Granted, Canada is not the United States. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t offer a vision of what could happen if well-intended people get their way here, as they have there.

A new requirement from the Law Society of Upper Canada aimed at tackling systemic racism in the legal profession has already generated heated debate among lawyers — but this week the controversy hit a new level as a law professor launched a court challenge to try and block the new rule.

The law society is making it mandatory for lawyers and paralegals to abide by what it’s calling a personal “statement of principles” that acknowledges they have an obligation to “promote equality, diversity and inclusion generally, and in their behaviour towards colleagues, employees, clients and the public.”

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A Christmas tradition at SJ:

In years past, some have taken issue with offensive religious stereotypes reflected in this video. In years past, this didn’t strike me as a serious issue. It was funny, satire created by Jews who were able to laugh at ourselves, at others, at life. There were always people who would find something to take offense at when it touched their world, but so what? Continue reading →

Someone screwed with Jessica Schulberg’s head.

[T]he legal profession is one of the few that requires members to uphold a certain moral standard.

This is true, as lawyers are required to be of “good moral character” to be admitted to the bar. But what this means is easily misunderstood by people who conflate their politics with morality.  For Schulberg, morality is progressive politics, as her Huffington Post article makes clear that being on the “right” side of politics is immoral. Continue reading →

District of Columbia Judge Tanya Chutkan is to be doubly commended. First, for resolving the dilemma the government created when it played hide and seek with a United States citizen captured and held incognito overseas, then contending that the ACLU couldn’t represent its captive because he didn’t seek their representation.

And for doing so in twelve pages.

Somewhere in Iraq, a United States citizen has been in the custody of the U.S. armed forces for over three months. The detainee, who has been classified as an enemy combatant and whose name has not been released, was advised of his right to counsel and requested the assistance of counsel. To date, the detainee remains unnamed, uncharged, and, despite his request, without access to counsel. This court must now consider whether Petitioner shall be permitted to proceed in this matter as the detainee’s next friend.

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Put the two words, “child porn,” together and well-intended parents shudder. We must do something, they cry, and so laws are enacted to criminalize and harshly punish these disgusting miscreants. Careless laws that reach farther and wider than the evil perv sitting on a park bench, eyeing little girls with bad intent.

But the passionate advocates will tell the horror stories, capture our deepest fears and unrelenting disgust, and out come the pitchforks as the townsfolk march on . . . Jane Doe.

“I’m not a criminal for taking a selfie,” stated Jane Doe. “Sexting is common among teens at my school, and we shouldn’t face charges for doing it. I don’t want anyone else to go through what I’m going through.”

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A few short years ago, Sally Yates would have been burned at the stake for her crimes against humanity as a prosecutor.  But one cool trick changed everything. Betray your duty as acting Attorney General, play to the institutionally ignorant resistance, and be recreated overnight as a hero of the miserable, who know nothing about anything you’ve ever done before. It’s like one-hour Martinizing, except it didn’t take that long.

All anyone needed to know was that Yates used her moment in the sun of being fired by Darth Cheeto for using her interim post to embarrass him under the guise of being all justice-y, and every bad thing she ever did magically disappeared. Now, Yates gets to pretend she’s a warrior.

Over the course of our nation’s history, we have faced inflection points — times when we had to decide who we are as a country and what we stand for. Now is such a time. Beyond policy disagreements and partisan gamesmanship, there is something much more fundamental hanging in the balance. Will we remain faithful to our country’s core values? Continue reading →

For the past eight years, there was a friendly competition for the Best Criminal Law Blawg Post, which in 2012 was renamed the J-Dog Memorial Prize after our dear friend, Joel Rosenberg. In 2015, I wondered whether there would still be enough of a criminal law blawgosphere to sustain the contest. I decided there was.

As it turns out, there is not only life remaining in the criminal law blawgosphere, but some damn fine writing out there, as reflected in the nominations (as well as some truly excellent criminal law blogs that, inexplicably, didn’t muster a nomination but are still doing great work).

The point of the competition was to provide a way to promote writing by practitioners, by the people who did what others merely talked about, and who knew what they were saying. The next year, the problem was exacerbated by my being managing editor of Fault Lines. Continue reading →

Bexar County deputies feel horrible about killing 6-year-old Kameron Prescott. No one meant to shoot him. No one meant to kill him. But he’s dead, nonetheless. A stray bullet entered a mobile home. Kameron was inside the mobile him, and the stray bullet entered him.

A 6-year-old boy was fatally shot when Bexar County sheriff’s deputies opened fire on a woman at a Schertz mobile home park after a lengthy manhunt Thursday.

The woman — a wanted felon and a suspect in a car theft — also was killed by the gunfire at the Pecan Grove Manufactured Home Community, located off FM 78 on the banks of Cibolo Creek.

She had been trying to break into a mobile home while the child was inside when deputies caught up to her on the front porch.

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Kids make mistakes and the sun rises in the east. The first half of these epiphanies brought to you by the New York Times. But mistakes today aren’t like the mistakes of yore.

These days I work as the senior communications officer at another college, where I spend a healthy fraction of my time dealing with students who’ve made mistakes of their own. I recognize myself in them: intellectually adventurous, skeptical, newly aware of life’s injustices. They’re also different from me in many ways: less Grateful Dead and Dead Kennedys, much more technology.

Today’s students live their lives so publicly — through the technology we provide them without training — that much simpler errors than mine earn them the wrath of the entire internet.

Whether it’s true that the complication is tech “we provide them without training” is one issue. Some of us offered “training,” but they weren’t buying. Not only do they insist on putting their every burp and fart on instagram, as if we could stop them, but they also insist on the world learning of their every thought. They have opinions. They’re brilliant. They are entitled to make sure everyone knows it, and they are entitled to have their brilliance respected.  Continue reading →

That it ended up being recorded by the school district’s voicemail system was merely fortuitous. That it happened at all, on the other hand, was not.

[Bogota, New Jersey] Sgt. Craig Lynch left the recording, which is expected to be addressed by the Board of Education during a special meeting tonight, when he accidentally dialed a school district phone line with his cellphone after he left the Steen Elementary School principal’s office in August, according to district officials.

“[Expletive] you and the school superintendent and your [expletive] Ph.D. and the entire school district,” he says in the recording. “[Expletive] you. You can’t touch me. You’re not my [expletive] boss. [Expletive] you.”

Lynch was apparently displeased at a decision to terminate an employee. His solution was threatening to ticket everyone at the school. Continue reading →