Come 8 o’clock tomorrow evening, all non-essential business in New York will be locked down, upon order of Governor Andrew Cuomo.

“I want to be able to say to the people of New York — I did everything we could do,” Cuomo said. “And if everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.”

The time-tested “save just one life” has long sufficed to justify all manner of government overreach and policy making. This time, it rings hollow. Maybe not as hollow as Trump’s dissembling or “feeling” that a drug that works as a malaria prophylaxis will work even though, as Dr. Anthony Fauci explained immediately afterward, it’s scientifically nonsensical to discuss a “feeling” about a drug’s efficacy, but still hollow. Continue reading →

Maybe it was a gaffe, a long-standing issue for Joe, or maybe it was pandering to a cohort whose support was squishy, but Biden said it out loud, on TV, for everyone to hear.

In his debate with Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden made two pledges to voters and asked his opponent to do the same to nominate only a black woman for the next open Supreme Court seat and to choose a woman as his vice president. Even with identity politics, the pledge to impose a gender and race requirement for the next Supreme Court nominee is as ironic as it is troubling. What Biden was declaring, and what Sanders wisely avoided, would effectively constitute discrimination in admission to the Supreme Court. Indeed, the Supreme Court has declared that such race or gender conditions are strictly unconstitutional for admission to public colleges.

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Remember when the fear of dying in a pandemic drove America to prepare? No, of course you don’t. If you were old enough to remember the Influenza Pandemic of 1918, then called the “Spanish Flu” even though it started at a military base in Kansas and long before anyone was traumatized by the use an ethnic word, you would likely be quite dead today.

We regulate at the moment because we have a reason at the moment. It’s a priority. It touches our concerns and the syllogism kicks in, so we regulate because how else can we stop or control this thing that absolutely must be addressed?

Among many shocks of the past week—school closures, Tom Hanks, the shuttering of one sports league after another—this rule change registers as major. The liquid restriction has been a key component of air travel ever since 2006. If people are now allowed to bring 12-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer onto planes, won’t the planes blow up? Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Chris Halkides has been kind enough, again, to try to make us lawyers smarter by dumbing down science enough that we have a small chance of understanding how it’s being used to wrongfully convict and, in some cases, execute defendants. Chris graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and teaches biochemistry, organic chemistry, and forensic chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

In 1991, Gregory Taylor was partying with an acquaintance when his Nissan Pathfinder got stuck in the mud in Raleigh, NC. About fifty yards away from his vehicle was the lifeless body of Jacquetta Thomas, which Taylor and his casual friend saw but did not report.  When he returned to retrieve the truck, Taylor and his companion were arrested for her murder.

There were two primary pieces of evidence against him, a prostitute who claimed that she had seen the victim get into his vehicle and a spot in the wheel well of his car, which a report from the NC State Bureau of Investigation’s crime lab said gave “chemical indications for the presence of blood,” In 1993, Taylor was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison. Continue reading →

Most lawsuits for defamation turn out to be SLAPP suits, strategic lawsuits against public participation, whose purpose isn’t to win but to silence by exacting a cost to litigate and defend. Some, even some who should know better, leaped to this assumption, as there have been a rash of frivolous suits (think Devin Nunes versus his cow) of late, and the president threatens them with regularity.

This is no SLAPP suit. The defendants are Netflix, Ava DuVernay and Attica Locke, and Netflix has done very well with the serial When They See Us. Time is long past to try to prevent people from seeing “the truth,” as it’s already been seen by millions. Netflix won’t be scared off by the cost of defense, as they’ve made many millions of dollars off the show and can well afford to litigate any damn thing they want. Continue reading →

Mitt Romney’s proposal to send every American adult a check for $1,000 opened a discussion of ways to address the economic dislocation that will permeate the nation. Of course, if you can’t work, lose your job, have a small business that’s shuttered, will a check for $1000 do the trick?

The shift came four days after an internal report from the Department of Health and Human Services — not yet shared with the public — concluded that the “pandemic will last 18 months or longer and could include multiple waves of illness.”

To self-isolate for a couple weeks is one thing. If this goes on for 18 months, is it even conceivable? This isn’t to say it will happen, but it’s not beyond the pale. During whatever period it is, people will not only need medical care, and maybe burial, but will need to eat, among other things. Continue reading →

Before sides were picked and bizarre and disgusting accusations leveled, a new Woody Allen movie was an event. They were a big deal, and his movies became cultural touchstones. Even the opening sequence to Manhattan, scenes aligning with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, was magical. Or the iconic scene on the movie line in Annie Hall, where Marshall McLuhan appears to shut up the smug Columbia professor. Classic, but only one of hundreds.

Then it all crashed.

As readers surely know, that happened after Farrow found out about his relationship with her (but not his) adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, now his wife, who was then 21. Farrow subsequently accused Allen of sexually molesting their adopted daughter Dylan Farrow, who was then 7, during a 1992 visit to her Connecticut country house. Continue reading →

Already this morning, I’ve written three posts and, after due deliberation, decided not to post any of them. The first was about how the past excesses of criminal reform activists have made their calls for releasing prisoners to avoid COVID-19 from ripping through prisons ring hollow at a time when people care more for mom and dad than convicted felons.

The second was about the economic illiteracy of millennials who somehow connect COVID-19 with proof that capitalism is the disease and Bernie is the cure, and passionately expressing it on the corporation named Twitter on their China-made AAPL iPhones.

The third was about Mitt Romney’s idea of giving $1000 to every American adult to tide them through this economic dislocation. Continue reading →

No matter how healthy he is, or at least appears to be, the fact remains that Joe Biden, like Bernie and Trump, is old. Old people, well, don’t always remain alive in the natural scheme of things. At age 77, there is a very real possibility that Biden, if nominated and if elected, might not survive his term of office. Remember, William Henry Harrison, the oldest president for a very long time, only lasted one month before he kicked the bucket, and he was a mere kid at 68,

This being the case, Biden’s choice of running mate as vice president is very important. So what’s the plan?

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My daughter got the email around 11:00 am yesterday. Don’t show up on Monday as school will be closed. The plan had been to show up Monday and Tuesday, which had already been designated as “professional development” days to prepare for the likelihood of school closings. The idea, last week, was that schools needed to figure out how they were going to deal with closing, whether they could teach remotely and how to accomplish it. For public school students, the issues are very different than college or graduate school. Think first graders.

But then, a decision was made, and that was that.

“I understand the gravity of this action and what it means for every community in our county, as well as for the families and caretakers of our students, especially health care workers with kids in school,” Nassau County Executive Laura Curran said.
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