Neither Dr. SJ nor I had much in our youth. She would make pot holders and I would take any job that I could, from shoveling snow to washing windows to being a warm body at a nuclear reactor. Somehow, we both figured out that hard work, education and goal orientation would serve us better than complaining about what we didn’t have.

By the time we married, we were first clawing our way to financial independence, which seemed like a wise choice given that nobody else was going to finance dinner every night. Over the years, we worked, saved and never lived beyond our means. But Jimmy was a different story. He bought a fancy condo on a good street that cost far more than he could possibly afford. He drove a fancy car, and got a new one every three years. He wore the best suits. Where I went to Brancrofts to look respectable, he went bespoke.

The problem was the bill collectors. Jimmy was always hiding from them, and they were always looking for Jimmy. He had no money in the bank, but he looked like a million bucks. When I asked him why, he told me life was short and he was going to enjoy every moment of it, living the best he could get away with. They might take away his car or his apartment, but they couldn’t take back the good times he had. Continue reading →

Kalief Browder’s case was an exercise in failure at many levels, far too many for the passionate activists to grasp. Bail beyond his family’s ability to pay was one, but so was Speedy Trial, a dishonest prosecutorial sham and the judges who allowed it to happen, and a lawyer who let the case drag on. But passionate people need a poster boy, and he’s been picked, even though there is no suggestion that the deal in the works would have changed a thing.

Since his death, the movement to abolish cash bail has grown stronger, especially among the state’s urban politicians. On Friday, leaders in the state Legislature were poised to move forward with a plan to eliminate cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent crimes while keeping monetary requirements or other conditions for violent felonies.

There’s a tradeoff that is buried in this description. At present, the sole basis for imposition of bail is the likelihood of a return to court. There is no prong for danger to the community, so a person accused of assault with a job and strong community ties will be released, while a turnstile jumper with a history of bench warrants may not. Continue reading →

AUSA Katherine Pfeifle went for it on cross.

When Pfeifle brought up his $4 million Dallas house, Rimlawi did not dodge the subject.

“If you want me to say I’ve moved up in the world, yes,” he said. “Yes, I have a nice house.”

A surgeon owns a nice house? Not exactly shocking. But what might be shocking is that the government, despite the cries that they never prosecute white collar crime, are trying to use their clout, the fear they wreak on their targets, to bring down what they claim is a nefarious scheme of bribery and kickbacks between Forest Park Hospital and the surgeons whose patients they sought to fill its operating rooms. Continue reading →

The Second Circuit smacked it down in Copeland v. Vance, when the attack was the lack of a mens rea requirement for New York’s misbegotten gravity knife law. It didn’t matter that you weren’t a criminal, that your possession had no criminal purpose, that it was, anywhere else, a perfectly lawful knife as any ordinary person would use. No, that wasn’t good enough.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit acknowledged the law’s absence of a mens rea requirement but held that it makes no difference whether the defendant believed a knife was legal or not, whether he actually attempted a “wrist flick” to open the knife, or even if he received advice from a police officer that the knife was lawful. Ultimately, the court below suggested that challenges to such prosecutions could only be raised on an as-applied basis—meaning that when someone is prosecuted under this law for carrying a Swiss Army or other common folding knife, then he may be able to raise this defense.

The only solution was to buy a knife on Amazon, or at your local hardware store, and find out later whether some cop could, after as many tries as he felt inclined to give it, “flick” into movement, get arrested, spend a night in jail and await the joy of fighting it out. Continue reading →

The argument made by the Department of Justice before the Second Circuit, that this Trump guy blocks people on Twitter as a regular citizen exercising his First Amendment right, but twits as the president of the United States when he bans transgender people from the military, received the reaction it deserved.

The court appeared skeptical on Tuesday. Peter Hall, one of the judges on the panel, noted the oddity of the Justice Department representing Mr. Trump in his personal capacity. “It’s curious to me that the Department of Justice is here representing, essentially, a private entity,” he said.

