Judicial Notice (11.16.25): ‘I Regret Ever Knowing Him’
Deep Dives
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Thanksgiving is a week and a half away, and things are starting to slow down, at least for me. And I’m not complaining: I need time to dig myself out from under everything that has piled up over the past few months. Sigh.
On Wednesday night, I had a great time attending the joint 50th birthday party of Peter Stris and Elizabeth Brannen. They’ve been friends for decades, going back to their time together on the high school and college debate circuits—and now they’re the founding and managing partner, respectively, of Stris & Maher, a leading litigation boutique. The festivities were attended by numerous legal luminaries—but for me, it was mainly a fun opportunity to reconnect with old friends from speech and debate.
On Thursday, I headed down to Philadelphia for the annual meeting of the board of directors and advisory council of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—an organization whose work in defense of free speech and the First Amendment is more important than ever. To learn more about FIRE and how you can support its mission, check out the FIRE website.
Now, on to the news.
Lawyer of the Week: Kathryn Ruemmler.
By the standards of 2025, last week was actually not heavy on hard news. So I hope you’ll indulge me as I return to my roots, at Underneath Their Robes and then Above the Law, and file an edition of Judicial Notice that’s a bit more gossipy than usual.
One of the biggest stories of the past week was the release by lawmakers of more than 20,000 emails from the files of Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious financier and sex offender who died in 2019. Most media coverage focused on the mentions of Donald Trump—but the lawyers on my group texts were more interested in the messages
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