When Cristian Farias twitted about his excellent post, detailing Rochelle Garza’s representation of Jane Doe, he used the phrase “held the hand of a once-pregnant undocumented teen in Texas.” This reminded Blake Feldman of what Bronx Defenders founder Robin Steinberg told him when he was an intern.

I’ll never forget Robin Steinberg telling me & 50 other interns that we don’t have to be “hand holders” or “trial jocks.” We can be both https://t.co/eRC2KwFDts

— Blake Feldman (@bfeldman89) November 4, 2017

Robin takes a holistic view of the relationship between criminal defense lawyers and their clients, where hand-holding is just as much of the job as trying their case. Years ago, this wouldn’t require any further discussion, as it was understood that part of the job included the emotional management of a client. Today, it’s not so clear. Continue reading →

At PrawfsBlawg, Howard Wasserman points to the Atlantic’s post about the Reedies Against Racism protesting the required course, Humanities 110.

At Reed College, a small liberal-arts school in Portland, Oregon, a 39-year-old Saturday Night Live skit recently caused an uproar over cultural appropriation. In the classic Steve Martin skit, he performs a goofy song, “King Tut,” meant to satirize a Tutankhamun exhibit touring the U.S. and to criticize the commercialization of Egyptian culture. You could say that his critique is weak; that his humor is lame; that his dance moves are unintentionally offensive or downright racist. All of that, and more, was debated in a humanities course at Reed.

But many students found the video so egregious that they opposed its very presence in class. “That’s like somebody … making a song just littered with the n-word everywhere,” a member of Reedies Against Racism (RAR) told the student newspaper when asked about Martin’s performance. She told me more: The Egyptian garb of the backup dancers and singers—many of whom are African American—“is racist as well. The gold face of the saxophone dancer leaving its tomb is an exhibition of blackface.”

Continue reading →

When the tragedy is perpetrated by a bullet, the cries for gun control ring out. When the tragedy is caused by a truck, what can you say?

In the coming days, politicians will try to convince you that what happened on the West Side Highway in Manhattan this week was an issue of terrorism, immigration, or religion. But just like the plague of mass shootings is a gun problem, the thousands of people killed by cars as they walk our streets every year is a car problem.

The obsession with calling a tragedy “terrorism,” with its nouveau definition of being whatever the unduly passionate say it is, contributes nothing. All of the factors that were involved are in play, but whether a change to any one of them would have thwarted the tragedy, or will prevent any future tragedy, is obscured by the screaming politics that drown out the mourners’ dirge.

But rarely does anyone blame the vehicle, even though trucks and cars kill tons of people. Continue reading →

Regardless of your views on abortion, there just wasn’t a hard legal issue that a pregnant, under-age undocumented immigrant on American soil had a right to one. You don’t have to like the rights we afford people here, but them’s the breaks. And so the government sticking its nose into Rochelle Garza’s case was, itself, bizarre and shocking.

Garza, in her capacity as Doe’s court-ordered guardian, is the named plaintiff in Garza v. Hargan, a class-action challenge to what the ACLU calls the Trump administration’s exercise of a “veto power over unaccompanied immigrant minors’ access to abortion in violation of their Fifth Amendment rights,” among other constitutional claims.

The public only learned of Doe’s plight when it made national headlines last month, but by then she had been waiting for nearly a month — since Garza and another local attorney, Marie Christine Cortez, convinced a Texas judge that it was in their client’s “best interest” to let her decide for herself that an abortion was right for her.“

The administration stuck its nose in this mess because their proxy at HHS, Scott Lloyd, who is charged with caring for unaccompanied undocumented minors, is against abortion, and uses his office to convince his charges not to get one. This alone wouldn’t be a bad thing, a nice chat to make sure Doe appreciated her choice and was sure of it. But when she stuck to her choice, the government decided that this was a mountain it was prepared to die on. And die it did. Continue reading →

Michelle Obama raised two lovely daughters, so naturally that qualifies her to opine about raising boys.

