Cornell lawprof Sherry Colb sought to make her point about the movie Submission, which she had not yet seen, by introducing an analogy.

[I]magine going to see a popular movie and finding out that the story of the movie is all about how a rich, Jewish moneylender exploits the poor Christians who live in his neighborhood. In the course of the story, the moneylender collects usurious interest rates for his loans, and various Christian borrowers descend into terrible poverty, unable to feed their children, some driven to suicide. At the end, the moneylender sits at the table celebrating the Jewish Sabbath with his family, singing songs and beaming at the heavy gold jewelry around his wife’s neck that he was able to give to her after appropriating what rightfully belonged to his clients.

Such a story would be anti-semitic propaganda, and we would all recognize it as such. Does that mean that a Jew has never leant [sic] people money? Of course not. Does it even mean that a Jew has never charged excessive interest on a loan or that borrowers never suffered as a result? No again. And still, releasing a film that tells the story of one Jew who does these terrible things is hate propaganda, because the film implicitly says not only that this thing happened one time or may happen sometimes. It says that this is what people can expect from a Jew, that the Jew is a greedy villain. And even as this is obvious to most of us, a Nazi might reply with outrage, “It’s just a movie!” or “This does happen sometimes,” even as he would enjoy the effect of propaganda that conforms so well to what he thinks about Jews.

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A statewide strike by teachers in West Virginia may well be justified by the failure of their salaries to keep pace with the cost of living, not that the same can’t be said about the salaries of many others. But the strike is unlawful. Teachers’ strikes are an old joke, where the penalty for engaging in an unlawful work stoppage is negotiated away with the settlement.

Of course, the week plus (thus far) of the strike means that students lose a week of education, and working parents are forced to find some way to deal with their children at home rather than school. That makes it hard for the teachers to fall back on their usual claim, “we’re doing it for the children,” when the kids suffer and, well, they’re doing it for the money.

The conflict arises from the niggardly raises offered teachers, and they were, indeed, pretty darn low. Continue reading →

Retired Harvard criminal law prof, Alan Dershowitz, has become a pariah in polite academic society, which wouldn’t be a bad thing but for the reason.

It’s rather striking that Dersh and Dennis Prager, a conservative radio talk show host, are sitting in the same room, talking calmly to each other, agreeing. A mere decade ago, this would have been more likely to be a naked mud-wrestling match.  Continue reading →

David Brooks took a road trip to find out what Millennials in America’s best colleges* are thinking. It isn’t good.

It’s not that the students are hopeless. They are dedicating their lives to social change. It’s just that they have trouble naming institutions that work. A number said they used to have a lot of faith in the tech industry, but they have lost much of it. “The Occupy strategy was such a visible failure, it left everyone else feeling disillusioned,” one lamented. “We don’t even have a common truth. A common set of facts,” added another.

The second large theme was the loss of faith in the American idea. I told them that when I went to public school the American history curriculum was certainly liberal, but the primary emotion was gratitude. We were the lucky inheritors of Jefferson and Madison, Whitman and Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Kennedy and King. Our ancestors left oppression, crossed a wilderness and are trying to build a promised land.

The kids weren’t buying. Continue reading →

Whether Sarah Katherine Campbell committed the crime of which she stands accused has yet to be determined. She is due the process, the fairness, that the law provides anyone accused of a crime, even if those who would have shrieked that she must be believed would have denied that to those she accused.

Deputies said 18-year-old Sarah Katherine Campbell was charged with filing a false police report of a felony.

According to deputies, the charges stemmed from a false report of a sexual assault. Clemson University Police responded to a report of a sexual assault at the Delta Chi Fraternity house on January 27, deputies said.

The sheriff’s office said an investigation into the incident was launched and as evidence was gathered in the case, it was determined that the sexual encounter between Campbell and the male at the fraternity house was consensual.

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There was a time when being a member of the United States Sentencing Commission was a big deal. But that was before Booker, holding the Sentencing Guidelines advisory. Since then, most judges have come to the realization that the grid was more random numbers than reality, more Draconian aspiration than a reflection of sentences either appropriate under § 3553(a) or some empirically determined aggregation of actual sentences meted out by actual judges.

That doesn’t mean the Commission doesn’t matter. There are still a few judges who refuse to recognize that the numbers on the sentencing grid, and calculations done to reach those numbers, are merely social engineering. And there are the younger judges, who never practiced law before the Mistretta went and screwed everything up, to whom the monstrously long sentences seem totally normal.

But there is one guy for whom the Guidelines were just too lenient, too soft on crime, a gift to the vicious jaywalkers who deserved life, or the more serious criminals who deserved life plus cancer. And it comes as no surprise that he’s finally getting his close-up. Continue reading →

She was predator, not prey. It was consensual, not coercive. But how would Monica Lewinsky know that someday, 20 years in the future, a narrative would arise that would enable her to reinvent herself as the victim?

I have been working toward this realization for years. I have been trying to find that power—a particularly Sisyphean task for a person who has been gaslighted.

To be blunt, I was diagnosed several years ago with post-traumatic stress disorder, mainly from the ordeal of having been publicly outed and ostracized back then. My trauma expedition has been long, arduous, painful, and expensive. And it’s not over.

Take a second to breathe, wipe the tear from your eye, and reflect. Monica has. Continue reading →

It’s long been recognized that prosecutors are part of the problem. They hold too much power over the system, as a by-product of mandatory minimums, based upon charging choices that constrain a judge’s authority to sentence as she sees fit. And then there’s the deference problem, that judges acquiesce to prosecutorial demands because they’re the good guys on the side of truth and justice.

And it’s long been recognized that much of the system that’s gone terribly awry, from mass incarceration to gross racial disparities, happens at the hands of prosecutors. But it wasn’t until Fordham lawprof John Pfaff’s research that we learned that prosecutors played a pivotal role in mass incarceration by increasingly pursuing felony charges, with their higher sentences.

Pfaff showed that many of the favored tropes about the system, the myth that the overload is caused by non-violent first-time drug offenders, for example, were false. If we repealed laws criminalizing drugs tomorrow, it wouldn’t empty the prisons. Most crimes are “violent,” and Americans remain convinced that violent criminals must be put away for life plus cancer. Continue reading →

Some view the New York Times as a sketchy resource, too often providing real estate on its op-ed pages for those who hold outlier, unfounded, factless views in support of social justice goals. Some, but not all.

Why is it that whenever the NYT starts “recruiting different kinds of writers than we have traditionally” they’re always white and racist and kind of mean? They’ve never been well stocked with writers of color who are kindly intelligent—why not diversify with some of those? pic.twitter.com/FUUFHSfwOX

— Steven Thrasher (@thrasherxy) February 27, 2018

It’s unclear, at least to me, what this means. Is the argument that Thomas Sowell should be a columnist? He’s black and intelligent. He can’t be racist, by some definitions. Maybe he’s not “kind” enough? Continue reading →

Is Middlebury College unduly harsh in its discipline? That’s a matter of perspective, and a “permanent” letter in a college student’s file can be a deal-breaker for some purposes. Grad school, for example. And that means it could conceivably make it hard for Elizabeth Dunn to achieve her goal.

Dunn told the Seven Days reporter that although they are applying to law school, they are not concerned with the discipline on their record hurting their chances of being accepted. Dunn said their backup plan is working in the Bronx public defender’s office.

Who are the “they”? That would be Dunn, as she either prefers her special pronoun or has multiple people residing inside her head. Will law school still want her with a blemish on her undergrad record? Certainly some law school will. Empty seats are depressing. Continue reading →