The explanation given way back when for the “reasonable person” standard is that people can only be judged by an objective standard of reasonableness. After all, there is always somebody who is so fragile, so delicate, so easily outraged that they will lose it over anything or find cause to be traumatized if that’s what they’re inclined to be. But that can’t possibly work for a society, since people cannot guide their conduct in accordance with the most fragile person alive, right?

Maybe not any more. Continue reading →

Torture? Not for a day or week, but a year? Ten years. A child? A pregnant woman? Even without other vulnerabilities, solitary confinement stands a good chance of breaking a person. Of that, there is little doubt.

Corrections officials first turned to this strategy in response to growing gang violence inside prisons, Dvoskin says. Though critics contend that administrative segregation has never been proven to make prisons safer, use of this type of confinement has continued to rise. That’s worrisome to most psychologists who study the issue. Deprived of normal human interaction, many segregated prisoners reportedly suffer from mental health problems including anxiety, panic, insomnia, paranoia, aggression and depression, Haney says (Crime and Delinquency, 2003).

Continue reading →

It was, to be blunt, astounding.

The City of Minneapolis agreed on Friday to pay $27 million to the family of George Floyd, the Black man whose death set off months of protests after a video showed a white police officer kneeling on his neck.

On the one hand, there is a strong likelihood that this suit would have been dismissed on the basis of qualified immunity, as the use of common restraint techniques, permitted under departmental policy, seems highly likely to fall below a clearly established violation of constitutional rights, if, indeed, it’s a violation of constitutional rights at all. That it resulted in death isn’t the test, a detail that many will find unacceptable but is nonetheless the law. Continue reading →

At Volokh Conspiracy, Josh Blackman picked up on a curious diktat at the Georgetown Law Journal.

I recently came across the Georgetown Law Journal’s author diversity amendment. It was ratified in the spring of 2020. (I am not certain the date). The policy creates an express quota for reviewed articles:

During each articles-assignment period (usually each week), at least 25 percent of the total articles the Senior Articles Editor assigns shall be written by diverse authors as defined by (i). Continue reading →

Remember Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Paul Campos does.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was widely, and deservedly, criticized for her refusal to retire from the Supreme Court at a time when a Democratic president could have chosen her replacement.

She could have retired during President Obama’s term of office. You know, that time during which Nino Scalia passed away and Merrick Garland was nominated to replace him, but Mitch McConnell gamed the delay and got away with it. Justice Ginsburg was asked. She said no. She wasn’t appointed to the Supreme Court to facilitate a political passage to her successor, but to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court, and that was exactly what she planned to do. Continue reading →

Eugene Volokh writes about the tentative ruling in the action by former-rep Katie Hill against the Daily Mail and Red State for publishing the nude pics of her. When it happened, Hill was simultaneously the victim of revenge porn and a woman in power taking power asymmetry advantage of her subordinate. Darn those conflicting demands, not that it had any impact on those who would capitalize on the matter to push their own agenda.

Hill could have stayed and fought. Instead, she quit and sued. She chose poorly. Continue reading →

It was only last November that third-term New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was a hero, winning an Emmy for his daily television show, publishing a book about how he masterfully managed the pandemic. delightfully called “leadership lessons.” Andy could not be flying higher, and somewhere, Mario was smiling that his smarter son was doing well.

And here we are, mere months later, with his own team demanding his resignation. Continue reading →

My old pal, BMAZ, tried to infuse a bit of perspective into the extremely hyperfocused obsessive parsing of the prosecutions stemming from the January 6th insurrection.

People in our comments are out of their minds. The entire matter is 65 days old. And y’all are whining about the hanging rope not being strung up yet. All the minute by minute microanalysis from news reports and release pleadings is NOT evidence. The last big conspiracy case I was involved in had somewhere near 100+ defendants. It took the govt nearly somewhere around two years to bring it in. Continue reading →

It’s not the first time this happened. And it’s not the first time this happened at a good law school. It happened in 1997 at the University of Texas when prawf Lino Graglia argued that black and Mexican law students weren’t competitive with white students. It caused outrage, but ended with a defense of his academic freedom to say so, with the ACLU behind him.

Then there was Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania, who began by raising the controversial if correct contention bourgeois values were beneficial, who then followed it up by claiming black students were rarely in the top half of the class. That cost her a job.

Now Georgetown law prof Sandra Sellers on a recorded Zoom call with David Batson said it. Continue reading →

As the podcast has been taken down, I can’t listen to it (even if I were inclined to) to determine whether it was as bad (read “traumatic”) as claimed. In its place is the apologia.

This is Dr Howard Bauchner, Editor in Chief of JAMA and the JAMA Network.

The podcast on structural racism based on the discussion between Dr Ed Livingston and Dr Mitch Katz has been withdrawn. Comments made in the podcast were inaccurate, offensive, hurtful, and inconsistent with the standards of JAMA. Racism and structural racism exist in the U.S. and in healthcare. After careful consideration, I determined that the harms caused by the podcast outweighed any reason for the podcast to remain available on the JAMA Network. I once again apologize for the harms caused by this podcast and the tweet about the podcast. We are instituting changes that will address and prevent such failures from happening again.

Continue reading →