In the case argued before the First Circuit by Harvard prawf Jeannie Suk Gerson, after much inexplicable melodrama, the sole issue before the court was whether to reverse a temporary restraining order issued by Judge Douglas Woodlock. Ordinarily, this isn’t a tough call. This time, it wasn’t merely tough, but added another level of bizarre to the case.

A TRO maintains the status quo ante until the suit against Boston College is determined, much like letting a defendant remain on bail rather than serve his sentence while his appeal is proceeding. The reason is fairly obvious: if the defendant is constrained to serve his sentence immediately, but the conviction is subsequently reversed, he doesn’t get that time back. Not even the god-like power of a federal court can alter time. It’s gone, lost forever, together with the consequences that follow from the punishment to family, job, life. Continue reading →

As you know, my theory is that I write the posts and, should you find them sufficiently worthwhile to read (whether for love or hate), it’s up to you to contribute to the freight of keeping SJ online.

So if you want to help, there’s a way you can do so and make $50. I know, right? SoFi bank* will pay you $50 to open an online bank account, called SoFi Money, and fund it with $100. SoFi will then pay me $50 for referring you. It takes about five minutes, it’s intrusive because what bank isn’t, but for your $100 funding (and it actually pays a far better interest rate than brick and mortar banks), you get $50 and so does SJ. Continue reading →

Chris Seaton is your typical cis white male colonist, caring only about the Thanksgiving turkey, dammit, and not a lick about the 556 federally recognized tribes of indigenous people who suffered for his stuffing. When I read his screed, I was literally shaking.

Thus, it’s incumbent upon me to counter his polemic with a more empathetic post to reflect the critical issue of what makeup a true ally should wear in order to demonstrate their lack of complicity.

I, too, hope your turkey is dry, Susan.

The complaint stated that Officer Smith observed the defendant hand a vial to another person on the corner of South Street and 107th. The defendant has been “credibly accused.” So what? No rational person would argue that the defendant should now be presumed guilty, or that he might as well be detained as he’s obviously guilty. Why bother to try him? After all, he’s been credibly accused.

Of course, if Officer Smith wasn’t on duty that day, and was, in fact, on vacation in the Bahamas, sunning himself on the beach and drinking a fruity beverage with a tiny umbrella jutting out of the cup, then the accusation would be incredible. Or if the defendant was the one on the beach instead. It could happen.

If that was proven, the defendant would be incredibly accused. An incredible accusation would be dismissed out of hand, but a credible accusation might give rise to further inquiry.  What it would not do, never do, is suffice for any greater purpose. Continue reading →

Derrick Jenkins was not pleased that his suit against the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department was dismissed, so he decided it was a good idea to let Circuit Judge Howard K. Coates Jr. know how he felt and sent him a kinda motion letter.

The letter ripped the judge as “incompetent” and “unfit to serve,” with expletives added for emphasis.

This barely does justice to Jenkins’ complaints, which expressed how he really felt. It’s worth a full read. Continue reading →

What if you happened to find some odd gadget attached to your car? Why it’s there, who put it there, you can’t say, but one thing is for sure. It’s there, it doesn’t belong there and the car is yours. So you remove it because it’s your car.

Did you commit theft? The Supreme Court of Indiana has to deal with the peculiar question.

A man who removed a secretly installed GPS tracking device from his SUV is making his case to the Indiana Supreme Court. Justices last week heard the case of Derek Heuring, who had a warrant-authorized tracker placed on his 1999 Ford Expedition by the Warrick County Sheriff’s Office on July 11, 2018. Continue reading →

As he dips a wrinkled toe into the waters of the Dem presidential nomination pool, former New York City Mayor and current billionaire Michael Bloomberg had to admit something: He was wrong.

“Over time, I’ve come to understand something that I long struggled to admit to myself,” he said in the soaring sanctuary of the Christian Cultural Center, in East New York. The former mayor choked up, seemingly holding back tears. “I got something important wrong. I got something important really wrong. I didn’t understand back then, the full impact that stops were having on the black and Latino communities.”

No, he wasn’t being sentenced by SDNY Judge Shira Scheindlin for his part in violating the constitutional rights of five million New Yorkers. It’s Bloomberg coming to painful grips with the fact that there’s no way he gets to run as a Democrat (mind you, he switched to Republican to be New York’s mayor, but party affiliation is just a social construct, amirite?). Continue reading →

Had it been written by an angst-driven college sophomore, an activist ally of the cause wearing the mantle of “survivor” because she got drunk one night, it would have been ordinary. But it wasn’t. It was written by a Sexual Assault Prosecutor for the 5th District of Colorado. Jake Lilly, a 2003 Cornell law grad, an army veteran (or as he calls himself, a “warrior”), a Democratic party activist and a guy who doesn’t like cops much, but wants to tamper with the jury to get his conviction.

It is heartbreaking, infuriating and almost too hard to watch. A young woman is asked to repeat the painful details of her sexual assault to investigators over and over and over again.

Viewers of the Netflix series “Unbelievable” will recognize this story of a serial rapist in Colorado and in Washington State.

Continue reading →

In the typically inane halls of #AppellateTwitter, the progressive scolds tried desperately to manufacture a rationalization where they could pretend they didn’t hate their conservative brethren who are members of the Federalist Society provided they didn’t attend the speech by Attorney General Bill Barr, or didn’t applaud afterward, or didn’t stand while applauding.

Or, as Iowa prawf Andy Grewal put it, “A decent conservative would have taken his dinner fork and stabbed anyone standing next to him who applauded.” Barr’s speech was wrong and awful, but it’s not enough to disagree with him. In order to be accepted by the progressives as a not-entirely-Nazi-conservative, there was an affirmative duty to display one’s disapproval or progressive lawyers were forced to hate you for not hating Barr enough.

This is a theme that runs far deeper than the narcissists on twitter who believe anyone gives a damn about being a sufficiently acceptable conservative for them to tolerate. Cathy Young wrote about a split on the far more consequential issue of racism where the theme was manifest. Continue reading →

Peter Westbrook, who fenced on the 1976 United States Olympic Team, explained that fencing teaches people how to lose. It’s a critical lesson, as people will lose, whether on the piste or in their daily lives. But the other half of the equation is that you can’t blame your way to winning. If you don’t like losing, work harder, train harder, push harder. It’s what athletes do because what they don’t want to do it lose. Not if they can help it.

This is where retired professional distance runner Lauren Fleshman devolves from reality and indulges in the fashionable delusion of blame, which naturally gets her real estate in the New York Times.

I was one of the fastest distance runners to never make the Olympics. I’m certain that relative energy deficiency in sport, or RED-S, the same problem Mary Cain encountered, caused me to leave some talent on the table. I don’t mind the missed podiums, the missed chances. What gnaws at me is that nothing has changed. Until we acknowledge and respect that the female performance curve is different from the male version that sports was built on, girls will continue to face institutionalized harm.

Continue reading →