The story told by United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz was that Dr. David Dao was “disruptive and belligerent.” He Ignored the existence of a video that proved the lie, the words used to rationalize calling the police to remove a passenger who had the temerity to remain in the seat he paid for after he was ordered to leave, as the randomly chosen passenger, which put into action the event that followed.

Subsequent discussion ranged from the entirely irrelevant media smearing of Dao, because they could and lacked the depth of understanding why they shouldn’t, to the abuse of the scenario as an excuse to further the social justice agenda of “privilege.” The guy just wanted to get where he was going. The guy bought a plane ticket and, like anyone else on the plane, took his seat. That’s about as far as any reasonable person’s duty to the airline goes. Continue reading →

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he was ending the Forensic Science Commission.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions will end a Justice Department partnership with independent scientists to raise forensic science standards and has suspended an expanded review of FBI testimony across several techniques that have come under question, saying a new strategy will be set by an in-house team of law enforcement advisers.

In a statement Monday, Sessions said he would not renew the National Commission on Forensic Science, a roughly 30-member advisory panel of scientists, judges, crime lab leaders, prosecutors and defense lawyers chartered by the Obama administration in 2013.

What a terrible thing to do, given the impact of junk science on wrongful convictions. Who doesn’t pine for the old days now, when the Department of Justice heeded the voices of scientists telling them that all their cool forensics were bullshit. Just total bullshit.  Continue reading →

His Election Law blog should be the go-to resource for honest, authoritative information as to the law in the aftermath of an election of a president that causes so many people to feel, write, believe, so many monumentally nonsensical things about the law. You know, the opportunity not to make people stupider. That’s pretty much what intellectual integrity is all about, why academic freedom exists.

Rick Hasen just couldn’t. He may not be as rabidly partisan as the once-respected Larry Tribe, but he makes his sympathies clear. The problem is that his blog, rather than provide insight, goes down the lazy route of merely linking to other people’s writings. One might hope a scholar would add some critical analysis, something resembling thought, to justify the murder of bandwidth. If only.

But Hasen actually wrote something which, despite being noted on his blog, appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

Even before the Senate confirmed Neil Gorsuch as a justice of the Supreme Court, and before it “nuked” the filibuster for nominees, the Trump administration and conservatives were already plotting to fill the next vacancy. Indeed, they have made overtures to swing Justice Anthony M. Kennedy to get him to feel comfortable with retirement. If Kennedy goes, or if a liberal justice gets sick or dies, Democrats have few levers to stop Republicans from confirming a nominee even more conservative than Gorsuch. The future, then, holds a Supreme Court where Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is the swing vote — a scary eventuality for progressives.

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The last time I read an article by feminist-with-a-law-degree, Jill Filipovic, it was a listicle in Cosmo entitled, 9 Reasons Constitutional Originalism Is Bullsh*t. It wasn’t that I was an originalist. It was that her article made people stupider, as it was complete, utter nonsense. She distorted, well, lied unless she was really stupid enough not to realize how far from the truth she was, to advocate against then-Judge Gorsuch.

But there were others who were far more deeply concerned with originalism to take her to task, and there were other stories that grabbed me harder. So I let it go. It’s not as if her name hasn’t appeared in the annals of SJ before, That she’s a cartoon character of feminist progressive sentience is beyond doubt. That anyone lets her on their soapbox is telling. It’s like asking Ann Coulter to be fair.

Yet, whom did the New York Times turn to for its review of KC Johnson’s and Stuart Taylor’s The Campus Rape Frenzy? Continue reading →

Over the past few years, definitions have fallen out of favor, replaced by Humpty-Dumptyisms that serve their purpose in twitter-level discussion. But the vagaries that make total sense in the context of the echo chamber have yet to be accepted in court. As Eric Goldman discusses, there is a definitional void that needs fillin’.

This is an interesting opinion from the Texas Supreme Court on citing Wikipedia as a dictionary. The underlying case involves an article in D Magazine titled “The Park Cities Welfare Queen.” The article purports to show that the plaintiff, Rosenthal, “has figured out how to get food stamps while living in the lap of luxury.” After publication, evidence emerged that the plaintiff has not committed welfare fraud. She sued the magazine for defamation.

So what is a “Welfare Queen”? Much as it has become a common slur, roundly understood as such, is there an “official” definition? If so, who gets to decide what it is?