“It’s powerful to have strong men but what does that strength mean?” asked Obama. “Does it mean respect? Does it mean responsibility? Does it mean compassion? Or are we protecting our men too much so that they feel a little entitled and a little, you know, self-righteous sometimes?”

“And that’s kind of on us, too, as women and mothers,” Obama added, “as we nurture men and push girls to be perfect.”

What does that “strength mean”? Better question is what does any of that mean*, as it’s a string of words that suggests most of us have grossly overestimated Michelle Obama’s ability to be cogent. Since a guy is a misogynist if he points out that a woman is irrational, women get away with being irrational because no one can say so. Except someone who doesn’t care about being called names. This makes no sense at all. Continue reading →

There are dots that people just don’t seem to connect anymore. And there are beliefs so deeply embedded that people just can’t see beyond them. Neither of these things stopped billionaire Joe Ricketts from shuttering DNAinfo and the Gothamist a week after they went union, and people are furious.

A week ago, reporters and editors in the combined newsroom of DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of New York City’s leading digital purveyors of local news, celebrated victory in their vote to join a union.

On Thursday, they lost their jobs, as Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade who owned the sites, shut them down.

The law entitles employees to unionize. It also allows the owner to close the business. Ricketts explains why. Continue reading →

Poor Lenore Skenazy and Jonathan Haidt. They put a great deal of work into their post at Reason about the harm done to young people by bubblewrapping them from harm, whether physical or emotional, whether real or imagined. Despite the best of intentions, we’ve created the Fragile Generation.

We’ve had the best of intentions, of course. But efforts to protect our children may be backfiring. When we raise kids unaccustomed to facing anything on their own, including risk, failure, and hurt feelings, our society and even our economy are threatened. Yet modern child-rearing practices and laws seem all but designed to cultivate this lack of preparedness. There’s the fear that everything children see, do, eat, hear, and lick could hurt them. And there’s a newer belief that has been spreading through higher education that words and ideas themselves can be traumatizing.

How did we come to think a generation of kids can’t handle the basic challenges of growing up?

But life comes at you fast. Continue reading →

While rampant anti-Semitism in Mahwah, New Jersey, has brought the state’s attorney general down on the locals, who have no issue with the good Jews but only with the bad ones, Councilman George Ervin runs for election on the Confederate Towel Party line.

So is this just an anomaly in the Garden State? No. No it’s not. Continue reading →

Until he was nominated for a seat on the Eighth Circuit, I never heard of Steve Grasz. From what Lambda Legal says, he’s pretty much the embodiment of everything they despise in a judge.

Since 2015, Steven Grasz has served on the Board of the Nebraska Family Alliance.

• He is currently its Board Director.
• The Nebraska Family Alliance is a religious-based organization affiliated with Focus on the Family that has advocated extensively against LGBT rights.
• Steven Grasz’s family connections to the anti-LGBT Nebraska Family Alliance run deep. His son, Nate Grasz, currently serves as Director of Policy for the organization.

Not their policy positions? Not mine either, but then, I’m not president (or even a measly senator), so my policy positions have no bearing on who is nominated for a circuit judgeship. What is clear is that his personal political views on the issue of sexual orientation go past conservative and into reactionary territory. Continue reading →

On October 18, 2017, the CATO Institute held a day-long program on “Criminal Justice at a Crossroads.” The program consisted of various panels discussing a variety of issues regarding the criminal law.

Our host, Scott Greenfield, sat on one of the CATO panels with Judge Jed Rakoff, the eminent Senior Judge from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The third panelist was Suja Thomas, Professor of Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a scholar devoted to studying the American jury system. The panel discussion was entitled, “The Defendant in Court.”

The primary discussion that ensued dealt with the dearth of criminal jury trials and the large number of plea bargains. Everyone seemed to agree that more criminal jury trials would be a good thing.[i] But then the discussion turned to plea bargains. Continue reading →