There’s an old saying in New York: There’s no justice on the Court of Appeals. It’s a local play on words, as lower court judges are called justices, but at the Court of Appeals, New York’s version of the state supreme court, the robed inhabitants are called Judge.  Less than a month ago, Governor Andy Cuomo nominated the next Chief Judge. It was, at minimum, a surprising choice.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Tuesday nominated Janet DiFiore, an experienced prosecutor and fellow Westchester County resident, to New York’s highest judicial post.

Prosecutors applauded. Others pondered. DiFiore was on the list of seven potential choices offered by the State Commission on Judicial Nominations, but wasn’t thought to have a serious chance.  The New York State Bar Association rated her “qualified,” but not “well qualified.”  Yet, she got the nod. The question of “why” is shrouded in the usual meaningless political nonsense.

“Chief judge is a very, very important position,” the governor said, “and I think she’s going to do an extraordinary job.”

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At a blog called “Jessica’s Thoughts,” a non-lawyer feminist explains why revealing the Planned Parenthood videos aren’t free speech under the First Amendment.  No one cared.  After all, some random person named Jessica doesn’t really matter much. The internet is full of random people writing their deepest thoughts who don’t matter.  That she wasn’t a lawyer reduced her thoughts even further. Seriously, someone with no clue what she’s talking about talks about it nonetheless. Alert the media!

But when her thoughts appear in the media, everything changes.

Jessica Valenti stood atop the Guardian’s big hill and explained her view of free speech law.

The Guardian attributes credibility to Jessica Valenti because she writes.

Jessica Valenti is a columnist and staff writer for Guardian US. She is the author of four books on feminism, politics and culture, and founder of Feministing.com. Her newest book, Sex Object, will be out in 2016.

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When the New York Times article describes the beef in snarky tones, you know that a college gripe has reached a point where absurdity can no longer be ignored.

It is the latest skirmish in a year marked by protests and other actions by college students to challenge the cultural and racial status quo on campuses across America.

The students at the college in Oberlin, Ohio, are accusing the campus dining department and Bon Appétit Management Company, the main dining vendor, of a litany of offenses that range from cultural appropriation to cultural insensitivity.

Oh my, the bành mí uses coleslaw instead of pickled veggies, the General Tso’s chicken is boiled instead of fried, the sushi isn’t fresh and they aren’t serving black students fried chicken.

Instead of a crispy baguette with grilled pork, pate, pickled vegetables and fresh herbs, the sandwich used ciabatta bread, pulled pork and coleslaw. “It was ridiculous,” Nguyen said. “How could they just throw out something completely different and label it as another country’s traditional food?”

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When I went to college, fraternities and sororities provided two things that were considered vital to a college education.  First, they gave students a place to live, which always beat the crap out of not having a place to live in schools where there weren’t enough dorm rooms to house all their students. Second, they threw parties.  Back then, this was considered a good thing by all. Without parties, weekends were a drag. We wanted to have some fun. Everyone, of every gender, color and sexual preference, wanted to have some fun. Parties were fun.

Somewhere along the line, fun went out of fashion.  Well, maybe the kind of fun that could be found at a fraternity party.  Fun morphed into live-twitting a lecture on social justice while in a state of total sobriety. Good times? To each his own, I suppose.

But the University of Alabama has taken the Greek life fun to a new depth of cleanliness that only a grandmother could love.  Quietly, they’ve instituted mandatory drug testing for fraternity members. Continue reading →

If the candidates for the Democratic nomination for the presidency don’t cater to your identitarian interests, you’re going to threaten to sit the election out?

Black millennials are unlike any other generation of black voters the Democratic Party has had to court. Born roughly two decades after the biggest wins of the civil rights movement, we’ve experienced both its benefits and failures. We grew up in neighborhoods and matriculated at schools that were resegregated. And while many of us participated in the election of the nation’s first black president, we’ve witnessed what feels like his inability to adequately serve black Americans in the face of continued economic challenges and systematic police brutality. As a result, we are not satisfied with the Democratic Party’s mere acknowledgment of our issues, nor are we charmed by their willingness to appear in black churches.

Like all other constituents, we need to be targeted and convinced. So far, the candidates have spent far too little time debating the policies that shape racial justice. At the top of 2016 they have a chance, with a debate sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus in which they should focus less on movements of the past and more on the one in front of them.

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New York Assemblyman Chuck Lavine gently alluded to the problem:

Despite the fact that New York is one of the largest states in the country and one of the largest economies in the world, my colleagues and I work shockingly few hours: Next year we are scheduled to spend just 57 days in Albany between Jan. 6 and June 16, when the legislative session ends.

