Brandi Levy’s snapchat teed up an issue that needed to be resolved. It was after school hours. It was outside of school. It was on the internet. But it related to school, and a screen cap of her speech was shown to a coach and she was punished for it.

The case concerned Brandi Levy, a Pennsylvania high school student who had expressed her dismay over not making the varsity cheerleading squad by sending a colorful Snapchat message to about 250 people.

She sent the message on a Saturday from the Cocoa Hut, a convenience store popular with teenagers. It included an image of Ms. Levy and a friend with their middle fingers raised, along with a string of words expressing the same sentiment. Using a swear word four times, Ms. Levy objected to “school,” “softball,” “cheer” and “everything.”

Continue reading →

It’s said that within a courtroom, the judge is king. And indeed, the judge is as far as lawyers and litigants are concerned, and he’s got marshals to back him up. But what happens when those same marshals are the targets of a judge’s concern?

U.S. District Judge Charles Kornmann of South Dakota levied criminal contempt charges against three senior federal law enforcement officials on Monday over an ongoing feud over his insistence that he must know whether law enforcement officials guarding his courtroom have been vaccinated against COVID-19. Continue reading →

When the University of Washington Republicans held a “bake sale” in 2019 to make a political point, it didn’t go well.

The Friday bake sale drew an angry crowd and the presence of University of Washington police to try and keep things calm.

Continue reading →

Let’s acknowledge the obvious: Certain collegiate sports are big money. Huge money. Coaches get millions. NCAA commissioners get millions. Colleges get millions. The only people not getting millions were the players, who might get their head pounded into the turf for our amusement. Maybe they would turn pro someday and get a huge pay day at the end, but most likely not. Maybe they would get hurt and, despite their talent, leave their future on the court. Maybe some, but not all, would get free education. Maybe some would even learn something.

Division 1 FBS teams can give out a maximum of 85 full-ride scholarships to athletes. Division 1 FCS programs can provide a maximum of 63 total scholarships. The 85 FBS scholarships are headcount scholarships, which means every athlete who receives a scholarship at the DI FBS level gets a full-ride scholarship. The 63 FCS scholarships are equivalency scholarships. This means a coach can divide these scholarships up, giving more athletes partial scholarships.

Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.

In Portland, Oregon, all the members of the Police Bureau’s Rapid Response Team (RRT) resigned, en masse, after Officer Corey Budworth was indicted for 4th degree battery[1] for his attack on journalist Teri Jacobs. The 50 or so officers didn’t like it. Continue reading →

It’s rare to read something that reflects a grasp of a complex problem, rarer still to read it in the New York Times. But NY1 political anchor Errol Louis took the risk and expressed the complications that few will admit because it muddies their simplistic campaign slogans designed to appeal to a constituency with an 8-second attention span and the grasp of an iguana in a snowstorm.

The context is the battle of New York City mayoral candidates. On the one side, there’s former cop Eric Adams. On the other side, there’s Maya Wiley, former SDNY assistant United States attorney and chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board. There’s a fair chance neither will win the Democratic primary, the winner of which will become mayor, now that Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia (who was endorsed by the New York Times and NY Daily News as a decent mechanic, but can’t seem to get any traction) have joined forces to game ranked choice voting, it’s hard to say what will happen. And then there is a laundry list of others, from Scott Stringer to Paperboy Prince. Continue reading →

I would like to think I’m a bigger person than to indulge in schadenfreude, but I have my moments of weakness. One of them is when I hear from a prof who begins his story with his bona fides as a believer in social justice and ends with his being accused of some outrageous offense that’s so unfair. They can’t see me over the telephone, but I find myself involuntarily smiling.

What did you think would happen when you indulged the little shits in their narcissistic belief that they were entitled to seek and destroy anyone who uttered heresy?

At Reason, Robby Soave notes an interesting new campus survey. Continue reading →

After Michael Powell’s scathing NYT article about the American Civil Liberties Union’s abandonment of its mission in favor of social justice, the knives came out. I’ve chronicled it for the past few years here, Much of the defense of the ACLU’s failing was disingenuous, arguing that it hadn’t abandoned its mission, a position that was typical of argumentation in a factless age of strenuous denial of reality coupled with the nodding agreement of the chorus.

But there were some letters to the editor at the Times that weren’t the typical squishy reimaginings and sophist rationalizations. My old pal Ron Kuby, as lefty as they get, called it out. Continue reading →

It wasn’t because Jack Phillips’ cakes were so delicious, although they are apparently in great demand, but because Autumn Scardina wanted to “get him.” And Denver District Court Judge A. Bruce Jones held she did.

The cake in question was ordered for a birthday. The woman who called Masterpiece Cake Shop to ask for it wanted pink on the inside, surrounded by a layer of blue frosting. She explained to the shop employee it was to honor her gender transition.

At that point, the woman at the shop said they likely could not make it. Continue reading →

When they learned one of their “brothers” had been charged, they resigned. En masse. Much like their counterparts in Buffalo and Albuquerque did before them. They had enough.

A group of about 50 police officers who had served voluntarily on a specialized crowd control unit in Portland, Ore., have stepped down from the squad after a year of sometimes violent clashes with protesters, the city’s Police Department said on Thursday. Continue reading →