In stark contrast with the usual simplistic activists, UCLA lawprof Joanna Schwartz offers no fantasy panacea that eliminating qualified immunity will somehow end wrongful police violence. But Schwartz has done some of the most important scholarship on QI, including this article in Yale Law Review on how qualified immunity fails, and so what she has to say deserves serious consideration.

In an excerpt from her new book, Shielded, How the Police Became Untouchable, Schwartz offers some interesting measures to hold individual police officers responsible for their actions. Continue reading →

It’s at the complaint stage, so that the allegations have yet to be proven. But if true, they raise a question that few would have anticipated would ever be asked. Joshua Diemert works for the City of Seattle as a “program intake representative,” which means his job was to “connect city residents with public resources.” He held the position for nine years until he could take no more. The reason was that he had become the enemy and he could no longer suffer the hostile working environment. The reason, he contends, was because he was a white man.

“The city of Seattle believes that race representation is paramount, and they believe that people should not be judged by their individuality or their individual actions, but should be judged by their collective race,” says Diemert. “In fact, they say that if you judge people by individuality, that was actually a tool of white supremacy used to oppress people of color.”

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David Bernstein at VC brought up an essay by New York Law School prawf Rebecca Roiphe about two things, the role law is now believed to play in the society and why Jews are blamed for it. The gravamen of the post is about Jews, and it’s certainly worth reading. But as David highlighted, there is the dogma behind it that has seized control of how law is viewed by academics and students that is independently worthy of some discussion.

Many, if not most, students have bought into academic lessons peddled in the 1980s and ’90s as an outgrowth of what’s often called critical legal theory. Among them: Continue reading →

One of the glaring omissions in New York criminal law had been the lack of an expungement law, a means by which someone could get an ancient conviction off his record so that it would no longer affect everything from jobs, licensure, deportation, credit and even voting. After all, what you did at 17 really doesn’t mean much when you’re 47 and have led a law-abiding life every since. But in New York, it didn’t matter. One you were convicted, you were convicted forever.

That’s now been changed with regard to marihuana (which is the New York statutory spelling; I didn’t make the law) with the enactment of Penal Law Article 222, which legalized personal recreational use quantities of weed and the Marihuana Regulation & Taxation Act (MRTA), which mandated expungement for low level pot convictions. No other crime, but just marihuana. The New York Times says the law contains a typo, and that typo is preventing some people from being relieved of the burden of conviction. Continue reading →

By all accounts, Jen Angel was as sincerely devoted to her progressive beliefs as anyone could be. It didn’t prevent her murder.

Angel was running errands for her business on Monday, including a stop at the Wells Fargo branch near Webster and 21st streets, her fiance, Ocean Mottley, told the San Francisco Chronicle. According to a spokesperson with the Oakland Police Department, around 12:30 that afternoon, “an individual broke into” Angel’s car while she was in it and stole an item from her, then ran back “to a waiting vehicle.” Continue reading →

For some, the now-ubiquitous word “disproportionate” has inexplicably morphed into majority, as in the police disproportionately kill black men when the reality is that the majority of people killed by police are white men, but the percentage of black men killed is greater than the percentage of black men in the general population.

The concept, but not the word, popped up again in an interesting New York Times column by Bret Stephens about an op-ed by Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of The Washington Post, arguing that objectivity in media needs to die. Continue reading →

As army artificial intelligence burst onto the public radar with both written words and images, the initial reaction was largely curiosity and amusement. Some have tried to trick chatbots to see what it will get wrong. Others have created “art” that never existed, assuming you don’t consider DALL E an artist. But what about law? Sure, there was the stunt by DONOTPAY to offer $1,000,000 to let its AI bot argue a Supreme Court case, or for no money, a traffic court case, whichever came first. But that was just goofy and unserious.

At the same time, others are creating more serious applications for AI that raise new, yet old, concerns about the damage it can cause. Continue reading →

Contrary to what some have asserted on social media, it’s not quite a done deal, as the Fourth Circuit’s decision in Sharpe v. Winterville Police Dep’t neither affirmatively held that the livestreaming by a passenger in a traffic stop was definitely protected by the First Amendment, nor foreclosed the possibility that on a different record, the claim of officer safety wouldn’t be sufficiently established to overcome strict scrutiny. But at least, for the moment, the court held that in in the absence of such a showing, there was a First Amendment right to do so.

This case asks whether a town’s alleged policy that bans video livestreaming certain
interactions with law enforcement violates the First Amendment. It also asks whether a
police officer who, during a traffic stop, attempted to stop a passenger from livestreaming
the encounter may be successfully sued under § 1983 for violating the passenger’s First
Amendment rights. Continue reading →

In reaction to the “mostly peaceful” protests of 2020, the City of Atlanta decided to build a police training facility on an 85 acre tract of land, which included a mock city. Protesters of what they dubbed “Cop City,” who called themselves “forest defenders,” have taken to the woods to fight against the initiative.

Protesters, many of whom are college students and or from out of state, have set up camps throughout the 300-acre Weelaunee Forest, as the land was called by its original inhabitants from the Muscogee Nation before serving as a plantation site during the Civil War and later as a prison farm until 1990. They’ve even constructed treehouses and set up barricades in an effort to halt the construction process. Continue reading →

It’s a curious path from the National Review to the New York Times, given the ouster of James Bennett, the long time editorial page editor, following the Times’ publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed. Then there was Bari Weiss’ quitting in the face of unwelcoming colleagues who characterized her as a liar and bigot. Yet, here we are, with former NRO writer David French making his debut as a New York Times columnist.

Before I go further, let me put my own partisan cards on the table. I’m a conservative independent. I left the Republican Party in 2016, not because I abandoned my conservatism but rather because I applied it. A party helmed by Donald Trump no longer reflected either the character or the ideology of the conservatism I believed in, and when push came to shove, I was more conservative than I was Republican.

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