.

From the New York Times opinion page:

I’ve Picked My Job Over My Kids

I love them beyond all reason. But sometimes my clients need me more. By Lara Bazelon

Ms. Bazelon is a law professor. June 29, 2019 I am a lawyer, a law professor and a writer. I am also a divorced mother of two young children. I’m often asked some version of: “How do you excel at work and be the best mother you can be?” Every working mother gets this question, which presupposes that a “work-life balance” is achievable. It’s not. The term traps women in an endless cycle of shame and self-recrimination. In 2013, I was the trial lawyer on a case to free an innocent black man improbably named Kash Register…. At the time, my son was 4 and my daughter was 2. One month before the retrial started, I moved from San Francisco to a tiny apartment close to the courthouse in Los Angeles. I went long stretches without seeing my children. During these months, my son had a lot of questions. “Why are you gone so much?” “Why are you always on the phone talking about that guy with the funny name?” I explained what was at stake. The good guys are fighting the bad guys. If we lose, it means racism won and a man’s life was destroyed. … In 2017, my son’s third-grade class had a midday Thanksgiving potluck. … After the meal, it was time for presentations. Each child had been given a piece of orange paper shaped like a leaf with prompts to answer: “I appreciate my parents because” and “this helps me to.” One by one, the children stood up and read what they had written. Many of them talked about how much they loved their moms, because they made them delicious food or gave them a safe place to live. I grew uncomfortable as I listened, my smile frozen on my face. What on earth was my son going to say when it was his turn? That he lived in two different houses and routinely ate boiled hot dogs and chicken fingers while his mother told true crime stories? That he had once told me, politely, as we sat down to dinner, “Mom, I think you forgot the vegetable”? My son was one of the last children to speak. He stood up and, in a clear voice, said: “I appreciate my parents for being lawyers because they get people out of jail. This really helps me reflect, do the right thing and have positive role models.” Lara Bazelon (@larabazelon), a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, is the author of, most recently, “Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction.”

I’ve often wondered whether a lot of Jewish anger at family members gets redirected outward toward society in general.