At PrawfsBlawg, Tracy Hresko Pearl makes a bold prediction: fully driverless cars are coming to U.S. roads, and they’ll be arriving much sooner than you might think: probably within five years. There remains a laundry list of technical problems that need to be sorted out, not the least of which is the assurance that the computer doing the driving doesn’t crash. There are moral issues to be decided, such as the Trolley Problem, or who found the parking space first.

But assuming, arguendo, technology can figure out a way to get past its problems, including the fact that cars aren’t iPhones, meant to be thrown away every two years when shinier new hardware comes out, or what to do with the hundreds of thousands of displaced workers who can’t buy a driverless car because they have no jobs, there remains an additional problem.

As the conversation wound down, however, he noted that, despite everything I had said, he would always love driving.  He asked whether, once fully driverless cars are widely available, he would still be able to drive his own car.  I quickly reassured him he would always be able to do so, but as we parted ways, I questioned what I had just told him.  If autonomous vehicle advocates are correct about the dramatic safety gains fully driverless cars stand to offer, might the government eventually outlaw human-driven cars on public roads?

To the extent the introduction of driverless cars reflects an overarching concern for safety and efficiency, because everybody really wants to sit in a car driven at speeds that would make grandma smile, the sacrifice would be visceral. We would be reduced to mediocrity in the name of safety. Continue reading →

It would not be unfair to guess that more than a million words have been murdered in the name of “consent” over the past couple years. But then, that’s when it relates to sex and the litany of things that can interfere with enthusiastic, if not aggressive, desire for the 50 shades of, I dunno, maybe yes, maybe no, I’ll decide tomorrow, but for now, YES, YES, YES!!! What about the children?

Consent by a child is guided the same, regardless of whether it’s consent to have sex, to eat one’s beans or to a cop’s sweet requests to search.

Officers Biandudi and Wyle were patrolling a Pinellas County neighborhood in a marked police car. They saw twelve-year-old F.C. and his friend, Pedro, playing in the grassy common area of their mobile home park. Officer Biandudi testified that the boys looked like they were just playing around and having fun. He saw nothing alarming. Nevertheless, he pulled over and stopped the patrol car. He and Officer Wyle exited the car. They were uniformed and armed. They approached the boys and asked if they could search them. The boys consented. The officers found small amounts of marijuana on each boy.

That’s right, the old “playing around and having fun” excuse. Street cops have a sixth sense about these things, knowing how scheming 12-year-old boys use “playing around and having fun” to throw cops off their trail to conceal their reefer madness. Continue reading →

In the aftermath of a disappointing outcome, a Harvard Law grad turned marketeer created a Facebook group for disaffected lawyers. The groups was named, unironically, Lawyers of the Left. Brian Tannebaum shared their sentiments, and tried to share a zombie post. It was “moderated” into oblivion, censored for not meeting “community standards,” causing Brian to walk away with a parting thought.

Some complained about the group’s name, because they didn’t view themselves as being “of the left,” but rather mainstream believers in the righteousness of social justice. They saw nothing peculiar about one of the group’s first acts being censorship. Silencing people is a fixture of those who rely solely on vague feelings, shared among others who have similar feelings, but can’t put them into rational words. If they have no meaningful words, neither will anyone else to drag them down from their perch of righteousness with the tyranny of reason.

While real lawyers were busy representing clients, passionate lawyers were reinventing legal ethics at the American Bar Association meeting last September to create their own, private Utopia, because lawyers should be leaders in social justice. The rule, which extended basic discrimination law into heretofore virgin territories, unanimously passed.

It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to: Continue reading →

Have you been blocked by the twitter account @realDonaldTrump? That’s quite an accomplishment really, given that he’s got over 15 million followers. Congrats. You stood out enough from the millions of people who twit nasty stuff at a guy who gets a lot of hate. He may be thin skinned. He may be cynically diabolical, if you want to give him that much credit. But achievement unlocked.

But what about when he gets the keys to the @POTUS twitter account? Sure, the account only has 12 million followers, so it’s possible he won’t want to take the step down, but still. Should POTUS be allowed to block you? This is the question posed by Room For Debate.

On one side Elizabeth Joh, a crim and con law prof at Cal Davis. On the other is Danielle Citron, the Maryland lawprof who has dedicated her scholarship toward justifying internet censorship in the name of women’s feelings. Joh begins the debate:

Should a president’s Twitter account be permitted to block anyone, including journalists? Blocking is a Twitter feature designed to help its users address well-documented harassment and abuse. If a user blocks you, you can’t see that person’s tweets, nor can you “retweet” them in order to comment on them. While blocking is a tool to fight harassment, a user can block a follower for any reason. (Blocking does not make it impossible to view a person’s tweets, although it is much more difficult to do so.)

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On the one hand, Donald Trump’s captured “private” chat with Billy somebody was disgusting. If misogyny alone was enough to preclude a person from being elected president, that would have been the end of things. It wasn’t. The difference in what was said, that he actually engaged in the conduct spoken, is that those actions would be illegal. On the other hand, even that wasn’t enough to stop voters from rejecting Hillary Clinton.