Of course, this was a bit on the snarky side, given that it’s not only an “oddity” but an incongruity. If Trump used his @RealDonaldTrump twitter account to speak as president, then it’s inconsistent to claim that it was only when he wanted it to be viewed that way, and not when he didn’t. This would be true if the argument was made by his personal lawyer, MIchael Cohen, or by someone on the government payroll defending a petty man’s right to block citizens, even if it’s the least significant attack of things he does. Continue reading →

San Antonio hates tasty chicken sandwiches. This isn’t my view, but the official view of Peter Kirsanow, a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

If the City Council had banned Chick-Fil-A from the airport because its members hate the
tastiest chicken sandwiches in creation, there would be no constitutional violation. The City
Council, however, explicitly banned Chick-Fil-A because of the company’s charitable donations
to religious organizations. Fortune reports:

“With this decision, the City Council reaffirmed the work our city has done to become a champion of equality and inclusion,” said City Councilman Roberto Treviño. “San Antonio is a city full of compassion, and we do not have room in our facilities for a company with a history of anti-LGBTQ behavior.”

The lack of self-awareness in that statement is astonishing. Exclusion in the name of
ostensible inclusion; intolerance in the name of tolerance.

Continue reading →

Clarissa Byrne Hessick came at the problem from the perspective of rules. Not “mandatory” rules, as that was beyond what anyone could impose, but the creation of norms that would guide law professors in how to twit so as to neither embarrass the Legal Academy nor use the status of “professor” in a way that deceived the public by conveying the imprimatur of scholarly credibility when they were just blowing random personal opinions out their butt.

Not being a big fan of rules, it struck me as inflexible and censorious. Sure, prawfs have their areas of scholarship, where they may (or may not) be particularly knowledgeable. But they too get to have opinions beyond the narrow limits of what they teach and research, and this being America, they get to express them. Free speech doesn’t mean wise speech, or expert speech, but speech. Even prawfs are entitled to it. Even when they’re wrong. Even when a renowned Harvard legal giant endorses the views of Louise Mensch.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that bootstrapping the ascribed credibility of the job to peddle nonsensical, if not dangerous, opinions isn’t a problem. Continue reading →

The farm was maintained as an homage to American history, or at least what was considered American history before it was reinvented to show that it was the history of awfulness. Still, students from the Claremont School District went there on field trips. Until they didn’t. David French explains why.

Though it was lost in the national news cycle, Central District of California Judge Jesus Bernal — an Obama appointee — issued a ruling that directly challenged government boycotts and reprisals against allegedly intolerant business owners. The case is called Riley’s American Heritage Farms v. Claremont Unified School District, and the facts are similar enough to  government actions against Chick-fil-A that the franchise’s lawyers should take notice.  The farm is a “living history farm,” and it frequently hosts school field trips. At the farm “immersive presentations focused on the American Revolution, Civil War, American colonial farm life, California Gold Rush, and pioneering homesteading history.” The presentations strive to be historically accurate and contain no political or cultural commentary. The farm maintains a social media presence, and its social media accounts are also politics-free.

Whether Riley’s farm is a testament to the American experience or our colonialism and original sin, it was there for students to see. But one of the farm’s owners, James Riley, also had some thoughts of his own. Continue reading →

When my buddy, Donald, and I backpacked around the continent after college, there was a running joke about how the kids in each country spoke their national language. “Isn’t it great how every kid in France speaks a foreign language?” We were so witty. But the reality was that most people we met spoke English as well as their native tongue.

But what about us? Back then, everybody took a foreign language in school. Our choices were generally French, German or Spanish, as Latin had fallen out of fashion. Few became even remotely conversant, but at least we had some exposure. No more.

In January, the Modern Language Association made an astonishing announcement in The Chronicle of Higher Education: From 2013 to 2016, colleges across the United States cut 651 foreign language programs. French was the hardest hit, losing 129 programs, followed by Spanish with 118, German with 86 and Italian with 56. Once these programs close, they are very hard to reopen.

Continue reading →

Indicted to the right. Indicted to the left. It was obvious from the start that he was playing Icarus, spewing bluster like any loudmouth fool can do, but with a standing invitation to sit with Rachel and Ari whenever he didn’t have someone more important to hang with. Sure, Mark Geragos tried that before him, albeit with somewhat less noise and more signal, and it failed to land him a prime time special, but the sun was shining on Michael Avenatti. Or at least the Klieg lights.

But Avenatti’s entrance to the studio was paved by Stormy Daniels, who had nothing nice to say about Trump, and so his bluster was not merely welcomed, accepted, but adored. Since then, he hasn’t been particularly useful, given his ridiculously hyperbolic introduction of a false accuser forward against Justice Kavanaugh that undermined the efforts to taint him as a teenage rapist.

Of course, there were also his claims that he was solely responsible for bringing down Trump’s hatchet man, Michael Cohen, even though it turns out that the feds were onto him years before anybody outside of bankruptcy court and the grievance committee knew Avenatti’s name. Continue reading →