Richard J Peltz, a law professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is suing two students in the school's Black Law Student Association, the association itself and one other person affiliated with the group. Peltz is alleging defamation after several of his pupils took to the law school's dean and demanded Peltz face punishment for his so-called "hateful and inciting speech" regarding affirmative action.

According to a memo sent to the dean, Peltz is accused of "ranting" about affirmative action; saying affirmative action helps "unqualified black people"; passing out a form on which he asked students to specify their race, claiming their answers would affect their grades; and "denigrating" black students in a debate about affirmative action. The memo then asked that the dean publicly reprimand Peltz, bar him from teaching any course black students would be required to take and to mark on Peltz's personnel file that he is "unable to deal fairly with black students."

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Judges all over the place are taking heat for removing people from their courtrooms based on their skin color. A judge in Atlanta recently came under criticism for removing whites from his courtroom to give some tough loves to blacks, and now a Miami job is apologizing after she ordered a 9-year-old black boy out of her courtroom. The boy was the son of a public defender, who brought his child to work so that he could see what he did for a living. The judge said the child needed to leave because the jury might think that he belonged to the defendant, who was also black.

"Even if my son was the defendant's son, there are reasons both legal and logical which he be allowed to stay in the courtroom," said Arthur Jones in a letter to The Miami Herald. "Her order's precedent would be that no African-American child is allowed in the courtroom during the trial of an African-American defendant."

Butchko apologized to the boy Friday afternoon in her courtroom, in front of his father and 15 of his father's colleagues.

"When I found out your feelings were hurt and that I made you feel unwelcome here, I felt terrible," Butchko said to Marquis, "I'm very sensitive to all kinds of diversity conscious issues."

Jones and his son accepted the apology, but later complained that the judge had apologized because "they got their feelings hurt" not because she actually did something wrong. It's a safe bet that this kid probably doesn't want to grow up to be a lawyer. [MH]

"A bunch of young people ran up behind me quickly, Mr. Ricco recalled. They wore pins for the New Black Panther Party. "One said, 'I want to ask you a question.' They’re asking me about the case. 'How could you?'"

Anthony L Ricco, the lawyer for the detective accused of firing the opening salvo in the hail of gunfire that killed Sean Bell in 2006, is black, and he's taking a whole lot of heat over his latest case. As Ricco tells The New York Times in their recent profile of him and the trial, it's irrelevant to the outraged masses that his client, Gescard F Isnora, is also African American; that he could literally defend yet another seemingly senseless killing of a black man by the NYPD has people — even Ricco's friends and colleagues — baffled. Perhaps counterintuitively, Ricco told the Times that bigotry is actually what propelled him to accept the case.

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• Eighty-three percent of minority elected officials want the U.S. out of Iraq, which is 29 percentage points more than the public at large. [USAT]

• "It is time for 50 Cent to be a man of his word, and retire," Mark Dice, spokesman for The Resistance, explained. "The world will be a better place when this Satanic piece of filth retires and stops making music." And what more is there to say? [SOHH]

• A black columnist at the Indianapolis Star was fired for writing a column about the black city council president called "Coons for Power." [RP]

• Minority female associates are not feeling the law firm gig. [Law]

• Jay-Z plans to tie Elvis Presley for most #1 albums, but he's got to get through lukewarm reviews and Chris Brown's teenyboppers first. [AHH]