Rather than get the message that America doesn’t buy the hysterical hyperbole, Vanderbilt philosophy prof Kelly Oliver doubles down.  It’s not just misogyny, but violence.

Well before the election of Donald J. Trump, the mainstreaming of misogyny during his campaign caused justified outrage and fear. Now, with the alarming reality of his coming presidency and his choices for a number of cabinet posts, that fear has been multiplied among the nation’s vulnerable, and those who stand to defend their most basic rights.

Of course the problem of misogyny and violence against women existed long before this election cycle. But the immediate danger that comes with raising an unrepentant misogynist to the nation’s highest office is emboldenment; the implicit condoning of degrading or violent behavior against women, and the diminished fear of punishment from authorities.

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While everyone, myself included, has some fun with the pettiness of the president-elect’s reaction to an uncivil curtain call, a wonkish concern goes relatively unnoticed.

Friday evening, the Washington Post reported that about 100 foreign diplomats gathered at President-elect Donald Trump’s hotel in Washington, DC to “to sip Trump-branded champagne, dine on sliders and hear a sales pitch about the U.S. president-elect’s newest hotel.” The tour included a look at the hotel’s $20,000 a night “town house” suite. The Post also quoted some of the diplomats saying they intended to stay at the hotel in order to ingratiate themselves to the incoming president.

What? You didn’t know the guy had hotels? Of course you did. But you assumed that he would at least have the good sense not to engage in the transparent conflict of interest of using them as an opportunity for foreign governments to curry his favor.

Donald Trump has decided not to put his businesses in a blind trust, a mechanism by which his assets would be managed by people with no direct connection to the President. Instead, he has asked his children to continue to manage the global operation, which raises the possibility of an appearance of a conflict of interest.

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With each new rumor, screams were heard. Rudy Giuliani as Attorney General? As Secretary of State? Chris Christie as White House doorman? The runt of the Sessions litter? Steve Bannon as anything? How could this be? They’re awful, terrible, racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, white supremacists+. How was it possible that the president-elect chose these horrible people?

Early signs of what the Trump administration may look like: A man associated with white supremacy and misogyny will be White House chief strategist; a man rejected for a judgeship because of alleged racism will be attorney general; and an Islamophobe who has taken money from Moscow will be national security adviser.

No, this is not satire.

I’ve repeatedly noted that my side lost this election, that elections have consequences, and that President-Elect Donald Trump should be given a chance. He seems intent on blowing that chance.

Given a chance to do what, exactly? Make Lena Dunham Secretary of Education? Put Lady Gaga in charge of wardrobe? It’s not that the people being chosen, or whispered about, or rumored to be something, aren’t the people I would choose if I was president, but I’m not president. Neither are you. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Long time reader and commenter, Patrick Maupin, provides an answer to a question that so many have asked, “what can I do?” He saw the opportunity to be heard and did something. It worked, so I asked him to write a post about it. Thank you, Pat.

Back in July, I received a pre-recorded call on my cellphone. It was a breathless, chirpy female voice, probably Rachel from cardholder service’s little sister:

Hi! We haven’t heard from you after the recent disaster in your area! Call the Wells Fargo Disaster Recovery Team at 1-888-818-9147 if you need financial assistance or need help rebuilding!

In order to look outside and verify that the sun was still shining and the birds were still singing, I had to use my window — the walls and roof of my domicile seemed quite intact, so I wasn’t exactly sure what the disaster was, or what I was supposed to be rebuilding. The whole spiel sounded as bad (or as good) as the IRS calls, so I duly wrote down the number in preparation for explaining to Wells Fargo that they should warn their customers about this scam. Continue reading →

Mark Lilla, who gets a paycheck for, of all things, teaching humanities at Columbia University, took his career into his hands by writing an op-ed entitled The End of Identity Liberalism. Oh boy.

But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

While I would take issue with his characterization of liberalism, which I view as a conflation of liberalism with progressivism, that’s just my pet peeve. I’m big on definitions, which have gone out of fashion among intellectuals. But putting aside the labels, he makes a point that must have been painful:

One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end.

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It’s given the name “probable cause” even though it’s neither probable nor cause. The law likes to do that, because it lets good people sleep at night believing that there is a viable system in place that both protects them from the bad guys and preserves their freedom.  Yay, law!

But probable cause is a rhetorical trick. Doggie sniffs, which are basically coin tosses with cute puppies who, when ordered, will bite your head off, continue to impose their tyranny on the public because judges aren’t cat people. When there’s no doggie to be had, what’s a cop to do?

When officers tested the powder using a $2 narcotics identification kit, it was identified as a controlled substance.

The only problem with the $2 testing kit, available at a K-Mart near you, is that it’s prone to false results. This isn’t a secret. So why use it? Did you not read that it only costs $2? The government has a duty to protect the public fisc. That’s your taxpayer money they’re spending, you know. And besides, they’re out there doing god’s work nailing criminals, and of all the things not worthy of your hard-earned tax dollars, who is worse than criminals? Continue reading →