It had the trappings to suggest that it was yet another deep dive into bad law.  It was named after a dead kid, Evan Lieberman.  It gave the police another mystery tool, and one with a cool and utterly meaningless name, the textalyzer. It was enabled by the unprincipled concept of implied consent. And there was a press conference where New York lawmakers and a “group” with a really bad acronym, DORCs, made the announcement.

This is almost always how the stars align for the next new bad law.  Almost.

But not always.  The proposed law, this time, may not be a big deal.

DORCs co-founder Ben Lieberman, a staunch advocate against distracted driving since he and his family lost their 19-year-old son, Evan, in a 2011 collision caused by a distracted driver, has been working closely with Senator Murphy and Assemblyman Ortiz to implement the new law, known as “Evan’s Law.” Continue reading →

Chicago police sergeant Dennis Barnes started out charged with two felonies, He ended up with a misdemeanor battery.  The 27-year veteran was out of a job, but he was only going to jail for 60 days.  But there was a kicker: the judge also imposed two years of sex offender therapy.

All things considered, sentencing day wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

In explaining the unusual move, Judge Charles Burns said prosecutors had failed at trial to prove, as required by law, that Dennis Barnes fondled the girl for his own sexual arousal, yet the judge said he believed “something was going on, and that’s something that I find disturbing.”

What makes this unusual is that a defendant either committed the crime to which he pleaded guilty, in which case he should be prosecuted and sentenced for it, or he didn’t. Given that the judge dismissed the felony charged upon the basis that an essential element, sexual arousal, was unproven, then there is no justification to impose a sentence mandating sex offender counseling. If he’s not a sex offender, then don’t sentence him as one. And if he is, then don’t toss the charges. Not even judges get to sentence based on their “disturbing” feelz. Continue reading →

The idea has been floating around for a while, since SheTaxi launched.  According to TechCrunch, another company is going for it, set to launch in Boston this time.

Uber driver Michael Pelletz is launching a new ridesharing service with a twist: All the drivers and passengers will be women. Chariot for Women will be active in the Boston area on April 19. But does the world need another ridesharing service? Especially one so specific? It turns out maybe it does.

The new Uber of Ubers? This time, with flagrant discrimination. Putting aside the irony of its founder being male, as in he wouldn’t be able to drive for his own company, this concept is an open assertion that the irrational fears of feminism constitute a sufficient basis to overcome all law that prohibits discrimination.

Employment, accommodation, human rights, on federal, state and local levels, laws exist that forbid discrimination on gender. And the core justification for Chariot for Women is that it discriminates.  Continue reading →

On CBS Sunday Morning, a segment on college, even high school, “whiz kids” who have dropped out to become the new prospectors in the digital goldrush. Part of this segment was an homage to Peter Thiel’s Fellowship, a $100,000 prize awarded 20 of the best and brightest dropouts.

How cool is that?

The cameras showed the faces of a handful of young whizzies, filled with risk-taking aplomb and ideas for new apps that were pretty much like old apps, and didn’t do much of anything to change the world. But hey, all they want is some VC loot and a chance to sell it to someone with enough money to turn them a profit, so they can do it all again.

But the kids they didn’t put on camera were the waiters in the restaurants where the TV producers ate lunch, or picked up a venti fruiticcino. Because they were going to be huge successes too. The problem is that the faces they show, the stories they tell, are of the handful who are treading water, if not quite surviving.  Continue reading →

I’ve never been a member of the “information wants to be free” club. That’s because I create content (this stuff you’re reading), and as much as I choose not to monetize it by putting advertisements on SJ, though there is the donate button on the sidebar, it pisses me off when someone else decides to take my content, put it on their website and make money off it. I give it for free. You don’t get to steal my content so you can make money.  Is that wrong of me?

At Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow writes about a new browser called Brave.

Brave is a new experimental browser from Brendan Eich, inventor of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla. It comes with a built-in ad-blocker that only blocks third party ads, and replaces them with non-tracking ads from its own inventory, whose revenue is then shared with publishers and users, on better terms than most ad networks give.

If my understanding is correct, Brave takes OPC (“other people’s content”), strips out the advertising that the original source of the content uses, and replaces it with its own advertising.  There is one additional aspect, but it needs to be addressed separately, that the revenue from the replaced ads are “shared with publishers and users.”

For obvious and self-serving reasons, one can understand why users would love that. Instead of finding themselves in the constant position of having to suffer advertising to enjoy the internet, they would get something out of it.  And publishers too? Well, that’s not as simple. Continue reading →

My bad.  When I argued that the Senate had a constitutional duty to provide “advice and consent” on the president’s Supreme Court nomination, but that there was no enforcement mechanism to compel it to do so, I blew off the notion that the failure to perform this duty could constitute a waiver.  And yet, Gregory Diskant, a senior partner at Patterson Belknap and former clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, argues exactly that in the Washington Post.

