A brisk walk about the blawgosphere this morning to see what’s up.  On Friday, a New Jersey jury convicted former Rutgers student Dharun Ravi for a host of crimes relating to invasion of privacy and bias intimidation resulting from the suicide of Tyler Clementi. 

At Wally’s place, there is a link to a post by David Link at independent Gay Forum called Trivializing Hate. The conviction reflects one of the worst aspects of the criminal justice system as reflecting transitory moral outrage (of the sort  Stephanos Bibas argues it should reflect) because of a subsequent, and at best arguably related, tragedy.

Everyone will read a different moral lesson into the conviction of Dharun Ravi for invading the privacy of Tyler Clementi and intimidating him because Clementi was gay.  Some see the verdicts as the reason we shouldn’t have hate crimes laws, and others view this case as the vindication of those laws.

I have always been divided.  No hate crime can occur unless there is an underlying offense, and those offenses – whether murder, assault or anything else – are already crimes irrespective of who the victim is.  Penalty enhancements because of a motive beyond that to commit the crime itself do raise troubling questions about government intrusion into thoughts, and there are few areas where the government’s machinery is more destructive and menacing than in criminal prosecutions.

David Link persuasively argues that as “bias crimes” go, this barely touched the issue. But for Clementi’s suicide, no one would have ever given Ravi a second thought, but this case was no Matthew Shepard. Save the outrage for when it’s warranted, and let’s fear the manufactured excuse to get worked into a lather over trivialities as much as hard-core hatred.

At Constitutional Daily, BL1Y considers an attempt at  PrawfsBlawg to crowdsource teaching Federal Courts and Trial Advocacy. 

A friend who’s vapping now asked me to put up some crowdsourced resources regarding teaching fed courts and trial advocacy. . .  But I admittedly don’t know many trial ad teachers, so please use the comments to weigh in with suggestions for what new folks teaching trial ad should know about in terms of teaching and scholarly resources.  

BL1Y immediately sees the absurdity of this request.

Trial advocacy is of course a special case, it’s a skills class. You can’t get skills from a book, you get them from experience. Books help, but you don’t learn to drive by reading traffic rules, and you certainly can’t teach someone else how to drive.

The problem is not merely that it’s ridiculous to suggest that “scholarly resources” provide a path to teaching advocacy, nor that law students are charged for the pleasure of being taught by someone who couldn’t find a courthouse if his life depended on it. The problem is that it’s something law students really need to learn, and this is what the get instead.

I offered a  comment at Prawfs suggesting my “best practices” for preparing to teach trial advocacy:

Try 100 cases to verdict before a jury. For every 10 cases you try, argue an appeal. By the end, he will achieve minimum competence to teach trial advocacy.

The rest of you are poseurs.

I suspect that Dan Markel won’t embrace it in the spirit it’s given. In fact, I suspect he might even delete it as being hurtful and crude, particularly since it will make all the lawprofs feel inadequate rather than bolster their self-esteem.  But he asked.

This month marks the 20th Anniversary of one of the all-time great lawyer movies, My Cousin Vinny.  Jim Dedman at  Abnormal Use came up with an interesting concept, to have a bunch of lawyers post about the film:

Keeping with this week’s theme – the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the release of My Cousin Vinny – we asked some of our favorite bloggers to share their thoughts on the film and its place in cinematic history.  As previously noted, these are some real heavy hitters in the legal blogosphere.  This week, each of them published their own post on the film’s anniversary and the lessons that we as lawyers can learn from the characters in the film.

Having used portions of the movie during cross-examination lectures, both because it provided excellent instruction and it saved the audience from having to listen to me, this struck me as a great idea.  Unfortunately, it failed to take into account one problematic aspect. Lawyers have the uncanny ability to take something truly funny and turn it into something, well, lawyerly.  I left a comment :

With this endeavor, you have managed to accomplish what was previously thought impossible: You made My Cousin Vinny boring.

Most lawyers fancy themselves as stand-up comics. Of course, we also fancy ourselves as being reasonably smart.  In response to my comment, some wag using the nom-du-comment “SHG-translation-service” responded:

This project really could have used more me in it.

That’s for sure.

The 2012 Legal Marketing Association held a big conference in Grapevine, Texas this week, always fascinating for providing insight into how a top ten list of empty truisms can serve as a reason for a bunch of consultants to submit to TSA scope and grope.  It made the timeliness of  Seth Godin’s post about the difference between what we say and what we do all the more real.

We say we want local merchants to offer great service, deep selection and community values, but we cross the street to the big box store to save $3.

We say we want companies to honor their promises and act transparently, but one new product or big discount from a business that has deceived us in the past and we come right back for more.

We say we’re disgusted with Congress, but almost all of us vote to re-elect the dufus we sent there in the first place.

We say we hate spam, but we send it. And sometimes buy from it.

We say we’d like people to think first and act later, but we get cut off in traffic and all bets are off.

We say we love art, the brave work that touches us, but we listen to oldies and rarely head out to hear live music or visit a cutting edge gallery.

Hypocrisy may be an epidemic, but the problem isn’t in what we say. It’s what we do.

Be authentic, right?  In the twits for #LMA12, former  laundry detergent turned lawyer marketer Sonny Cohen made an astute point :

Remember, if you can brand water, you can brand a law firm.

Of course, the disciplinary rules for water are a bit different.  At least for the moment.

And finally, Danielle Citron, the Patron Saint of Cyber Bullying Victims (also known as girls), announces at  Concurring Opinions that she’s writing a book to be published by Harvard University Press called Hate 3.0.  For those of you who fear that such pandering may create problems of overbreadth, Citron tried to put your mind to rest:

Cyber harassment refers to online behavior that causes a reasonable person to suffer severe emotional distress.  Cyber stalking has a more narrow meaning: it covers online behavior that causes a reasonable person to fear for her safety.  Cyber stalking and cyber harassment often involve explicit or implicit threats of violence, calls for others to hurt victims, privacy invasions, defamation, impersonation, and/or technological attacks.  The abuse tends to appear in e-mails, instant messages, blog entries, message boards, and/or sites devoted to tormenting individuals. 

It’s unclear whether she’ll be sending me a copy to review, but I’m not counting on it.  Instead, as soon as I hear it’s publicly available, I plan to rush down to my local feminist book store to grab a copy, where I expect it to be prominently displayed in the humor section.