The appeals court denied the magazine’s anti-SLAPP motion in part because it held the term “Welfare Queen,” as informed by the Wikipedia entry, could be defamatory. The Texas Supreme Court affirms the anti-SLAPP denial, but it also criticizes the appeals court for not sufficiently examining the entire article’s gist. Along the way, the court opines on the credibility and validity of Wikipedia as a dictionary. TL;DR = the Supreme Court says don’t treat Wikipedia like a dictionary.

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Did you know John Hanson of Maryland was the first American president? Well, maybe not exactly, since he was under the Articles of Confederation. You knew about them, right? Sure, you’re lawyers, you’re interested and knowledgeable. Of course you did. But your children might not. As George Santayana famously said, “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Harvard has decided to eliminate the pilgrims from its school song.

For decades, Harvard students and alumni have sung an alma mater that calls on them to be heralds of light and bearers of love “till the stock of the Puritans die.”

University officials teach the refrain to freshmen on arrival and sing it again when the students graduate years later.

But this week, a university steeped in tradition said the time had come for a change.

To affirm Harvard’s commitment to inclusion in a time when college campuses are routinely finding themselves at the center of national debates on race and identity, university officials said they are seeking suggested rewrites of that disquieting final line.

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The sound of echoes.

Over the past two months, as the nation has watched a new president drop one depth charge after another — banning Muslim refugees; ordering the demolition of broadly accepted rules protecting air, water and American consumers; flaunting conflict-of-interest and other ethical standards honored by his predecessors in office — Americans have looked to the courts, the one aspirationally nonpartisan branch of government left to them, to stop him.

Yet of late their faith in the judiciary, including the Supreme Court, the system’s ultimate arbiter, has been flagging.

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Long after the rest of the policing world accepted the premise that body cams weren’t going away, and might actually help police when they were in the right, New York Police Department persisted in its fight against them. It’s not just that it’s as big as a medium-sized country’s army, but that they were scared to death of what it would show about the job. With good reason. Stop and frisk, anyone?

So then-Southern District Judge Shira Scheindlin ordered a pilot program of 1000 body cams. That was in 2013, before Bill de Blasio was elected mayor so he (she, xe, they, it?) could turn NYC into a progressive mecca, and before BdB got his butt kicked by the police union. Almost four years later, New York City is finally discovering what police across the country have known for years, that body cams exist. Right on top of things, guys.

But like all good bureaucracies, NYPD has to have rules and regs, and they take time to establish since no excellent bureaucracy isn’t required to reinvent the wheel as if everybody hadn’t been using body cams already. And the rules they created are, as one might guess, peculiar to the New York experience.

The first “big” question is when will cops be required to turn their body cams on, since having them doesn’t actually serve much of a purpose if they’re turned off. Continue reading →

Nobody gave a damn about the deportations. There were no news reports, no hand-wringing editorials, no protests. When a father who had lived here for decades, arriving as an infant, was taken from his family, his children, and sent to a country he never knew, no one cared. When it happened hundreds of thousands of times, it was just a statistic.

But now, it’s all the rage to care about deportations. Having magically discovered it happens, the deeply passionate demand it be fixed, and so the guy who desperately wants the votes of the deeply passionate will do what he must to prove his loyalty to their feelz by diverting tax monies from things necessary to the progressive palliative of the moment.

The 2018 New York State budget included a grant of $4 million to significantly expand the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (NYIFUP), a groundbreaking public defense program for immigrants facing deportation that was launched in New York City in 2013.

New York has become the first state to ensure that no immigrant will be detained and permanently separated from his or her family solely because of the inability to afford a lawyer.

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Law is hard, but not that hard. After three years of study at an accredited law school, it’s not unreasonable to believe that one would have the ability to pass the bar exam. And yet, many don’t.

Graduates who fail face losing jobs already started, not getting jobs that were promised, debt, embarrassment and more debt. Simply taking the exam again costs more than $700, and add to that the cost of further bar review classes, living expenses in the meantime and income lost. All told, thousands more dollars may be piled onto law school debt that is increasingly well above $100,000.

Most of those who fail their first attempt eventually pass the bar on the second or third try. After each attempt, however, these graduates do not learn to be better lawyers, they simply learn how to beat the test. And the damage done from the initial failure can be great. In addition to the financial costs, they may find themselves timed out of promising professional opportunities that never reappear. Finally, there are the emotional and psychological costs that are possibly the most overwhelming consequence of even one failed attempt.

This is all true, a veritable laundry list of terribles that come from failing the bar exam. But notably, it’s all one-sided, the narrative of the failed. As Dean of UC Hastings School of Law, David Faigman is likely smart enough to have deliberately tried to fool readers by this narrative. But it’s in his best interest as a law school dean to try to game the discussion. Continue reading →