The University of Massachusetts Boston last crafted its mission statement in 2010. It was what one might expect of a university, the usual research and education stuff, “inquiry, creativity and discovery,” with the requisite nod to diversity, because it is, after all, a university.

Its first sentence identifies UMass Boston as “a public research university with a dynamic culture of teaching and learning, and a special commitment to urban and global engagement.” It celebrates the school’s “vibrant, multi-cultural educational environment” and “broadly diverse campus community.” And it commits UMass Boston to “creating new knowledge while serving the public good of our city, our commonwealth, our nation, and our world.”

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The wife of an old friend of mine is a librarian, which was always good for librarian jokes when we went out to dinner. But she wasn’t joking when she vented about trying to find new novels worthy of shelf space. Almost every book, she explained, is about some coming of age of a marginalized person, whether ethnic or sexual, with intimate detail, little plot and poorly written. And the baby librarians loved them, not because they were good literature, but because they were “correct” literature.

She had nothing against novels telling the stories of marginalized people, although she did have a problem with bad writing. What troubled her was that there was little else being published. The book prize lists were barren of anything else. How many books about teenaged gender nonbinary Norwegian one-legged food-insecure unibrow women with a gerbil can you read? Continue reading →

At Volokh Conspiracy, Josh Blackman posts a letter sent to the students at UC Hastings law school following the Ilya Shapiro debacle.

Dear Concerned Students,

We write in our individual capacity and not on behalf of the institution to explain where the Administration’s community email, The College is Committed to Academic Freedom and Free Speech, does not represent our priorities or articulate our commitments to providing you an equitable learning environment. Continue reading →

The New York County District Attorney’s office was the last bastion of the Old Guard of the City. Between Frank Hogan and Robert Morgenthau, they owned the office for 65 years. They were icons. And when Morgy was finally ready to get out of this chair, he passed it to the son of Cyrus Vance, someone he would invite for dinner.

It all changed when Vance, reading the room, decided that it was time to walk away and put the office at 1 Hogan Place, ironically the only address on Hogan Place, into the hands of another, and unlike his iconic predecessor, he had no one to anoint for the position, mostly because it was no longer his to pass over to the next generation of the Old Guard. Continue reading →

There’s no style book dictating what words to use, what letters to capitalize, at SJ. But I’ve pondered whether to capitalize the “B” in the word “black,” not so much because I thought it was something of substance that helped anyone, but because the failure to do so suggested that maybe I was sending a message by not capitalizing it that I did not care about racial equality, about racism, about black people.

Fortunately, John McWhorter struggled with a similar question and wrote about it. Continue reading →

It’s not as if ex-Hialeah police officer Jesús Menocal Jr. got a complete walk, as the deal cut required him to plead to three federal misdemeanors for violating the constitutional rights of his victims. He had to give up his police license and promise never be a cop again, which some might argue is part of the punishment although others might point out merely removes the authority that enabled him to commit the crimes to which he almost pleaded guilty. What crimes?

During a Friday afternoon hearing before U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, the fired officer pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor charges accusing him of depriving three of his victims of their constitutional rights when he forced them to touch his penis, perform oral sex or have intercourse, according to federal court records. The three incidents were part of a series of complaints dating back to 2014 and 2015 that included alleged oral sex involving a 14-year-old girl.

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We’re at the start of another “history” month by the woke calendar, and I’m not having any of it. No, here at the Friday Funny for a few weeks we’re going to highlight the stories of some of my favorite people in the world: con artists.

Look, it was either this or you got a post this week about the history of people shoving gerbils up their asses, okay?* So bear with me. You’ll thank me later. Continue reading →

It isn’t always easy for a federal judge to address a claim of a constitutional right, particularly when the crux of the issue revolves around the disclosure by a detective and child protective case manager that a person’s spouse has a missing part of their anatomy  about which spouses usually tend to be acutely aware. So Judge Damon Leichty in the Northern District of Indiana took the easy way out, holding that the plaintiff failed to show that there was a clearly established right to privacy of “gender preference”* and gender identity.

The case arose from an arrest following the plaintiff, the non-biological and non-adoptive, father of a 17-year-old for throwing him out of the house and refusing to feed and support the child. The child’s mother was arrested as well, same reasons, giving rise to an unusual issue. Continue reading →

Four years ago, Josh Blackman was invited to speak at CUNY law school by its Federalist Society chapter on the topic of free speech on campus. It did not go well. The National Lawyers Guild chapter decided that whatever Josh had to say, it should not be heard. Its express reasoning was “fuck the law,” their words.

It seemed that Free Speech had become a “dog whistle” of the far right, which therefore justified disrupting any attempt to discuss or debate it. Was this a low point for law schools, a reaction to the extremes arising from fear and loathing of Trump, where thought, argument, debate and tolerance of a constitutional right in the hands of an “adversary” could no longer be tolerated? Continue reading →

After the jury went into deliberations, Judge Jed Rakoff informed the attorneys for both sides that he was granting the defendants’ Rule 50 motion, finding that no reasonable jury could conclude that the plaintiff proved malice. But this was Sarah Palin suing the New York Times and its inadequately woke now-ousted editorial page editor, James Bennett, so naturally it was going to be a big deal in the news. Judge Rakoff didn’t anticipate that.

Because this was a serious and case-dispositive motion, the Court did not rule precipitously. Rather, the Court reserved judgment, first so that it could hear the lawyers’ closing arguments and then, even after the jury had begun its deliberations late on Friday afternoon, so that the Court could receive further written and oral submissions from counsel. Ultimately, however, by the early afternoon of Monday, February 14, 2022, the Court had reached the firm conclusion that it would have to grant the motion for judgment as a matter of law and so informed the parties.

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