Thirty of those days will go toward completing the state budget, due at the end of March. Those days will be totally consumed with fiscal analysis and negotiation, leaving only 27 days between April 1 and June 16 to consider all other governmental business, including more than 10,000 bills. There’s little chance we’ll get to more than a handful of those.

The ones that rise to the top, actually reach the legislature so that there’s a potential for action, usually have some dead kid’s name attached to them, or the likelihood of getting a front page headline to show what a great job government is doing for us and why you should re-elect your incumbent.

Unsexy laws, critically needed reform, not so much. But then there’s the other problem, that the Democrat-controlled assembly knows that the Republican-controlled senate is going to nix them anyway, so why waste scarce time trying to change something that won’t happen anyway?

Mario’s son, Andy Cuomo, is no stranger to playing the headline game, and so he characterizes his gesture in sufficiently grand terms to garner the benefit. Continue reading →

The dialogue gets a little too peculiar as Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff Murade realizes that he’s been shot.

“Where’s the gun?” Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy Jose Ruiz asked Aguilar seconds after his partner announced he had been shot.

“I don’t have any,” Aguilar said.

“I’ve been shot,” yelled Albert Murade for the second time.

“I didn’t shoot nobody,” responded Aguilar.

In the gestalt of law enforcement, this can’t possibly happen, because if Murade is shot, someone had to shoot him.  The participants are limited to Murade, fellow deputy Ruiz, and the guy they’ve pinned to the ground, Aguilar. It’s just math at this point.  Eliminate the answers that are unacceptable, and you arrive at the only possible conclusion. Continue reading →

It’s been a while since I wrote a post specifically directed at Fault Lines, which has been a source of enormous pride and joy for me, providing a wealth of perspectives on criminal law that extend beyond the usual echo chamber.  Sure, it’s long on the criminal defense perspective, but it include the cop view as well as the prosecution view.

One of the initial gripes about FL was that it was too broad in its inclusiveness, lacking a “voice.” That was one of the ideas, that there are legitimate points of view other than the ones that confirmed your bias.  We hoped to expose people inclined to only read one perspective to others.  Whether we’ve done enough to accomplish this is subject to dispute.

Frankly, we’ve sought greater breadth of perspective, but it’s hard to find. There aren’t a lot of cop-types and prosecution-types whose offices will let them write honestly. And there are other perspectives that are also missing from the mix, one of which is the Biglaw White Collar point of view.

Following the Martin Shkreli indictment last week, Lee Pacchia got a brainstorm.  Why not bring in a Biglaw white collar guy to be interviewed about it.  This offered two new independent prongs to the experiment, video interviews and the Biglaw perspective.  It was a great idea, and Lee went to work. Continue reading →

As Ken White notes, Chicago lawprof Eric Posner has never lost any sleep worrying about the impairment of free speech. While some of us think it matters, Posner shrugs.  It’s not so much that he’s worried about silencing disagreeable ideas, but that he’s a pretty smart guy, kind of elitist, and just doesn’t think a lot of the dumb crap that, in his view, masquerades as free speech on the interwebs is worth protecting.

He’s not alone in flipping off words and ideas that he deems low value.  There is a pretty large swathe of legal academia that has had enough of OPS (other people’s speech), though they don’t always agree on what constitutes speech of such insignificant value that it’s not worthy of protection.  As for who decides what speech isn’t worthy, each prawf is auditioning for the position of Speech Czar, offering their services to the cause.

Posner’s latest audition isn’t grounded in the usual “your speech is nasty and brutish,” or “hurts my feelings,” but rather an old school approach, “protects us from death at the hand of the heathens.”  To this end, he proposed his rule.

Never before in our history have enemies outside the United States been able to propagate genuinely dangerous ideas on American territory in such an effective way—and by this I mean ideas that lead directly to terrorist attacks that kill people. The novelty of this threat calls for new thinking about limits on freedom of speech. Continue reading →

Every once in a while, a story comes along that reflects the diseased perspective of this digital age perfectly.  At a site called Reductress, sent to me by my pal, Stephanie West Allen (I have no clue how she finds these bizarre things, but she does), such a story appeared.  Wait for it…

Woman Uses Law Degree Exclusively for Facebook Arguments

Clickbait? I would guess, but that’s hardly the big issue here. Not only did it appear, but it was proffered as if it was a good thing.

Despite having earned her JD from Columbia Law School in 2012, 32-year-old Jessica Hart has since been using her extensive knowledge of the field exclusively to argue her political ideology in Facebook debates.

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