The dreaded Federalist Society at Pace Law School decided to have a panel on New York’s Proposition 1. The program was packed and its moderators were thrilled at the prospect of holding such a popular event.

When Houston Porter, a 28-year-old law student at Pace University, first walked into the college auditorium last month, he was surprised to see a packed house for the “Saving Women’s Sports” panel he was co-moderating.

“Our events normally don’t get that kind of turnout,” says Porter, a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative group that sponsored the panel at Pace’s law school in White Plains, New York. “So it was exciting.”

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The original opinion, by Judge Jane Stranch, joined by Judge Stephanie Davis, with Judge Alice Batchelder dissenting, has now been vacated and will be reheard, en banc. At Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene revisits the initial ruling which, I contend, reflects an excellent example of the logical fallacy of “begging the question.”

The problem is that the rationale of the majority in the original opinion cannot reach a conclusion without deciding the merit of the underlying question as to the efficacy of gender identity. This is not to say which way the court should come out on the question, or what the right or wrong decision may be, but that skipping over the issue and assuming its legitimacy, as recognized in the Batchelder dissent, undermines the majority’s rationale. Continue reading →

Remember reading Google’s terms of service? Neither does anyone else, because nobody does. We all click on the “yes” link that we’ve read and agreed to it because otherwise we can’t do whatever it is we were trying do when the TOS link popped up, and it’s not as if reading it opened up the possibility of engaging in negotiation with Google about what was fine and what was not so fine. It was take it or leave it, and leave it meant we didn’t get to use gmail, or whatever feature brought us there.

In legal parlance, one might characterize it as a “contract of adhesion.” Courts, on the other hand, treated it as if it was a legitimate contract, one that people entered into knowingly and willingly. After all, you clicked “yes,” didn’t you? Continue reading →

The event at the Statler was a job fair for ILRies in human resources. For those unfamiliar with Cornell University, the Statler is the home of the hotel school, and ILR stands for Industrial and Labor Relations,* another of Cornell’s colleges. The event, like so many campus events, evoked the outrage of the unduly passionate, who decided it was their duty to disrupt it and prevent it from happening.

Despite whatever one thinks of the intelligence of students at an Ivy League university, the students involved fell short of cognizance when a question was posed to Michael Kotlikoff, interim president and former provost of Cornell University. Continue reading →

There’s a television commercial running in New York about Mondaire Jones, a candidate for Congress, having called for defunding the police. Then came a television commercial wherein Jones replies that he said this when he was young and dumb. Another television commercial  was then broadcast saying that “young” was four years ago as he ran for Congress.

When it was said, it was the position of the progressive orthodoxy, and Jones chose to be an orthodox progressive. Was he really “young and dumb” back then? Perhaps, but then, is it really an excuse that he lacked the intelligence to realize it was a monumentally dumb idea or lacked the guts to reject the orthodoxy? Either way, he took a position that, today, would make him unelectable. What was he thinking back then? He wasn’t. And that’s true of a great many people who embraced the crazy when it was cool to be crazy and now need to wheedle their way out of their idiotic past positions. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: The idea for today’s post came from biochemistry prof Chris Halkides, who raised questions about whether teens are “amusing” themselves to death, or whether the First Amendment protects the right to engage with AI, regardless of outcome.

Fourteen-year-old Sewell Setzer III, a ninth-grader from Orlando, Florida, took his own life. Regardless of anything else, this is a tragedy, and as with most tragedies, people want to deal with the cause and prevent other teens and their families from suffering the same tragedy. But who’s to blame? Continue reading →

As I said when Biden withdrew and Kamala Harris was unceremoniously anointed as the Democratic Party candidate for president, I was open to being persuaded to support her. I watched her, listened to her, considered what she had to say. I continued to watch and listen, hoping that she would present herself in such a way as to give me a reason to vote for her. This continued up to the last Town Hall with Anderson Cooper on CNN.

Harris failed to persuade me to support her. Indeed, I found her canned, non-responses to the most obvious and easiest questions posed, disturbing. I have no idea whether she will support Israel given here inherently conflicted attempt to play both sides. I have no clue whether she will be the progressive she claimed to be in 2019 and for which her facile switcheroo “I’ve learned better” explanation doesn’t cut it for me. Will she be a moderate liberal or a woke progressive? To the extent she provides “hints,” she sometimes suggests the former, other times the latter. What she won’t do, and has studiously avoided doing, is giving a clear, firm answer. Continue reading →

For many years, regular people would ask a common question: How do I get out of jury duty? My pat response was to explain to them how they, if they were on trial, would sincerely hope for regular people to be willing to sit as jurors so they, if they were on trial, would have a shot at a jury chosen from a cross-section of the community. People didn’t like my answer, because jury duty is intrusive, inconvenient and, well, boring, but they generally accepted the premise. Yeah, sucky as jury duty may be, it’s necessary to get as fair a panel as possible.

But much as they may have loathed this civic “right,” they didn’t sign up to be afraid that someone would beat them or protest outside their home or threaten their children on the way to school. Loathing is part of the gig. Fear is not. Continue reading →

The Washington Post announced that it will not make an endorsement in this, and perhaps future, presidential campaigns. An endorsement of Kamala Harris has already been drafted by the editorial board, but upon demand of the paper’s owner, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, it was killed.

So what?

From those on the left supporting Harris, this was an outrage as if this could thwart Democrats’ winning the election, which remains neck in neck despite the fact that the Harris campaign was far better funded than Trump’s and that Harris was running against Trump, a vulgar, lying, narcissistic ignoramus. Continue reading →

There are times when the race of a criminal defendant matters, and can be used as an effective argument in his defense. Unfortunately, race can also come off as a ham-handed and offensive cudgel that backfires badly because of a public defender’s ideological blindness, as was the case when a San Bernardino County public defender engaged a prosecutor in plea negotiations on behalf of his Hispanic client.

According to the deputy district attorney’s declaration, when the deputy public defender failed to obtain a better offer, he “exclaimed ‘I really don’t care.’ [The deputy district attorney] proceeded to ask him what he meant by that statement and [he] stated, ‘read between the lines …, I am a white man, what do I care? It’s not my people we are incarcerating.’ [¶] Continue reading →