An Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are “children” offers a sad example of the age-old law of unintended consequences.

Alabama has bravely followed through on its position that a fertilized egg is a child. The position may be biologically false and politically dangerous, but give the state credit for honesty.

Shrinkflation is a symptom of inflation, not a cause. And to the extent it is fooling anyone about higher prices, it is helping Biden, whose economic record has been blighted by persistently high prices, especially for food.

Two with negative legacies are Robert Moses, who built New York’s highway and park systems, and Milton Friedman, who gave corporations carte blanche to abandon social goals. Their ideas and actions have had wide-ranging and negative effects nationwide.

As Mary Trump notes, the stakes are too high for guys like Jon Stewart to get away with neutralizing the toxicity of Donald Trump with comparisons totally lacking in substance. It’s a creepy kind of brand-building. And it comes at the expense of our fragile democracy.

If the pay of the president and members of Congress could be cut when faced with a shutdown, there likely would be no more of them. Unfortunately, like the hope some people have for term limits, the people who have created the problem pay no penalty for their refusal to do what used to be called the right thing.

What’s happening in New York — and is being replicated at the federal level and in Georgia in the 2020 election cases — is law as blood lust. It is a rejection of the Anglo-American legal tradition as it has developed over the centuries to enshrine neutrality and fair play in favor of something that is more personalized and illiberal.

If you are old, you remember countless other falling-outs, other miserable patches with people you love, where peace was restored. I believe in the resiliency of relationships, even if I struggle not to be initially devastated every time I disappoint someone.

It doesn’t take a law degree to know that the appearance of impropriety can be just as damaging as the real thing. Sometimes worse.