William Felkner wanted to be a social worker, so he attended Rhode Island College to get his graduate degree. The course of study didn’t turn out quite as expected.

More than 12 years after William Felkner was forced to choose between staying in his graduate program and obeying his conscience, the former student has a chance to protect the First Amendment rights of students nationwide.

That’s according to a friend-of-the-court brief filed last month by the Cato Institute, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and National Association of Scholars in Felkner’s lawsuit against Rhode Island College, a public institution.

Part of the curriculum, it turned out, involved lobbying for causes. Not Felkner’s causes. Not causes Felkner believe in or agreed with. Not that his professor gave a damn. Continue reading →

There’s a great saying, “I love humanity; it’s people I can’t stand.” New York’s governor, Andy Cuomo, is the walking, talking political version of this, gushing progressive when it suits him while putting his veto pen to use to kill any law that might actually accomplish his professed goals. It’s not that he doesn’t love the ideas, but he can’t tolerate them in practice.

Like what? Well, he vetoed statewide funding for indigent defense.  This has been a battle raging for more than a decade, to normalize funding across the state, to create a statewide office to oversee the function to assure quality and competence, and finally, finally, the Legislature passed a law. And Cuomo vetoed it. His spokesman explained:

“Unfortunately, an agreement was unable to be reached and the Legislature was committed to a flawed bill that placed an $800 million burden on taxpayers — $600 million of which was unnecessary — with no way to pay for it and no plan to make one.”

Continue reading →

As advocacy groups go, The FIRE, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, is a good one. Its work on freedom of speech on campus has accomplished a great deal, which is really quite amazing given the flip-flop of academia from free speech to outright censorship. But when it comes to Title IX, it’s given away half the battle.

An advocacy group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has argued for years that the Education Department guidance violates students’ due process rights. By reducing the burden of proof for sexual assault cases, the guidance by definition reduced the amount of certainty needed to issue punishment, said legislative and policy director Joe Cohn. “It is uncontroversial that there are both people who get away with things that they have done and there are innocent people who are getting expelled,” Cohn said. In response to the department’s guidance, campuses are “actively reducing due process protections, which is increasing the margin of error.”

Campus sexual assault adjudications, discussed here ad nauseam, certainly raise monumental due process problems, together with the question of whether the standard of proof, preponderance of the evidence, as dictated by the “Dear Colleague” letter from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, is grossly inadequate. Continue reading →

When some hated miscreant is convicted for a heinous crime, his angry, contorted, young face snarling out at you from the image in your newspaper, on your screen, it’s so easy to scream that he must be locked up for decades, centuries, until the day he dies, because it’s all so scary and he can’t hurt someone if he’s behind bars. What about the children? What about you?

So the answer has been easy, and one that’s rewarded politicians consistently: increasing the length of imprisonment, punishment, isolation, because, well, who really gives a damn if this person who has demonstrated an unwillingness to live amongst others according to the rules of acceptable behavior ever breathes free air again? It’s a simple solution to a complex problem, but it’s good enough and makes complete sense. Most importantly, you just don’t care enough to risk a headache thinking any more about it. Problem solved.

But years pass, and young men become old men, even older than they would normally age, because prison life isn’t nearly as much fun as you would think.  Three years out, there’s a vague recollection of the harm done. Five years, barely a twinkle. Ten, twenty, fifty, they’re mostly forgotten. Continue reading →

William Laurence Stanley left an unflattering review on Yelp about a mergers and acquisitions company, Generational Equity. For his efforts, he was convicted of a crime. He argues that his conviction violates his First Amendment rights.

Stanley, 54, says he was exercising his right to free speech and that everything he wrote about the company is true. He vowed to seek a trial and mount a First Amendment defense.

“This is America and you cannot shut up someone that is speaking the truth,” Stanley wrote The Dallas Morning News from prison via an email service.

Outrageous? Well, not so fast. Continue reading →

As Jacob Sullum notes at Reason, the good news is that the en banc Eighth Circuit held that blanket drug testing for students at Linn State, or officially, State Technical College of Missouri, was unconstitutional.

Last week a federal appeals court ruled that requiring incoming students at a state college to surrender their urine for drug testing violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches. The decision is a welcome departure from a body of case law that usually defers to the government’s perception of “special needs” that supposedly justify analyzing people’s bodily fluids without a warrant or any evidence that they pose a threat to public safety.

The bad news is that the kids still have to pee in a cup if they want to be in certain programs at Linn State, characterized as “safety sensitive.”

Linn State’s primary argument was that a drug-free school was an inherently good cause. Continue reading →

Last year, I queried whether there would be an 8th Annual Jdog award.

This marks the 7th year of the Best Criminal Law Blawg Post, and there was a very serious question of whether the crim law blawgosphere would have the legs to make it this far.  So many of the blawgs that existed when the contest began have since gone dormant that it seemed, at the time, that there would be little left from which to choose.

As it turns out, there is not only life remaining in the criminal law blawgosphere, but some damn fine writing out there, as reflected in the nominations (as well as some truly excellent criminal law blogs that, inexplicably, didn’t muster a nomination but are still doing great work).

The same was true this year, but a different issue arose. While the problem with criminal law blawgs fading into the sunset was disturbing, and for those of you who wondered why Fault Lines exists, you might want to noodle this a bit, this year was shy of nominations.   Continue reading →

Good friends have informed me that I’m unfair. Mea culpa. They tell me I hold progressives to a higher standard of logic than the groundlings who have gone conservative. By “groundlings,” I don’t intend to be insulting, but rather lack a better descriptor. I mean working people, those for whom feeding the kids, hard work, banal concerns such as how they’re going to pay the rent, are foremost on their minds.

In fairness, there’s a sound reason for this. The leading voices of progressivism enjoy the privilege of greater education, the comfort of knowing where their next meal is coming from, the joy of having the opportunity of basking in Abe Maslow’s self-actualization. They can afford to complain about paper cuts because they don’t have to worry about losing their legs.

The groundlings, on the other hand, are by no means stupid, as one would realize if one would only listen to them. But progressives too often don’t, even if they claim they do, because they say things that progressives reject, and use words that progressives refuse to allow. By choosing to believe they’re stupid (or racist, sexist, deplorable, pick ’em), they can dismiss them from their world, castigate them and listen only to the dulcet tone of their choir. Continue reading →

After notice and comment, as required by the Administrative Procedures Act, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a regulation.

The Health and Human Services (HHS) regulation “forbids discriminating on the basis of ‘gender identity’ and ‘termination of pregnancy’” under Obamacare, as US District Court Judge Reed O’Connor wrote in his opinion halting enforcement of those provisions in the rule.

The regs were to go into effect today. Judge O’Connor issued a nationwide injunction, the last of 2016. A few states, led by Texas, together with religious affiliated groups, headed to a reliable court and got what they came for.

Explaining the lawsuit, O’Connor wrote, “Plaintiffs claim the Rule’s interpretation of sex discrimination pressures doctors to deliver healthcare in a manner that violates their religious freedom and thwarts their independent medical judgment and will require burdensome changes to their health insurance plans on January 1, 2017.”

Continue reading →