If you took the view that the Senate’s failure to act could constitute a waiver, then you, too, could be a senior partner at a major law firm. You would still be wrong, but well paid, and given the opportunity to publish sentences like this:

The Constitution glories in its ambiguities, however, and it is possible to read its language to deny the Senate the right to pocket veto the president’s nominations.

Glories in its ambiguities? Pretty darned poetic, but what he’s probably trying to say is that the vagaries of the Constitution’s language should be read with sufficient flexibility to address unforeseen problems and provide answers. This is the “living Constitution” view, that it’s meant to be interpreted, and re-interpreted, by each generation in light of its priorities, concerns, experiences and sensibilities.  It’s the opposite of the textualist and/or originalist view.  Continue reading →

For reasons that aren’t clear, it seemed as if the “Shaken Baby Syndrome” had been thoroughly debunked and, like its predecessor, the Satanic Cult Hysteria, as best reflected in the outrageous McMartin Preschool prosecutions, somehow faded out of the legal system as another of our horribly misguided leaps into the abyss.  Sorry. It’s not gone. While the name has been changed a bit to “Abusive Head Trauma,” it’s still very much with us.

The Syndrome, a new documentary by director/producer Meryl Goldsmith and investigative reporter Susan Goldsmith, provides a deep dive into its origins, its promoters and, of course, the fact that it is based entirely on flawed science that has managed to grip the imagination of the legal system and public, neither of which is well known for its high expectations of reason.

And unironically, one detail which is both shocking and yet wholly unsurprising is that the same physicians who were at the heart of the ritualistic cult hysteria went on to create this new “diagnosis” to explain the unexplainable, to provide a means to prosecute and convict based upon the mythology that a trio of symptoms* could not be explained except as the result of the violent shaking of a baby, homicide. Continue reading →

I once suggested that the reason gender and deviant sexuality majors were underemployed and underappreciated was because it was a less than useful endeavor. I was taken to task, naturally, for my anti-intellectualism and lack of interest in how other genders feel.  I was not convinced.

But now that there is a twitter account called Peer Reviewed, I have seen the error of my ways.

On the misogyny of intellectual property laws https://t.co/IgbWntieJ2 pic.twitter.com/LL7CoiqZ4n

— Peer-reviewed (@real_peerreview) April 9, 2016

Social marginalization of women in heavy metal… https://t.co/DMTg5OyqKu pic.twitter.com/hg4E16DJNK

— Peer-reviewed (@real_peerreview) April 9, 2016

Continue reading →

As video began emerging of police encounters, some embraced it as the solution, the thing that would answer all questions, solve all problems, fix everything. Others warned that it was a good thing, but hardly the solution. A little thought, and the issues with video became, well, apparent. From missing video, to doctored video, to incomplete video, to distorted video, problems were manifest.

In the New York Times, police law prof Seth Stoughten did a demonstration of why, sometimes, your eyes do deceive when there is a video that appears to answer questions but really doesn’t.  His point wasn’t that video was unhelpful or a bad thing, but that the unsophisticated reliance on video, the view that video is the solution, fails to grasp that it’s not without flaws.

Tim Cushing at Techdirt explains how the police have figured this out as well, and are now busy exploiting the flaws.

Officers are actors and directors in their own scenes. Even when performances are captured by bystanders and their cell phones, there’s still plenty of “drama.” Multiple cops swarm the same suspect, blocking the body from view. Officers shout “Stop resisting!” even when subjects are prone with hands behind their back and under the weight of four or five cops. This allows officers to deliver extra amounts of force, instantly justified by the repeated shouts about resistance. Continue reading →

It was quiet. Calm. A couple of weeks ago, the government claimed it found a hack and no longer needed Apple’s help, though it deeply appreciated Mag. Sherri Pym’s time. Thanks, but no thanks. We’re good, said the government.

All those amici, the arguments, the op-eds, the TV appearances by Jim Comey and Cy Vance, explaining why terrorism was Apple’s fault; all for naught.  So we turned our attention back to what Kim Kardashian had to say. But while we were snoozing, the government was getting ready to clean up loose ends.

The government has notified EDNY Judge Margo Brodie that it will challenge Magistrate Judge James Orenstein’s adverse Apple order.  The government has obtained a new order from Boston Mag. Marianne B. Bowler requiring Apple to crack an iPhone.  Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein have released a “discussion draft” of a proposed bill to require a backdoor be built into encryption and a new op-ed will appear in the New York Times by some ex-government counterterrorism guys explaining why Apple is hurting its customers by refusing to be a good corporate citizen.

What? You thought this was done? Continue reading →