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We are live tweeting from the preliminary hearing of the Employment Tribunal case in which #AllisonBailey is suing Stonewall and Garden Court chambers.


The judge has ruled that for this hearing only, the names should remain redacted.

It is a Rule 50 Order. These particular individuals are members of Stonewall’s Trans Advisory Group and their names may well be known elsewhere. What is relevant is the messages from the group to Garden Court.

The judge states she would not make the same decision at the full hearing. This is only for the preliminary hearing.

Having dealt with the anonymity issue we now move to the main submissions in the case.
I was right. "Lawyer" starts out with name-calling and an insistence that trial is "unconstitutional". He's saying Trump's 1/6 speech was rather bland, and pretending that was the only thing the House managers talked about, and the managers were "slanderous."

Bilious bullshit.


"Lawyer" is arguing that since there were objections raised by Democrats to some of the vote counts in 2016, that means Trump didn't engage in sedition.

I'm not sure how that logic works.

Now they're running a Trump campaign commercial.

A bunch of whataboutism, contrasting patriotic music behind Trump's racist dogwhistles about "law and order" against Democrats making firey speeches with dark music.

He went to the moronic Gym Jordan argument that Trump couldn't have instigated insurrection if the violence was gonna happen anyway (without acknowledging Trump had been encouraging and building up to that violence for close to a year).
There is a now-relevant parallel here to the difference here between matters before a judge & matters before a jury. Judges are far more reluctant to strike testimony or evidence if they are the only recipients of it, with the theory being that they are really smart about ...


law stuff & will know what they can & can't consider. For instance, there is a long-held rule that a fact witness can't make legal arguments, only a lawyer. So what will happen in a motion for summary judgment, where the entire proceeding is on paper, will play out like this:

1) Defendant makes a motion for summary judgment. It includes a sworn declaration from some fact witness.

2) The declaration includes all sorts of legal arguments about why the defendant should win. Often the declaration includes arguments the brief didn't even make.

Defendants (especially DOJ-represented ones) often do this to get around the word or page-limits placed on briefs.

3) Plaintiff moves to strike the declaration for its inclusion of inadmissible legal arguments.

4) Judge denies the motion to strike, on the grounds that a ...

judge is a sophisticated consumer of evidence & can choose what to consider & what to ignore, unlike a jury.

The legal fiction behind this impeachment exception is that Senators are also smart enough to know what to listen to & what to ignore. Now, that may not be ACCURATE, ...