In a comment to my last post on what to do about Judge Alex Kozinski, with particular emphasis on calls from academia for his immediate impeachment and removal from the bench, Judge Richard Kopf provided an overview of previous judicial impeachments.

Judge Kopf concluded that, bad as the allegations then-known about Judge Kozinski may be, they did not rise to the level of misconduct reflected in the other judges who had been removed following impeachment. Mind you, there are also judges who prevailed after impeachment, including Wild Bill Douglas who was twice targeted for impeachment.

Unsurprisingly, this caught the attention of UC/Irvine lawprof Rick Hasen, who has been something of a stalker of Judge Kopf’s over the years. Continue reading →

Dating is really hard, especially when you’re a criminal defense lawyer. We’re usually busy saving lives and keeping people out of jail, so there’s precious little time to find the man/woman/non-binary-gender-fluid person of your dreams.

People outside the trenches are having problems with dating too. It’s such a problem that people are writing advice articles about it from all perspectives. Don’t fret! It’s time criminal defense lawyers got their own dating tips. After all, we’re called counselors for a reason.

1) Do you pay your bills on time or up front and in full? Continue reading →

Chief Judge Sidney Thomas has announced that a formal inquiry has been initiated into allegations of misconduct by Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski.

“In the past, when incidents of alleged misconduct have been reported in an accredited media publication, we have identified a complaint and initiated an inquiry,” wrote Chief Judge Sidney Thomas in an order issued Thursday afternoon.

The order indicated that Thomas was initiating a complaint himself based on a Dec. 8 report from The Washington Post that reported that six former clerks or externs at the court accused Kozinski of asking them to view pornography or subjected them to inappropriate comments. More women have since come forward with similar allegations.

C.J. Thomas has asked Chief Justice Roberts to transfer the complaint to another circuit “to ensure confidence in the impartiality” of the inquiry. This is both huge and proper. A wealth of allegations have been made, raising grave questions as to Judge Kozinski’s behavior, judgment and “handling” of the power and authority he wielded. Continue reading →

With a few minor shifts of the narrative, he might have been the hero of a sad story at the top of a deep dive into what it’s like to be fat, gay and alone in a place not known for its tolerance of these attributes. You would have cried, gushed, emoted for his welfare.

Instead, he’s a filthy pedophile who should be pilloried before prison, followed by a life of ostracism and disgust. Woke is such an ephemeral thing.

A 22-year-old college student at Ohio’s Youngstown State University was arrested after falling for a fictional 15-year-old boy created by local cops.

Austintown police officers used a phony dating-app profile for someone purporting to be an adult to lure in the student earlier this month. After chatting, the catfish “revealed” he was 15 years old. The college student, A.G. (not his full name), indicated he didn’t have a problem with his age. The conversation eventually turned sexual and A.G. sent the faux boy some nude photos of himself.

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When Eugene Volokh took his conspiracy behind enemy lines, I called it a “seismic shift” in the blawgosphere.

Eugene Volokh explained that his blawg, The Volokh Conspiracy, has “partnered” with the Washington Post.  Some took the news with a quiet, abiding shrug.

I did not. I lamented what would become of the new, monetized, officialized, once-gold standard of the blawgosphere.

Which means, for those of us who do not have a .edu or .gov email, were regular readers of both posts and comments, and don’t plan to pay the Washington Post, the Volokh Conspiracy is gone.

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Appellate Squawk raised the first alarm.

James Levine is one of the greatest living conductors and musicians of our time. We know this because the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, which usually gets up and leaves as soon as they’ve played the last note, would stay in the pit to join in the applause when Maestro Levine was the conductor, even back in the days before he had to conduct from a wheelchair.

You may not have heard of James Levine. He’s no Meghan Trainor or Chance the Rapper.

Now he’s been destroyed by accusations from four middle-aged males claiming that he ruined their lives by masturbating them decades ago when they were 16 and 17 years old. The Met responded by summarily canceling all his scheduled appearances.

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Did Trump call New York’s junior senator a whore?

Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office “begging” for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2017

I saw the words, “would do anything for them.” It wasn’t outside the pale that this could be a snide sexual insinuation, but then, Kirsten Gillibrand was a politician. New York politicians have always gone hat in hand to Manhattan’s wealthy begging for bucks, seeking their benevolence. In return, some give up their virtue. Oops, I did it again. Continue reading →

Give Brown University credit. It’s putting its alumni money where its feelz are.

Amid America’s colossal student debt problem, an Ivy League school is providing an example of how institutions can help.

Beginning next school year, Brown University will eliminate all student loans in its undergraduate financial aid packages, replacing them with scholarships. Following a $30 million fundraising effort launched in September, Brown administrators announced this week that 2,087 donors contributed toward the goal, and that the school—located in Providence, Rhode Island—plans to raise $90 million more to sustain the scholarship giving.

Mind you, the student debt problem arises, in large part, because the cost of education is out of control, The cost of attending Brown for the 2017-18 school year is calculated at $71,050. There may be a lot of parents of Brown students who would like to pay that, if only they made that much money in any year of their life. It’s not as if the hand of God reached down and etched the tuition number in stone. That’s what Brown decided was the right amount to charge. Continue reading →

There are two things that judges and jurors absolutely adore: cool names for pedestrian things and the reduction of complex, difficult scientific and mathematical concepts into something so simple even a third-grader could get it. Meet the “likelihood ratio,” coming to a courtroom near you.

Two experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are calling into question a method of presenting evidence in courtrooms, arguing that it risks allowing personal preference to creep into expert testimony and potentially distorts evidence for a jury.

The method involves the use of Likelihood Ratio (LR), a statistical tool that gives experts a shorthand way to communicate their assessment of how strongly forensic evidence, such as a fingerprint or DNA sample, can be tied to a suspect. In essence, LR allows a forensics expert to boil down a potentially complicated set of circumstances into a number—providing a pathway for experts to concisely express their conclusions based on a logical and coherent framework. LR’s proponents say it is appropriate for courtroom use; some even argue that it is the only appropriate method by which an expert should explain evidence to jurors or attorneys.

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The brave voices who now admit they knew all about Judge Kozinski’s porn peccadilloes, but only spoke out after Heidi Bond was brave enough to take the lead and they could follow behind her in safety, talk about the whisper network. There were whispers of risk and impropriety, so those who sought and obtained clerkships with Koz knew what they were getting into.

Penn State lawprof Dara Purvis says the Legal Academy should not allow the women who took the risk to do so again. Rather, they should blackball judges who are reputed to be a danger to students.

If there are credible reports that a judge’s chambers are not safe for our graduates, professors should band together, refuse to send our students to that judge and publicly explain why.

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