Somebody may be in trouble with Middlebury College for what she posted on Facebook.

On December 12, the senior went on Facebook to post a short list of “men to avoid” at Vermont’s most prestigious college and solicited input from others. She added the crowdsourced names to her list until she had called out 36 male students and recent graduates for sexual misbehavior, ranging from serial rape to harassment.

The “senior” was Elizabeth Dunn, who felt she was a “survivor.”

And, like many new college students, Dunn found herself navigating social situations for which she was unprepared. One night during her first year, she attended a party, met a guy and went to his room. According to Dunn, the student, a senior, plied her with alcohol to the point where she was “very drunk.” They had a sexual encounter even though Dunn now says she “didn’t really know what was happening” and “didn’t really consent to a lot of what was happening.” Continue reading →

The trial of eight members of the scandalous Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force is, to a large extent, a repeat of the Dirty 30 Scandal in New York City a generation ago. It’s a fairly obvious, and easy, gig for cops to use their authority, and the trust they’re afforded, to become the criminals.

The Baltimore Police Department is currently in court over one of the biggest scandals in the history of American law enforcement. The corruption case is replete with intrigue as police reveal secrets that sound like something out of an urban-fiction novel or a lost season of The Wire. It has revealed how one of America’s largest cities just happened to be filled with crooked cops, but no one seems to be talking about it outside of Baltimore.

This is what comes of being unaware of where The Wire came from. Or perhaps using pop references under the assumption that your audience knows no history. Continue reading →

It’s live, the first episode of Make No Law. Lend Ken your ear and learn about the First Amendment. The first podcast is on Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, the “fighting words” exception that has confused so many and caused so much harm of late. What does it really say? What does it mean today?

And because he knows lots of stuff, Episode Two is already live as well.

Learn at the knee of the master. I will.

It’s hardly acceptable, but at least the targets of accusations of sexual offense in the workplace are adults. Sure, they may be punished, lose jobs, have careers ruined, be the subject of hatred and scorn, despite the absence of anything more than an allegation, even an anonymous accusation, of vague impropriety. It could range from something serious and real to something trivial and fabricated.

But they’re grown-ups. They have learned to take a punch. The victims at Middlebury are kids.

Last year [meaning a month ago], the rise of #MeToo spawned a crowdsourced document known as the Shitty Media Men list. This was a Google spreadsheet, shared by women working in media, in which anyone could name powerful male industry figures whose offenses ranged from alleged rape to creepy comments.

Yes, even those “creepy comments” which are so traumatizing to the self-proclaimed fierce women. Continue reading →

Back in 2011, a cute post appeared at SJ about the Centers for Disease Control issuing a preparedness warning for the Zombie Apocalypse. It was a throwaway, fun for the moment but not the sort of post one would remember, so it never occurred to me that I would think of it again. I was wrong.

Hi Scott,

I saw that you included “natural disaster” in a post on Simple Justice’s website here:

http://blog.simplejustice.us/2011/05/20/psa-prepare-for-the-zombie-apocalypse-now-via-the-cdc/

Thanks for this – I’ve been looking for some content about emergency preparation online. It’s nice to see that your website has info that could be useful to people looking to prepare for emergencies and disasters. We at Coupon Chief have just created a massive guide titled “How to Save on Emergency Supplies – Disaster Prep on a Budget.” It includes up-to-date information and special tips to help prepare families for emergencies. Continue reading →

UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is the left coast version of Harvard’s Larry Tribe, sans the candlelit dinner with Louise Mensch. There isn’t a progressive cause he won’t embrace. Until now, and for that, one is constrained to wonder: How utterly awful must something be for it to be too far over the line for Chemerinsky?

The “something” is Stanford law professor Michele Dauber’s war against Judge Aaron Persky.

The effort to recall Judge Aaron Persky, which has submitted signatures to be on the ballot in Santa Clara County in June, is misguided and a threat to judicial independence. If there is disagreement with a judge’s decision, the appropriate remedy is to appeal the ruling, not to seek removal of the judge.

Such recall efforts are a serious threat to judicial independence as judges will fear that unpopular rulings will cost them their jobs. Justice, and all of us, will suffer when judges base their decisions on what will satisfy the voters.

Continue reading →

Queens detective Thomas Rice found a way to hack the “hard and dangerous” work of protecting and serving. He never got off his butt.

The thief used Hitlall’s credit card at a Lefferts Blvd. deli right away – a detail he provided to police. But as time passed, the investigation never seemed to go anywhere, he said.*

“I called them several times asking if they found anything,” the 41-year-old dad said. “The cops never got back to me.”

Unknown to him, there was a sinister reason. The case detective, Thomas Rice, had closed the “investigation,” and his lieutenant approved it just four days later.

There are two reasons to close an investigation. The first is that they’ve arrested the perp. The second is that they’ve decided they’ll never find the perp. Rice closed it for the second reason. But then, his report told the story of the great effort he put into solving the case. Continue reading →

Is it the price of being “privileged” to live in a superpower, the land of plenty, to assume responsibility for the poor of the world? Perhaps. Empathy isn’t a bad thing, except when its focus of the moment fails to include the reality that some of your fellow Americans aren’t living any better than the downtrodden elsewhere. What are the chances Ethiopia is going to send foreign aid to Milwaukee?

Surely no one in the United States today is as poor as a poor person in Ethiopia or Nepal? As it happens, making such comparisons has recently become much easier. The World Bank decided in October to include high-income countries in its global estimates of people living in poverty. We can now make direct comparisons between the United States and poor countries.

According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they are the world’s very poorest. Of these, 3.2 million live in the United States, and 3.3 million in other high-income countries (most in Italy, Japan and Spain).

Continue reading →

Long before it was assumed that campus sexual assault was an epidemic, or the tentacles of #MeToos of Hollywood emanating outward in all directions, there was a call for the military to end its blight of rape. And the military appeared ready to do whatever it could to convey the impression, if not the fact, that it was dealing with its problem.

Petty Officer Riesbeck was convicted of rape, two charges of making false statements and one charge of communicating indecent language. The jury sentenced him to three months of confinement, a reduction in rank and a bad-conduct discharge. Adm. Zukunft approved the punishment.

The defendant was tried under the Uniform Code of Military Conduct, one peculiar aspect of which is that the military, theoretically at least, abhors something called “command influence.” For obvious reasons, this is an overarching problem in military adjudications, given the hierarchical nature of command, such that a ranking officer could order a subordinate to do something that would influence the outcome. For the most part, the military takes this problem very seriously. But not always. Continue reading →

The answer to some who believe “hate speech,” whatever that may be, should not be protected under the First Amendment and, absent such protection, can either be criminalized per se or punished ad hoc, is to respond in kind. After all, law is like magic.

Eariler this week, Georgia State Sen. William Ligon, a Republican, introduced the Campus Free Speech Act, a bill designed to uphold students’ First Amendment freedoms. Following a year in which there were plenty of campus speech meltdowns, this bill attempts to address the growing resistance to a free and open campus, though it also creates new concerns.

The bill, which is based on the Goldwater Model, would require universities to take action against students who shut down speakers. Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and co-author of the Goldwater proposal upon which this bill was based, feels strongly about this specific bill.

Continue reading →