There has been an ongoing war between criminal law reformers and the media. Not with far right media, which has never been their metric of acceptable journalism, but with their loss of trust and fate with the outlets they thought were their allies, like the New York Times.

It’s not that the Times isn’t far more accommodating of their ideology than other, lesser, outlets, but that they still write stories that include occasional facts, positions, news, that does not shamelessly promote only their desired views. Why can’t all media outlets be like Slate, they demand to know, as they cancel their New York Times subscription in protest? Continue reading →

So what if it’s on the brink of bankruptcy, has lost the faith of the vast majority of America’s lawyers and is held captive by a small coterie of fringe social justice warriors who are using it to pursue their ideological agenda to the harm of the legal profession. It’s the American Bar Association, and so it continues to hold the one small bit of power given when it was the old, stodgy, legacy organization that could be “trusted” to maintain the standard of the profession: Accrediting law schools.

At its midyear meeting, now being held virtually because few of its members can afford to travel, Resolution 300 was just approved by a vote of 347 to 17, which amends the curriculum requirements to include the following: Continue reading →

How far does DNA travel? It’s one thing to recognize that, as a matter of science, it finds its way where it wants, but it’s another thing entirely when the police take the DNA collected from a rape victim, plug it into their DNA crime database and find that the rape victim is now a suspect in a crime. Yet that’s what happened in Frisco.

The police crime lab “attempts to identify crime suspects” by searching a law enforcement database that includes DNA collected from sexual assault victims, District Attorney Chesa Boudin said Monday. Continue reading →

Years ago, I testified before a New York State commission about what should be permissible in judicial elections. I argued that judges should be able to campaign on whatever positions they chose, which had been considered unseemly and inappropriate since judges were supposed to be impartial. Why put your bias on display?

My argument was twofold, that the sanitized campaigning was fairly silly, with judicial candidates allowed to run on their resume, which law school they attended and the jobs they held, which was essentially meaningless information to voters. I remember saying, “if one candidate went to Harvard Law School and another went to Brooklyn, does Harvard win?” A judge on the bench replied, “Not in New York,” to which we all had a good laugh. Continue reading →

I didn’t have much to do on February 13th, 2007. Dr. SJ, on the other hand, was busy, so to get me to stop annoying her, she told me, “start a blog.” So I did. It’s 15 years later and the blawg is still here, even though the blawgosphere has mostly come and gone in the meantime.

I’ve made a great many friends, and more than a few enemies. I’ve watched blogs come and go. I’ve seen Facebook, Twitter and podcasts replace actual thought as reflected in writings, and the need for validation replace the challenge of critical thought. Lawyers have been replaced by culture warriors, and reason has given way to emotion. And yet, here I am, still sitting down at the computer in the mornings typing out blawg posts about whatever strikes me as worth writing about. Continue reading →

As a professor and associate dean for faculty research at Tulane Law School, Ann Lipton brought some legit bona fides to her scholarship. Like all prawfs, her law review article, Capital Discrimination, was posted to SSRN, short for social science research network, and accepted for publication in the Houston Law Review. The article presented an interesting spin on business disputes when one party was male and the other female.

The law of business associations does not recognize gender.  The rights and responsibilities imposed by states on business owners, directors, and officers do not vary based on whether the actors are male or female, and there is no explicit recognition of the influence of gender in the doctrine.

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Some of the more progressive reformers on my radar throw out “wage theft” as the countervailing argument to shoplifting. Why, they argue, does petty theft garner national attention when wage theft, which involves far greater amounts of money, gets almost no attention?

The answer seems fairly obvious, as one is discrete and has visuals, and we are very much a visual society moved by images, and the other is some amorphous claim, sometimes mischaracterized as theft when there is a reasonable dispute about what wages are due. Continue reading →

The Great Flip happened. It’s out there for all to see and it’s radiculopathy ridiculous. Rand Paul calling for a blockade of the Super Bowl while an old twit by AOC about how protests are meant to make people uncomfortable is making the rounds again.

Rand Paul calls on truckers to blockade the Super Bowl and DC: “I’m all for it. Civil disobedience .. is a time-honored tradition in our country from slavery to civil rights to you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates.” pic.twitter.com/zvCBTe9wkg

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 12, 2022

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Three Harvard graduate students sued the University for its “deliberate indifference” to sexual harassment by a venerated anthropology professor, John Comaroff.

The suit, filed by three graduate students in the Anthropology Department, alleges that Harvard mishandled Title IX complaints and allowed Comaroff to intimidate students who threatened to report him, including the plaintiffs. Continue reading →

Some thought that poor Merrick Garland, former judge from whom a Supreme Court seat was stolen by the Republicans, would be the hero attorney general of their dreams. After all, he was Obama’s nominee and the maligned soul who launched a thousand SCOTUS tears.

But when it came time to decide whether prosecutors under his auspices were any more ethical, more reliable, more honest, Radley Balko discovered that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Continue reading →