In an otherwise thoughtful opinion by Judge Ricardo Martinez in the Western District of Washington, the court addressed an Everett city ordinance designed to prohibit “bikini barista bars,” a thing that I didn’t know existed until today, and to establish a dress code for “quick service facilities.”

Plaintiffs Jovanna Edge and others are or were employed by “bikini barista stands.” Plaintiffs challenge the constitutionality of two ordinances enacted by the City of Everett, Ordinance No. 3559-17 (the “Lewd Conduct Ordinance”) and Ordinance No. 3560-17 (the “Dress Code Ordinance”). The Lewd Conduct Ordinance expanded the definition of a lewd act to include an exposure of “more than one-half of the part of the female breast located below the top of the areola,” “the genitals, anus, bottom one-half of the anal cleft, or any portion of the areola or nipple of the female breast” and created the new crime of Facilitating Lewd Conduct. Continue reading →

It would be 25 years, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote.

The court validated affirmative action in a foundational decision, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which involved the University of Michigan Law School. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the court, emphasized racial diversity’s importance in elite academic environments.

Nevertheless, she also stated that “race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time.” Toward the opinion’s end, she noted that 25 years had elapsed since Justice Lewis Powell provided the decisive fifth vote to uphold affirmative action in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978. Then, in Grutter’s most arresting feature, she concluded, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.”

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For the past few months, criminal law reform activists have been losing their minds over the fact that crime has become a huge issue in the midterm elections for three reasons.

First, while violent crime rates have increased over some of the lowest crime years in decades, they remain far lower than they were in the bad old days of the 1990’s crack epidemic.

Second, violent crime rates are no higher in blue states than red, and in most cases, they are substantially higher in red states like Oklahoma than blue like New York and California. Continue reading →

About a decade ago, one of the huge issues in law was that there are huge underserved communities who needed legal help but were unable to afford a lawyer. Whether they couldn’t afford legal counsel or simply preferred to spend their scarce resources elsewhere was one issue, but the fact remained that we’ve built a society of legal landmines that few non-lawyers can traverse safely.

And unless you’re lucky enough to have a lawyer on retainer or one in the family, people are left to their own devices. As experience has shown, the internet isn’t a substitute for sound legal advice, and too often people believe they “know” the law to their enormous detriment. No, filing a UCC 1-308 does not protect you from being sued and cops do not have to give you Miranda warnings or your case gets dismissed. Continue reading →

There have been numerous studies reflecting problems within the medical profession, from racist beliefs that black people have a higher pain threshold than white people to sexist assumptions that women complaining of physical maladies are suffering instead from psychological issues. And there is an undeniable history of physicians engaged in experimentation involving black people like the Tuskegee syphilis study which lasted until 1972, well within memory of many of us alive today.

The medical profession has not always done itself proud in its treatment of minorities and women, and has much to consider about how a profession putatively dedicated to healing could be so blindly harmful. Continue reading →

There have been, and always will be, a handful of people who believe with all their heart and soul that the world is coming to an end. Eventually, someone will nail it, but in the meantime, there will be a lot of people who are determined to re-enact Chicken Little with the utmost gusto and sincerity. And they may not be entirely wrong in their cause or assessment, even if actions are guided by an existentialism that they can see but others can’t. And that makes them crazy.

As a rule, I tend to think sabotage is most effective when it is precise and gritty. When activists from the same group smashed gas stations in April this year, they hit the nail on the head. Gasoline, unlike a van Gogh painting, is a fuel of global warming. There is a whole planetary layer of stations, pipelines, platforms, derricks, terminals, mines and shafts that must be shut down to save humanity and other life-forms. When governments refuse to undertake this work, it is up to the rest of us to initiate it. That is the rationale for sabotage: to aim straight for the bags of coal.

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Sheriff Roy woke the morning of October 16 with a cold sweat across his brow.

Trying to piece together the previous evening left a pit of sickness in his stomach. He could see it all again now. The scooped up fumble into the touchdown that had Vols fans apoplectic. Then the missed field goal by Reichert. Then that son of a bitch Chase McGrath, clad in orange and white, barely making a game winning field goal to make the Third Saturday in October a win for the University of Tennessee Volunteers for the first time in 16 years. Continue reading →

As the star of House of Cards, Kevin Spacey’s career was on fire until Anthony Rapp, another actor whose career was not, hopped on the #MeToo train to accuse Spacey of “the most traumatic event” of his life when he was 14.

The New York natives were both in Toronto working, and Manheim had invited Rapp and his boyfriend over to partake in the beloved theater geek ritual. But for the first time, Rapp — a working actor since he was 9 years old, and most famously part of the original cast of the musical Rent — felt something he’d never experienced before with the Tonys: dread. Continue reading →

There are black holes on the internet where few of us normies tread, And no doubt if we  unwittingly stumbled into 4chan, our reaction would be shock, as the unpleasantness of certain unfiltered humanity would make us question how our species survived. And to be fair to New York Attorney General Letitia James, it can well be a festering, puss-filled sore that any decent person would want cured.

But as much as we may hope and pray such black holes didn’t exist, and that our fellow humans wouldn’t be this way, can it be stopped? Tish James calls for criminalizing the broadcasting and distribution of mass murderers on social media, and civil liability for the platforms that fail to prevent it from happening. Continue reading →

What’s most remarkable about Wayne Hsiung’s description of what he did is that he doesn’t wrap it up in a slurry of empty rhetoric. He basically concedes that he, along with a group of people who shared his views of animal rights, planned and then committed crimes.

We sneaked into the farm one night in March 2017. Inside, we found and documented sick and underweight piglets. One of them could not walk properly or reach food because of an infected wound to her foot, according to a veterinarian who testified on our behalf…Given their conditions, both piglets were likely to be killed and potentially tossed into a landfill outside of Circle Four Farms, in which millions of pounds of dead pigs and other waste are discarded every year. Continue reading →