My daughter got the email around 11:00 am yesterday. Don’t show up on Monday as school will be closed. The plan had been to show up Monday and Tuesday, which had already been designated as “professional development” days to prepare for the likelihood of school closings. The idea, last week, was that schools needed to figure out how they were going to deal with closing, whether they could teach remotely and how to accomplish it. For public school students, the issues are very different than college or graduate school. Think first graders.

But then, a decision was made, and that was that.

“I understand the gravity of this action and what it means for every community in our county, as well as for the families and caretakers of our students, especially health care workers with kids in school,” Nassau County Executive Laura Curran said.
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Where some see pain, others see opportunity. Matt and Noah Colvin saw the latter and acted upon it.

On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.

Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, “it was crazy money.” To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic.

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Despite having watched Outbreak and Contagion, I remain no expert in epidemiology, and so I leave it to more knowledgeable people to make predictions about what COVID-19 will bring to our life and how we should address it. My general view is to hope for the best but prepare for the worst, but that’s unhelpful platitudinous nonsense when there are hard choices to be made. Some counsel panic while others argue denial. Neither helps.

Should things deteriorate as some anticipate, there will be hard choices to be made. This isn’t a new concept. When Obamacare was on the docket in the halcyon days of 2009, its opponents created the phrase “death panels*” to manipulate people’s fears, that people’s lives would be left in the hands of bureaucrats to decide if their lives were “worthy of saving.” Much as the phrase was intended as a rhetorical device to create fear, it wasn’t entirely wrong. The allocation of scarce resources will always require decisions to be made to provide, or withhold, the resource. Continue reading →

Ever watch a panel discussion where the range of views runs from bad to worse, a fast death to brutal slow death, as if it reflected the full gamut of thought on a subject, as long as you prefer your gamuts to invariably lead to the only possible acceptable outcome?

What if that was the case on New York’s oddly-named highest court, the Court of Appeals? Appellate Squawk is not amused.

Apropos of #MeToo, the Court of Appeals has finally eliminated all that silly frou-fra about proof and decided that in SORA hearings, accusations alone are clear and convincing evidence. According to the majority, if it’s on a piece of paper from a law enforcement agency, that’s good enough. Continue reading →

What happened in a bar between a couple drunken people ordinarily doesn’t make the front page. But then, it doesn’t ordinarily involve a lawyer and a former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney either. Eli Cherkasky was both, and was convicted after a non-jury trial for his actions.

Eli Karl Cherkasky was convicted in 2015 of “criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation and assault in the third degree and harassment in the second degree,” the court recounted. He had been “drinking heavily for many hours” when he got into a verbal altercation with a woman that ended up getting physical, it said.

According to Cherkasky, the woman hit him in the eye with her arm [which was sufficiently severe to cause him a black eye] and then threw a beer at him. Continue reading →

Dear SJ Readers:

After numerous discussions with my mean-ass editor this week, it is with a heavy heart that I  am forced to announce that the Friday Funny will be suspended, effective immediately, for at least seven days due to coronavirus concerns.

“But Chris,” you might say, “this is just a blog post chock full of your one-liners, silly zingers, and semi-fictional stories you write each week to make us smile!” I know, I know. This move is not taken lightly and out of an abundance of caution to keep you, the SJ reader, as healthy as possible. Continue reading →

A few months earlier, a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals panel in an opinion by Judge Alice Batchelder held that a female accuser did not have a cause of action against the college for allowing the accused to remain on campus. Or to put it bluntly, not suspending or expelling the male student did not allow the female student to claim she was harassed by having to suffer his mere presence on campus.

In short, we hold that a student-victim plaintiff must plead, and ultimately prove, that the school had actual knowledge of actionable sexual harassment and that the school’s deliberate indifference to it resulted in further actionable sexual harassment against the student-victim, which caused the Title IX injuries. A student-victim’s subjective dissatisfaction with the school’s response is immaterial to whether the school’s response caused the claimed Title IX violation.

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Arguments over the seriousness of COVID-19 should be behind us. Whether millions contract it, even die from it, will be a matter how it’s dealt with, and that will only be known after the fact. Ironically, if we deal with it well, or at least better than expected, it will appear that it was less of a threat than many thought, even though it would have been every bit as dangerous had we dealt with it less well. Go figure.

In any event, among the many places where the normalcy of operations creates needless risk are courts and jails. Some have already taken measures to limit or shut down in anticipation of “penal distancing.” Many have not. It’s time to deal with the reality that the legal system has a host of reasons, some good, some not so good, to do things the way it does. But this changes the balance: death from disease is not the punishment. Continue reading →

Some might take away from Joe Biden’s win in the primaries in Michigan and Mississippi that the Bern has lost the vote of blue collar workers and black people. They may not be happy with the world, but socialism isn’t the solution. Some might take away from Elizabeth Warren’s dropping out that that her intersectional woke agenda had the complete support of Twitter social justice warriors and no one else.

But that’s not Jamelle Bouie’s takeaway.

There’s every chance for the progressive left to make this happen on a national scale. It looks like Biden will secure the nomination, but Sanders won the policy argument. Democrats in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina support Medicare for All; Democrats in California, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee and Virginia support free college. And the future of the Democratic Party — the youngest voters — are with Sanders. Continue reading →

There isn’t much the radical right and left share except methods, which was made glaringly clear when the Department of Justice invited no less a knowledgeable scholar on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act than, wait for it, Mary Anne Franks. It was a smart move by DoJ, as who would be happier to play the “carceral fool” than Franks, together with her sidekick, Carrie Goldberg?

The Justice Department panelists included lawyer Carrie Goldberg, who started a high-profile fight with Grindr over a horrific harassment campaign; University of Miami professor Mary Anne Franks, who helped draft the first “revenge porn” law; and Yiota Souras of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. All laid out — sometimes in graphic detail — ways that abusive partners and sexual predators have weaponized the web.

This happened in mid-February, and with a speed unheard of in government movement, the DoJ has miraculously come up with its solutions! Continue reading →