Daniel Muessig was sentenced to 60 months in prison for selling weed. It wasn’t a wrongful conviction. He did it. He admitted it during his plea allocution. And unlike others, he’s got no excuse for not knowing better. He was a lawyer. Not just a lawyer but a criminal defense lawyer who got caught.

Muessig was swept up in a far-reaching federal investigation into trafficking of cocaine and heroin when agents discovered more than 400 pounds of marijuana during a raid on “stash house” in Squirrel Hill on May 24, 2019. (Muessig admits to dealing marijuana but says he has never sold or taken harder drugs.) He escaped from the raid on foot and lived in limbo for more than two years. Gradually, his fear of going to prison gave way to hope; he and his wife, Laura Boyarsky, began the process of adopting a child.
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What Yale did to Saifullah Khan after his swift acquittal on a rape charge is a fiasco of the highest order, and so he pursued a defamation action against his pseudonymous accuser for having given false testimony against him at Yale’s Title IX hearing. The district court dismissed, holding that the accuser was entitled to absolute quasi-judicial immunity for  her testimony.

The issue has been raised and decided in other circuits based on the state caselaw as to what constitutes a quasi-judicial proceeding, and what level of immunity for testimony should apply. The Second Circuit certified questions to the Supreme Court of Connecticut to decide. Continue reading →

Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Wooden v. United States was unanimous, though it didn’t get there through the ordinary route of agreement.

KAGAN, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAVANAUGH, JJ., joined, and in which THOMAS, ALITO, and BARRETT, JJ., joined as to all but Part II–B. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed a concurring opinion. KAVANAUGH, J., filed a concurring opinion. BARRETT, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment, in which THOMAS, J., joined. GORSUCH, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in which SOTOMAYOR, J., joined as to Parts II, III, and IV.

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The University of Massachusetts Boston last crafted its mission statement in 2010. It was what one might expect of a university, the usual research and education stuff, “inquiry, creativity and discovery,” with the requisite nod to diversity, because it is, after all, a university.

Its first sentence identifies UMass Boston as “a public research university with a dynamic culture of teaching and learning, and a special commitment to urban and global engagement.” It celebrates the school’s “vibrant, multi-cultural educational environment” and “broadly diverse campus community.” And it commits UMass Boston to “creating new knowledge while serving the public good of our city, our commonwealth, our nation, and our world.”

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The wife of an old friend of mine is a librarian, which was always good for librarian jokes when we went out to dinner. But she wasn’t joking when she vented about trying to find new novels worthy of shelf space. Almost every book, she explained, is about some coming of age of a marginalized person, whether ethnic or sexual, with intimate detail, little plot and poorly written. And the baby librarians loved them, not because they were good literature, but because they were “correct” literature.

She had nothing against novels telling the stories of marginalized people, although she did have a problem with bad writing. What troubled her was that there was little else being published. The book prize lists were barren of anything else. How many books about teenaged gender nonbinary Norwegian one-legged food-insecure unibrow women with a gerbil can you read? Continue reading →

At Volokh Conspiracy, Josh Blackman posts a letter sent to the students at UC Hastings law school following the Ilya Shapiro debacle.

Dear Concerned Students,

We write in our individual capacity and not on behalf of the institution to explain where the Administration’s community email, The College is Committed to Academic Freedom and Free Speech, does not represent our priorities or articulate our commitments to providing you an equitable learning environment. Continue reading →

The New York County District Attorney’s office was the last bastion of the Old Guard of the City. Between Frank Hogan and Robert Morgenthau, they owned the office for 65 years. They were icons. And when Morgy was finally ready to get out of this chair, he passed it to the son of Cyrus Vance, someone he would invite for dinner.

It all changed when Vance, reading the room, decided that it was time to walk away and put the office at 1 Hogan Place, ironically the only address on Hogan Place, into the hands of another, and unlike his iconic predecessor, he had no one to anoint for the position, mostly because it was no longer his to pass over to the next generation of the Old Guard. Continue reading →

There’s no style book dictating what words to use, what letters to capitalize, at SJ. But I’ve pondered whether to capitalize the “B” in the word “black,” not so much because I thought it was something of substance that helped anyone, but because the failure to do so suggested that maybe I was sending a message by not capitalizing it that I did not care about racial equality, about racism, about black people.

Fortunately, John McWhorter struggled with a similar question and wrote about it. Continue reading →

It’s not as if ex-Hialeah police officer Jesús Menocal Jr. got a complete walk, as the deal cut required him to plead to three federal misdemeanors for violating the constitutional rights of his victims. He had to give up his police license and promise never be a cop again, which some might argue is part of the punishment although others might point out merely removes the authority that enabled him to commit the crimes to which he almost pleaded guilty. What crimes?

During a Friday afternoon hearing before U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, the fired officer pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor charges accusing him of depriving three of his victims of their constitutional rights when he forced them to touch his penis, perform oral sex or have intercourse, according to federal court records. The three incidents were part of a series of complaints dating back to 2014 and 2015 that included alleged oral sex involving a 14-year-old girl.

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We’re at the start of another “history” month by the woke calendar, and I’m not having any of it. No, here at the Friday Funny for a few weeks we’re going to highlight the stories of some of my favorite people in the world: con artists.

Look, it was either this or you got a post this week about the history of people shoving gerbils up their asses, okay?* So bear with me. You’ll thank me later. Continue reading →