It’s been a while since I’ve had the pleasure to welcome someone new to the blawgosphere. Meet Just Plead the Fifth, a Millennial lawyer’s mix of images, quotes, platitudes and commentary. It’s not about marketing. In fact, you’ll be hard pressed to figure out who’s behind the blawg. That leaves content.

It’s opening salvo is an old question, how the young lawyer deals with the unfortunate reality that they are, if nothing else, inexperienced.

You shake his hand. You introduce yourself. You explain confidentiality. You explain attorney-client privilege. You then ask him if he has any questions.

“Are you good?”

Continue reading →

At Techdirt, Cathy Gellis provides an exceptionally thorough parsing of the decision awarding $6.7 million to graffiti artists who painted on another person’s building, and whose “art” was ultimately destroyed when the building owner decided it was time to put his property to a higher use.

The facts in this case are basically this: the owner of a run-down, formerly industrial building in a run-down neighborhood aspired to do something to redevelop his property, but it would be a few years before the time would be right. So in the meantime he let some graffiti artists use the building for their aerosol paintings.

The building became known as 5Pointz, and the artwork on it soon began to attract attention. The neighborhood also began to change, and with the improvement the prospects for redeveloping the property into residences became more promising. From the outset everyone knew that redevelopment would happen eventually, and that it would put an end to the arrangement since the redevelopment would likely necessitate tearing down the building, and with it the art on the walls. Continue reading →

President Trump called former Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson, who served as the School Resource Officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas school, a “coward.” Much as, this time, it may be hard to feel badly about Trump’s noise, it raises a question. Had Peterson done what his job demanded, it would have violated the First Rule of Policing.

As Nikolas Cruz was shooting, Peterson was cowering. Gun drawn, outside the school, hiding behind a car. And he was not alone.

Scot Peterson, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school resource officer who declined to confront alleged mass killer Nikolas Cruz in the midst of his attack, wasn’t alone in remaining safely away from the massacre: three Broward County sheriff’s deputies waited outside the school as well. Continue reading →

When people learn that it’s not merely lawful, but encouraged, for special agents to lie to people in order to “catch” them or get them to admit to a crime, they are offended. When you add to the mix that it’s a crime for a person to lie to them, they get outraged. How is it possible that this is allowed?

Welcome to criminal law.

Professor Stephen Carter and Ken White (of the Popehat website) have written two columns raising a point that has bothered me for a long time.

That can happen, you know. They write. Someone gets bothered. Continue reading →

A snarky, pointed retort to the monumentally idiotic notion of arming teachers was that Philandro Castile was a black teacher with a gun, and look what happened to him. And look how the NRA didn’t give a damn. Except Castile worked in a school kitchen and wasn’t a teacher, not that this detail mattered to the 140,000 people who “liked” it.

There was an argument to be made that there are black teachers who could very well find themselves in Philandro Castile’s situation, with the same result. But there is no argument to be made that he was a “legally licensed” teacher, as George Ciccariello-Maher wrote. It was, in a word, false. It was within throwing distance of true, but it was not true.

The Intercept, which bills itself as doing “fearless, adversarial journalism,” has started posting articles by Shaun King. His latest appears under the headline The NCAA Says Student-Athletes Shouldn’t Be Paid Because the 13th Amendment Allows Unpaid Prison Labor. It’s far better written than his other writing, which is a testament to good editing at the Intercept, but otherwise, it’s pure King. Continue reading →

Robby Soave at Reason explains the impetus for a proposed Kansas bill to decriminalize sex.

A Kansas state legislator has proposed a bill that would decriminalize consensual sexual contact between kids under the age of 14—a much-needed update to the state’s draconian laws, which currently criminalize sexual contact up to age 16.

Democratic Rep. Dennis Highberger’s bill, HB 2738, would remove the criminal penalties associated with consensual sexual acts committed between kids ages 11 to 14. “Children of these ages are together in junior high school, and any sexual experimentation between them would be much better handled by parents, teachers and counselors than by the juvenile justice system,” said Highberger, according to The Wichita Eagle.

Most parents aren’t pushing their kids to go out and engage in sexual adventures. But then, they were young once, too. That first kiss. The nervousness when you first held hands or put your arm around your date’s shoulders at the movies. We know that kids do such things, and where it leads. And that it’s all part of growing up. Continue reading →

It started as a twitstorm on Valentine’s Day, and was catchy enough to make it into the New York Times.

Deeper even than the gun problem is this: boys are broken.

— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) February 15, 2018

It was the catchphrase, “boys are broken,” that did the trick for Michael Ian Black, a comedian (his twitter bio says “nine years in the NFL. Two rings) and actor.

America’s boys are broken. And it’s killing us.

That’s a rather broad assertion. It came after the Parkland High School shooting, and rather than go the “guns are the problem” route that many took, he made a hard left into toxic masculinity. Continue reading →

It could not have been issued at a worse time, when the rawness of the slaughter of 17 high school students remained fresh and brutal. And there could be no vehicle less demanding than a dissent to a denial of certiorari. But Justice Clarence Thomas’ 14-pages appeared nonetheless, without any other justice signing on to his polemic.

On the other hand, given the nature of his opinion, it could only appear in a dissent to a denial of cert. That was part of the problem against which he argued. And what use is life tenure if not to express views that the other eight would not? That it came at such a bad time was either a product of exceptional tone-deafness or couldn’t be helped. The denial issued inopportunely, leaving Thomas with the option of dissenting then or saying nothing.

Sometimes saying nothing is the better choice. It’s not the choice Thomas made.

California has a ten-day waiting period for the purchase of guns. The justification is rational. Continue reading →

The most dangerous time on the street is at the end of a shift. Sure, they could do the buy and bust at the beginning of the shift and then spend the rest of their time processing the perps, filling out the reports, waiting for the prints to come back, but that’s not how they roll.

Accusations about the practice — known as “collars for dollars” — have dogged the department for decades. The Mollen Commission’s 1994 report about police corruption, which used the term, detailed the various and devious overtime schemes that have been used.

There are myriad ways in which cops game the system for overtime. The problem is that it means money in their pockets, but it lacks the sizzle of a dead body of an innocent person caught on video.  Continue reading →

At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf uses the Bari Weiss twitter attack as a vehicle to challenge the value of “call-out culture,” the social justice reaction to whatever is perceived as a violation of their orthodoxy.

The writer Mark Joseph Stern, who had the last reaction, argued that “the original tweet—while not maliciously racist by any means—perpetuated the real and serious problem of the ‘perpetual foreigner’ stereotype that dogs so many Asian-Americans.” Agree or disagree, anyone can understand that critique. What I don’t understand—what I’d still like to understand—is the approach taken by the many people who treated the tweet as if it were malicious; or who attacked or “dragged” Weiss; or treated her with fierce hostility. I want to know if and why they believe their approach can plausibly advance social justice.

Was Conor’s question, what purpose is served by attacking Bari Weiss even if one exists in the same neighborhood as Stern where everything must be scrutinized, twisted, rationalized, to find its inherent if unintentional heresy, itself a wrong? Enter Vox co-founder, Matty Yglesias. Continue reading →