In the CNN story about the release of Curtis Crosland, one would get the impression that he had been proven innocent after 30 years in prison for murder in Philadelphia, all because of systemic racism.

[Crosland’s lawyer Claudia] Flores said every level of the criminal justice system is permeated with systemic racism, which contributed to Crosland’s wrongful conviction.

“Most people serving life in prison without parole in Pennsylvania are Black men. Probably most of these police officers involved are white. It’s a system saturated with systemic racism at every step. From the way crimes are investigated, to jury selection, to the fact that most prosecutors and judges are white,” she said.

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If you can’t turn to Harvard Business Review for “management wisdom,” where else can a CEO turn? And HBR delivers, even if the message may not turn out the way the brilliant minds there assume it will. First, the corporate dilemma.

Black employees are exhausted. Over the past year, their cognitive, emotional, and physical resources have been disproportionally depleted due to two deadly and intertwined pandemics: Covid-19 and structural racism. Black people are more likely to lose their jobs and be hospitalized or die from Covid-19, while still facing disproportionate threats of brutalization and death from policing compared to white people. Continue reading →

Much of the law cheaps out by making a test of language and conduct subject to the “reasonable person,” a theoretically objective standard that tests a claim against what some mythical “reasonable person” would think. Its purpose being that the law does not require a person to conduct themselves in such a way as no claim of harm is based on the most the sensibilities of the most “delicate flower.”

There’s always someone who will claim harm, offense, trauma or victimhood over something that most people would shrug off. Call me a dope and I won’t sue. Give me a little shove on the subway and I won’t run to the cops. When I get a papercut, I don’t call Turkewitz to sue. There is an old legal maxim, de minimis non curat lex, the law doesn’t bother with trifles. Reasonable people don’t lose their heads over every petty slight. Continue reading →

It might have helped had the United States Olympic men’s epee team not blown the team competition. They went into the third round up against Japan by seven touches. They ended up losing by six touches, Curtis McDowald giving up eight touches in his final bout, as he stood there, dancing, watching, guaranteeing that the US would lose.

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It was going to be our savior. It was going to remove the human factor, the bias whether explicit or implicit, from the mix. Artificial intelligence would rid us of the inherent racism of humans that we spent decades trying to shake but just never seemed to go away. After all, an algo can’t be racist. An algo has no feelings. An algo can’t love or hate. An algo is just an algo. Algorithms would save us.

Neither “woke” nor “social justice” were in vogue yet, so it would be unfair to characterize its proponents as such. They were against racism in the legal system, as were we all, but they weren’t “anti-racists” as that word is used today to characterize the new racism. That was back when eliminating racism was the goal rather than substituting new racism for old racism. And algos were the answer. Continue reading →

Sheriff Roy Templeton was in a grumpy mood. Of all the weeks for his wife to try and get him to quit coffee, this was the absolute worst. Instead of a delicious hot cup of black coffee, the Sheriff found himself drinking a mushroom extract tea tasting as if it were strained with a smelly athletic sock.

His rumblings over the disgusting brew were interrupted by a knock on his office door. It was his right-hand man, Deputy Ernesto Miranda, holding the one thing the Sheriff wanted more than anything else: a mug of coffee. Continue reading →

National Public Radio, or “npr” as it currently styles itself, was created by an act of Congress in 1967. Its purpose was to provide a channel through which higher culture could be provided the public that might never see daylight otherwise, for it wouldn’t enjoy the popularity of a sitcom or a Big Mac. Its purpose was to “constitute an expression of diversity and excellence” for “all the citizens of the Nation,” to take “creative risks” and “addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities.”

NPR appears to have taken this mission to heart. Continue reading →

It’s a rite of passage for law school graduates to complain how stupid, pointless, expensive and traumatic the bar exam is. And to some extent, they’re not wrong, even if their enlightened self-interest prevents them from understanding its purpose in the bigger picture of finding some mechanism, imperfect and open to grievance as it may be, to determine whether someone has the minimum knowledge to be handed the monopolistic responsibility for other people’s lives and fortunes.

You know all those really bad lawyers? They passed the bar. And if they’re so stupid and passed, you should be able to as well. And if you can’t pass after multiple tries, there is a very strong likelihood that you aren’t the legal genius you, your mother and your friends on social media believe you are. Spare us the myriad excuses for why you didn’t. We’ve heard them all. No lawyer ever won a case by making the best excuses for shitty lawyering. Continue reading →

It’s long been clear that what was once called “Shaken Baby Syndrome,” later renamed “Abusive Head Trauma” to pretend it’s not the same old sham, was nothing more than a phony diagnosis wrapped in pseudo-medical lingo to manufacture a crime when something terrible happened to a baby but no one knew what. After all, it was a baby, so someone must pay, even if no one did anything wrong.

The “syndrome” consisted of three medical criteria, “the trifecta of brain bleeding, swelling, and bleeding behind the eye.” Obviously, someone had to do something bad to a baby to make such horrifying things happen. The problem was that it wasn’t medically true and could just as well not be caused by anyone’s conduct. Continue reading →

It wasn’t my niche of law so I didn’t pay much attention to the caselaw relating to the CDC’s imposition of an eviction moratorium. I didn’t understand how such a thing could fall within the CDC’s authority, and even so, I didn’t understand how a governmental taking of private property could be constitutional. This isn’t to say that renters weren’t in desperate straits, but that doesn’t mean other people’s property was available for the government to give away. Still, there were people far more knowledgeable, and who cared more, about the issue, so I left it off my plate.

Come this Saturday, the moratorium ends. It could be extended, although that just kicks the can down the road. At that point, something is going to happen. At the moment, the federal government has a program to assist renters who can’t afford to pay. Whether it’s adequate or finely tuned is another matter, but not one relevant to this discussion. Continue reading →