The first videos to hit social media framed the issue. Some kid wearing a MAGA hat in the face of a Native American elder, with a fixed mocking grin on his face as other young white men chanted and laughed in the background. At its most benign, it was extremely disrespectful. At its worst, it was a racist confrontation.

On the one hand, this smirking, MAGA hat-wearing kid exemplified the persona of current-day evil. On the other, the Native American elder, Nathan Phillips, was a Vietnam vet and activist for the rights of Indiginous people. Continue reading →

It was between dinner and dessert that my devoutly Catholic mother-in-law announced that she supported a woman’s right to get an abortion. That being uncontroversial, and the silence at the table otherwise being awkward, I asked the obvious question designed to evoke her fury: So, you’re no longer Catholic?

And, as expected, she reacted. “Of course I’m still Catholic. I just disagree about abortion.” I had her. She wanted to remain a member of her tribe while disputing a number of fundamental tenets, both about abortion as well as papal infallibility. “Sorry,” I replied, “but you don’t get to be a Catholic if you reject the beliefs of the religion.” Maybe she could be Catholic-lite, or a cultural Catholic, but what she couldn’t be was Catholic. Religions aren’t the sort of thing where you get to pick and choose which beliefs you prefer. You believe or not. If not, then you may well be right, but you’re no longer a member of the religion.

When the Women’s March®* was founded, and the white women were replaced, there was an abundance of warm feelings. Unity was the word offered to express how the issues for which the march was formed, and so it wormed its way into the mission statement that few read and fewer still cared about. Continue reading →

If the purpose of law school is to teach students to become legal thinkers, lawyers, then Washburn University lawprof Rory Bahadur’s complaint misses the mark. No one is blaming students for being dumber than dirt. We’re blaming academics, Bahadur included, for doing a lousy job of either teaching them or, if they’re unteachable, handing them a dime.

But rather than think, at the curiously named site Institute for Law Teaching and Learning, he tells us dinosaurs to die graciously.

Most of us have heard the lament from colleagues that, “Because K-12 and undergraduate has changed so much since we went to school, students enter law school today undereducated and so unaccustomed to rigor, that law schools need to invest an inordinate amount of time just to enable students to be competent at the things that lawyers need to do.”  Corollary comments are:  students can’t write, and their grammar is deficient yada yada yada. Continue reading →

It wasn’t unexpected, but when I learned late yesterday afternoon that his time had come, it was still jarring. He had been prepared for it for a while, ready for his moment. He went quietly, asleep. My father, Edwin S. Greenfield, born 1925, passed away yesterday. His wife, my mother, Phyllis Joy Greenfield, passed away in 2015.

My father served in the 86th Infantry in World War II, Blackhawk Division, in Europe, where he was awarded two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Good Conduct medal. After raising two kids, he joined the Coast Guard Auxiliary, where he became the Public Affairs Officer for the Lake Worth Inlet Coast Guard station in Florida. He loved his Coasties, and they were incredibly kind to him. Continue reading →

Joe Otte observed the oddity:

Wow. Could you have predicted 97 replies in 24 hours on this, of all topics?

The “this” of which he writes is the “toxic masculinity” Gillette commercial. As for the specific number of comments, as well as some of the contentiousness, it’s hard to predict, but had I not thought it worthy of note, I wouldn’t have posted it.

But why, as Joe asks, did it generate such a response. Oskar von Aln took his swipe by replying “The frailty of men is hilarious,” a position he first sought to weasel out of until, when pressed, he put on his big boy pants and came out with it: Continue reading →

There was no “registration” fee when I was admitted to the bar. Then again, there were no bar numbers, no official cards secure enough to pass inspection at Sing Sing, either. We said we were lawyers, and that was good eough. If there was doubt, we were asked for a business card. Somebody would dutifully inspect it, turning it right, left, and eventually nod and say, “go ahead.” And we were off.

Things have gotten a bit more “official” since then. One change was the institution of attorney registration fees. Most states have them, because it’s money and they can. The initial rationale was to pay for the costs associated with becoming more official, since somebody has to, but the relation between the cost of officialdom and the amount of fees has never been clear. The benefit is that you get to continue to be a lawyer, like you were before, but now with a bar number. It’s not really much of a benefit, at least for the lawyer.

In his State of the State address, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo made a number of announcements relating to lawyers, in general, and criminal law, in particular. Cuomo says we’re going to reform discovery. That’s good, given that we’ve been fighting that battle for four decades. Continue reading →

Do you look to television commercials to inform your masculinity? Or is this just the razor blade version of woke marketing, that women do the shopping and will buy the brand that appeals to their sensibilities?

During the 2017 Superbowl, Audi played the feminist card, and it failed miserably. It’s not just that it’s a tough market to play, there invariably being something to criticize as irrational ideologies tend to be in a constant state of conflict, there never being a “right” answer and always being something to offend someone about. Continue reading →

The other day on the twitters, somebody announced that New York was “going to” reform its archaic criminal discovery statute, CPL § 240.20. Gov. Cuomo says it’s going to happen. The state Senate and Assembly are finally both in the hand of Democrats, rather than the normal split of the Senate being held by Upstate Republicans.

So I quoted the “going to” language of the twit, and the fellow asked whether I thought it would happen. “No,” was my reply. Not that it shouldn’t happen. Not that it isn’t desparately needed. Not that the current discovery statute isn’t astoundingly bad and restrictive, designed to deny the defense of basic information necessary to make rational decisions and prepare a defense.

Supreme Court Justice Jim Yates provides an explanation of what was intended when this discovery statute was written.  He should know.  He wrote it way back when.

Judge Yates was disgusted by the way his discovery statute had been undermined.  It had been the intent to encourage and expect meaningful disclosure, but with prosecutors using disclosure as a weapon, and judges unwilling to buck powerful district attorneys, it became a unwieldy limit on the defense.

Continue reading →

It should come as no surprise that colleges occasionally turn to consultants to keep them abreast of the latest way to game Title IX campus sex policing, so as to avoid liability and bad public relations. Brett Socolow’s NCHERM is part of the cottage industry living off the largesse of ever-increasing tuition to pay the freight.

One of NCHERM’s services, apparently, is a tip of the week, and this one’s a winner.

Multiple appeals courts at both the state and federal level have explained the importance and necessity of cross-examination in campus sexual-misconduct proceedings.

They often invoke a quote by the famed American jurist Henry Wigmore, cited in a 1972 Supreme Court ruling, that cross-examination is “beyond any doubt the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.”

A high-profile Title IX consulting firm doesn’t agree, at least when cross-examination is used in its field.

Continue reading →

What if they couldn’t even afford the pizza that came in the box that told them about their job? Few, myself included, will cry a tear for the employees of the Transportation Safety Administration, the blue-shirted bit-players in the longest running show at the airport. But as much as they produce nothing beyond annoyance, the TSA agents are employees, working for a living, for the United States government.

Since T.S.A. agents, who are among the most visible of the affected workers, make do on a starting wage of about $23,000 a year (with the possibility of going up to about $43,000), these can be hair-raising calculations: Skip the children’s dentist appointments and pay the electric company? Or try to get an extension on the utility bill and go without getting the car fixed?

With no end to the government shutdown in sight, and neither side wise enough to give the other a backdoor, these employees aren’t as easily dismissed as GS 10s, who should have seen it coming and prepared. At the bottom of the wage scale, they were already below the poverty level for a family of four. Sure, there are benefits to working for the government, such as job security, as well as the occasional detriment like a shutdown, but as despicable as some TSA agents may be, it’s still a job. A job they’re being told to do without a paycheck, if only for now. Continue reading →