It’s both unfair and very fair to lay this at my pal Elie Mystal’s feet.  While he most assuredly didn’t write it, it appears under his byline and in a space under his control, ATLRedline.  The first three letters refer to Above The Law, while the Redline part refers to . . . well, I really don’t know, but it’s basically where Elie lets his freak flag fly.

Above The Law is a business. It started as a snarky, irreverent blog, back when David Lat wrote it, captured a huge audience, and then monetized. It still offers stuff that biglaw babies and wannabes want to know, like what firms are giving what bonuses.  It still has a few outside contract writers who offer smart posts.  And it offers a lot of worthless dreck because it needs to fill empty pages for whatever clicks they can get.  The people writing the dreck think they/re important because their dreck is on ATL. More knowledgeable people just shake their heads.

But for the most part, it’s harmless dreck. Occasionally, they’ll stumble into something foolish, like when Staci Zaretsky decided to try a new concept of using ATL for a bitchfest of sexism in the law, which was oddly called the “Pink Ghetto.” The problem was her characterization of complaints as “horror stories,” the “most appalling stories,” when they were largely pedestrian examples of banal sexism and bad jokes.* But it was hugely attractive clickbait for the disaffected females who wanted to share their feelz. 

But ATLRedline sought to take content in a different, better direction.  Apparently, that didn’t work out, so they sold their soul to the highest bidder, and that was Avvo.  Like ATL, Avvo is a business, run by a smart and brutal overlord, Mark Britton, who has come up with a series of schemes to suck money out of the “legal space” from both ends, capitalizing on non-lawyer ignorance and lawyer desperation. Don’t blame Mark. Making money is why Avvo exists.

Among the things Avvo has tried to build interest and audience with is creating a blog called Naked Law. It’s a fascinatingly provocative name, but the blog is just moronic, and never gained traction.  So, put together two business interests and create a synergy, perhaps?  After all, no one ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the public.  And what could possibly go wrong?

This.

Probably most pre-teen children have shoplifted something at some point, often egged on by friends, and usually it’s something small like a candy bar. If you find out on your own that your child has lifted something from a store, take your child to the store and make him or her apologize and return the item, or pay for it. Those parental responsibility laws still apply; however the likeliest scenario is a manager will spend some time lecturing him or her, and not actually involve the authorities.

And this.

What if the store doesn’t know about the theft, but you find out? You can always call the police yourself to report the crime, but if the store has no proof, not much is likely to happen. This could serve to scare your teen, but it could also create a legal mess that you may not be able to untangle easily should the store decide to cooperate and prosecute. The better option is to take your teen to the store and make him or her personally apologize and return the stolen goods.

How much do you love it when lawyers, or pseudo-lawyers as here, include a disclaimer that “this is not legal advice” when it is absolutely legal advice?  But to compound the problem with giving mind-numbingly bad legal advice is another matter.

While this advice may work out non-disastrously for nice white kids from nice white families, there’s a strong possibility that things will end a little differently for nice black kids from nice black families. After all, it’s not like Loss Prevention Officers follow black kids around stores. Much.

And given Elie’s rants about racism in criminal law, his audience may have a few nice black non-lawyer readers. By posting this dreck on ATLRedline, Harvard lawyer Elie gives the impression he endorses this advice.

Is it possible anyone could possibly be stupid enough to actually do as this post advises, call the police to turn them in and scare them straight?  Or try the “better option” of walking them into a store, which has a mandatory reporting requirement of its employees that mommy is unaware of? After all, if mommy brings in junior to confess, and most stores have fill in the blank affidavits on hand just in case, what are the chances that everyone will appreciate mom’s efforts at honesty, give a stern lecture and a tummy rub, and everybody goes home feeling great about solving another societal problem?

This isn’t to say that parents should condone their babies’ shoplifting. It’s to say that this legal advice is as bad as it gets, the sort of insipid stupidity that lawyers should caution against rather than recommend.  Yet, there it is, in all its glory, to get a few clicks for ATL’s advertisers and bring a little attention to Avvo’s Naked Crap.

I get it. Elie earns a living off ATL’s clickbait. Staci too. If there are no squiggly lines on the page, no one will click on it, and if no one clicks, they will both have to get real jobs. Elie’s got kids to feed.  And I suspect that Elie didn’t bother to read the dreck before throwing it against the wall. It was just another space filler of no apparent consequence.

Maybe he should have read it. Maybe he should have given some thought as to whether the handful of clicks it brought for advertising revenue was a good trade-off for the stupid it brought to its readers. Maybe.

Or maybe it matters more to a criminal defense lawyer that idiotic dreck like this, commonly posted on blogs of no consequence or readership, not appear on Above The Law, in any of its permutations, because someone might read it and not realize that what facially appears to be legal advice is really just empty words meant to garner a few clicks from the foolish.  Their business needs aren’t important enough to hurt real people.  I bet Elie would agree if he thought it through.

*When I raised this on the twitters, both Gideon and Sam Glover responded that I was sexist for “dismissing women’s complaints.” Why whining by women should be treated any differently than whining by men is unclear, but if equality is the point (as it once was, before these guys were born), then treating women as too fragile to handle such pedestrian gripes strikes me as sexist. No doubt SJWs will disagree.