I watched Outbreak. I watched Contagion. Still, I don’t feel qualified to speak to the significance of the pandemic. I hear what far more knowledgeable people are saying, from Dr. Anthony Fauci to a plethora of docs in the trenches, and I accept that their studies were deeper than the two movies I watched.

Yet, there is a niggling question that lingers in the back of my head. If this pandemic began sometimes between last December and January, it has a death rate of 1% and its growth is exponential rather than linear, why have there not been more deaths worldwide? As of this moment, the number of deaths is 14,756.* That’s nothing to sneeze at and every death matters, but it’s not in the hundreds of thousands, the millions. Continue reading →

When schools decided, essentially overnight, to close up their physical shop and move online, it created something of a panic. Few knew how to make this happen at all, and almost no one was prepared to do it. Profs struggled to find their zoom-legs while teaching a course online, and students struggled to figure out how they were going to do it. It wasn’t optimum for anyone, but the alternative was to shut down completely for a semester, which raises many other troubling issues, and so they made the best of bad circumstances.

We’re now scrambling to transition everyone to remote learning on short notice, addressing each obstacle that arises as a problem to be fixed. Yes, taken individually, each student who doesn’t have a laptop or WiFi access off campus, who didn’t bring their textbooks home when they left for spring break, or whose survival depends on a paycheck now lost can be helped. Online learning and conferencing tools may groan under heavy usage, but we can hope they won’t break. We can also hope faculty and staff won’t break under the huge additional workload entailed in moving courses online that weren’t designed to be taught that way: a translation that poses particular challenges for science labs and practical classes in everything from physical therapy and nursing skills to dance and music performance.

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There were plenty of conspiracy theorists before, and being cooped up on their own hasn’t made them any less paranoid. But that doesn’t make them wrong, and the Department of Justice isn’t helping the situation.

The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United States.

Documents reviewed by POLITICO detail the department’s requests to lawmakers on a host of topics, including the statute of limitations, asylum and the way court hearings are conducted. POLITICO also reviewed and previously reported on documents seeking the authority to extend deadlines on merger reviews and prosecutions.

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Scott asked that I give you my point of view of how the pandemic has impacted the federal court in Nebraska. I will be short and only as transparent as I feel comfortable. Some things I am holding very close to my vest. And, of course, this post is personal and cannot be taken as an overview of the entire federal judiciary or my particular court.

First, our court is essentially shut down with most everyone working from home. My CRD who is a young woman, with no children, has volunteered to staff the Lincoln Clerk’s office every day. (She’s the best.) She will have one additional person help her each day with that second person serving on a rotating basis. A similar rotation system, I believe, is operating in Omaha. CM/ECF (electronic filing) is up and running as usual. Continue reading →

Come 8 o’clock tomorrow evening, all non-essential business in New York will be locked down, upon order of Governor Andrew Cuomo.

“I want to be able to say to the people of New York — I did everything we could do,” Cuomo said. “And if everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.”

The time-tested “save just one life” has long sufficed to justify all manner of government overreach and policy making. This time, it rings hollow. Maybe not as hollow as Trump’s dissembling or “feeling” that a drug that works as a malaria prophylaxis will work even though, as Dr. Anthony Fauci explained immediately afterward, it’s scientifically nonsensical to discuss a “feeling” about a drug’s efficacy, but still hollow. Continue reading →

Prefatory Note: Sticky’s Back! After weeks of silence, I finally saw Sticky Weeks back on our private Discord server with a brand new batch of leaks from the Mud Lick Sheriff. And this time he’s managed to hack into Sheriff Roy’s private journal! Enjoy—CLS

March 12, 2020

It is out of a desire to chronicle the madness engulfing our collective society I begin this journal. Panic is widespread in Mud Lick since word of COVID-19 hit our quiet little Southern town. The town elders tell us protocols in place since the Rand McNally Scourge will protect us. I am skeptical of their confidence.

Our one big box grocery store has cleaning products and hand sanitizer flying off the shelves. The mom and pop businesses are doing what they can to keep up with demands. Continue reading →

Maybe it was a gaffe, a long-standing issue for Joe, or maybe it was pandering to a cohort whose support was squishy, but Biden said it out loud, on TV, for everyone to hear.

In his debate with Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden made two pledges to voters and asked his opponent to do the same to nominate only a black woman for the next open Supreme Court seat and to choose a woman as his vice president. Even with identity politics, the pledge to impose a gender and race requirement for the next Supreme Court nominee is as ironic as it is troubling. What Biden was declaring, and what Sanders wisely avoided, would effectively constitute discrimination in admission to the Supreme Court. Indeed, the Supreme Court has declared that such race or gender conditions are strictly unconstitutional for admission to public colleges.

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Remember when the fear of dying in a pandemic drove America to prepare? No, of course you don’t. If you were old enough to remember the Influenza Pandemic of 1918, then called the “Spanish Flu” even though it started at a military base in Kansas and long before anyone was traumatized by the use an ethnic word, you would likely be quite dead today.

We regulate at the moment because we have a reason at the moment. It’s a priority. It touches our concerns and the syllogism kicks in, so we regulate because how else can we stop or control this thing that absolutely must be addressed?

Among many shocks of the past week—school closures, Tom Hanks, the shuttering of one sports league after another—this rule change registers as major. The liquid restriction has been a key component of air travel ever since 2006. If people are now allowed to bring 12-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer onto planes, won’t the planes blow up? Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Chris Halkides has been kind enough, again, to try to make us lawyers smarter by dumbing down science enough that we have a small chance of understanding how it’s being used to wrongfully convict and, in some cases, execute defendants. Chris graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and teaches biochemistry, organic chemistry, and forensic chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

In 1991, Gregory Taylor was partying with an acquaintance when his Nissan Pathfinder got stuck in the mud in Raleigh, NC. About fifty yards away from his vehicle was the lifeless body of Jacquetta Thomas, which Taylor and his casual friend saw but did not report.  When he returned to retrieve the truck, Taylor and his companion were arrested for her murder.

There were two primary pieces of evidence against him, a prostitute who claimed that she had seen the victim get into his vehicle and a spot in the wheel well of his car, which a report from the NC State Bureau of Investigation’s crime lab said gave “chemical indications for the presence of blood,” In 1993, Taylor was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison. Continue reading →

Most lawsuits for defamation turn out to be SLAPP suits, strategic lawsuits against public participation, whose purpose isn’t to win but to silence by exacting a cost to litigate and defend. Some, even some who should know better, leaped to this assumption, as there have been a rash of frivolous suits (think Devin Nunes versus his cow) of late, and the president threatens them with regularity.

This is no SLAPP suit. The defendants are Netflix, Ava DuVernay and Attica Locke, and Netflix has done very well with the serial When They See Us. Time is long past to try to prevent people from seeing “the truth,” as it’s already been seen by millions. Netflix won’t be scared off by the cost of defense, as they’ve made many millions of dollars off the show and can well afford to litigate any damn thing they want. Continue reading →