If you heard that it was because of “sexual harassment,” then it must have been bad.
In 2016, right before I had to go on his show and talk about sexual-assault allegations against Donald Trump, Matthews looked over at me in the makeup chair next to him and said, “Why haven’t I fallen in love with you yet?”
When I laughed nervously and said nothing, he followed up to the makeup artist. “Keep putting makeup on her, I’ll fall in love with her.” Continue reading
One of the more fascinating attempts to buck reality has been the New York Times’ efforts to achieve “gender parity” in its Letters to the Editor. The problem, of course, is that if the Times wants to publish more letters from women, men traditionally being more inclined to write, and to write on newsworthy issues, what’s a letters editor to do?
I spent 18 years as the letters editor at The Calgary Herald. I believe that your obsession with tallying the gender of letter writers to achieve greater parity between men and women is the height of political correctness run amok.
Can the “height” of something “run amok”? But I digress. Continue reading
It’s not at all surprising that some district attorneys’ offices in New York City have found a way around the law, and that their solution is to use an outside party to do their work. This has become the method of convenience for a while, whether for the turnover of discovery, videos, and now witness information.
Now that New York has adopted the radical notion that an accused should know something about the accusations before the morning of trial, prosecutors have been scrambling to get around the new discovery laws. One of which is that the defense is entitled to “adequate contact information” for the People’s witnesses.
Taking a tip from the MTA, which invites you to “download the free app” to find out there are no trains for the rest of the night, the DA’s have concocted an app called WitCom, a portal that defense lawyers are “required” to use if they want to talk to prosecution witnesses.
Not too long ago, I went to a birthday party for the father of a dear friend. Harry turned 90, and he’s a great guy. The party was held at 21 Club in Manhattan, and in preparation, I wore a blue suit, white shirt and tie. When I arrived at the party, all but the under-25 crowd of males wore suits. There were only two of us wearing a tie, me and an old friend, Gene. While a few wore sports coats with open collar shirts, most wore suits without ties.
Neckties are silly affectations, but they distinguish more formal dress from less. And, for guys, they’re the only aspect of more formal attire to reflect any personality. Pocket squares make you look like a dandy, trying to be Roger Stone with his desperate whiff of “look at me,” but ties remain within the normal paradigm of things men wear when they’re dressed for business.
Axon? That’s the company formerly known as Taser International, for good reason. As the name Taser got dirtied up some, just because the non-lethal weapon morphed into less-than-lethal and bodies inexplicably piled up due to excited delirium, Taser changed its name and branched out into cameras for cops, and Axon was born.
But what do they have to do with New York’s new Criminal Procedure Law Section 245?
The state of New York recently passed new discovery laws that will take effect on January 1, 2020, impacting the current process of digital evidence disclosure. Article 245, which is part of a state-wide initiative focused on criminal justice reform, will require prosecutors to provide initial discovery within 15 days of arraignment. In turn, law enforcement agencies are required to proactively submit all forms of digital evidence as soon as possible. Proponents of the law hope it will expedite case processing periods and shorten jail stays for defendants detained before trial. Some law enforcement agencies are expressing concern about the article’s impact on their workloads and processes . . ..
Every New Yorker with a car knows about the Parking Violations Bureau, which is where one goes to get convicted (which is only slightly hyperbolic). The problem is that the judges are employees of the City and, while putatively there to fairly adjudicate parking tickets, the PVB has never been known for its fairness or concern for parkers. They’re not judges.
Neither are immigration judges, despite what anybody wants to believe.
Although immigration judges are employees of the executive branch, they’re judges in the truest sense of the term, presiding over cases that have enormous consequences for asylum seekers or people facing removal from the U.S.
In a weird way, the approach taken by the Iowa Attorney General’s office on behalf of the University of Iowa in its defense against a Title IX suit by a male student expelled for “sexually harassing and assaulting two fellow students and by possessing and consuming alcohol on campus” not only makes sense, but was the natural progression of campus sex tribunals. Yes, consuming alcohol was in there too. Please wipe that shocked look off your face.
After all, campus sex tribunals are, despite the rhetorical denial that they’re anything more than just routine campus discipline mechanisms, no different than plagiarism, are most assuredly quasi-criminal administrative proceedings. While copying off someone’s test isn’t a crime, rape is. Continue reading
Within minutes of my posting a snarky twit, the phone rang.
Scott, it’s Pablo. Why are you doing this to us, man?
Pablo Arredondo is Casetext’s co-founder, along with Jake Heller. I like these guys, even if I haven’t always been supportive of their coolest new ideas. They’ve had misses and hits, but they’re still standing which is far more than you could say about most of their brethren in the “legaltech” space, creating tools for lawyers that nobody wants or needs. But this time? Continue reading
Moira Donegan started the “Shitty Media Men” list, which gave rise to an opportunity for women to tell their stories, whether real, exaggerated or completely false, without challenge or question. Did it help? Sure, it destroyed a few careers of men about whom lies were spread, but isn’t it worth it if they stopped just one bad man? Surely you understand that there will be collateral damage of innocent people in the war for gender hegemony.
There’s a real problem in the federal judiciary. Whether you look at disgraced retired judge Alex Kozinski, who was accused of pernicious sexual harassment in 2017; the resignation of district court judge Carlos Murguia, who was reprimanded for his “inappropriate behavior”; the stymied inquiry into Kavanaugh’s behavior which disappeared because he left the D.C. Circuit when he got elevated to the Supreme Court; or the powerful testimony of Olivia Warren, who detailed the sexual harassment and abuse she was subjected to during her tenure at the Ninth Circuit by the late Judge Stephen Reinhardt, it is clear the legal industry needs to do something.
The inaugural Rappaport Forum was held at Harvard Law School, starting with a panel discussion on “the role and limits of free speech on college campuses.” If the subject matter of the panel doesn’t immediately catch your eye, I’ll spell it out for you.
It wasn’t a panel on the protection of free speech, or the expansion of free speech, or even the assurance of free speech. It was a panel on the “limits” of free speech. As if limits were such an obvious need that the question was never “should there be a limits,” but rather what limits should there be.
In a discussion lasting roughly an hour on Friday afternoon, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychology professor at Northeastern University, and Jonathan Haidt, an ethical leadership professor at New York University, discussed the definition of violent speech and how the parameters of free speech have changed on college campuses with the advent of the internet.