An ordinary sentencing takes about 15 minutes, maybe half an hour. But the sentencing of Jussie Smollett lasted five hours, which was par for the course in a case that put together so much of what’s so very wrong about the current climate of criminal law.

At the end of a hearing that lasted about five hours, Judge James B. Linn excoriated Mr. Smollett from the bench, saying that he had concluded that the actor had premeditated the hoax and that despite his and his family’s admirable past work in social justice, he had an arrogant, selfish side and had planned the stunt because he “craved the attention.” Continue reading →

When first mention of Emma Camp’s NYT op-ed appeared here, it seemed to raise an issue so uncontroversial as to require no defense. After all, would anyone question that the Overton Window on college campuses has narrowed to a slit, where challenges to progressive orthodoxy were treated with good faith disagreement? Well, the answer was apparently, “you bet your ass,” and I failed to see it coming.

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It was a stirring and bold announcement by Martin May, director of the Cardiff Philharmonic.

The Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra has removed Tchaikovsky from its programme of its upcoming concert ‘in light of the recent Russian invasion’.

Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture was due to be included in the orchestra’s upcoming all-Tchaikovsky concert at St David’s Hall on 18 March, but it was considered by the orchestra ‘to be inappropriate at this time’.

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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 →