It’s not as if there was a problem on Staten Island that demanded a fix. Richmond County is the home of police officers, former police officers, their relatives and their next door neighbors, all living atop a garbage dump. Hey, this is America and that’s their choice. They’re allowed.

But when someone decided that Staten Island needed a new courthouse, and that $230 million was a worthy investment because it’s not like roads and bridges needed funding for repairs, it was well worth it to make sure they covered every base possible.  And indeed, they did.

Say you’re one of the 1.2 million New Yorkers with an open warrant for public urination, stoop drinking, or a missed court date of some other kind, and you have the misfortune of being arrested on Staten Island. You spend the night trying to sleep on a filthy cement floor at Central Booking surrounded by strangers and hope you don’t have to make use of the communal toilet with no seat. At some point, a guard calls your name. It’s your turn to meet with your court-appointed lawyer, or, if you’re connected, a private attorney you called.

Oops. I forgot to mention “connected” people on Staten Island. They live there too, although they rarely get pinched for public urination, and never get prosecuted by the Richmond County District Attorney. The SDNY and EDNY have dibs on “connected” people. But I digress. Continue reading →

News broke yesterday, via Ari Melber at MSNBC. Reform is here. Bipartisan reform. But the most important bit of news to foreshadow the details that are to be revealed, perhaps today, is that they have the support of Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Without his support, change is nearly impossible, as no law can get out of committee unless Grassley gives it a kiss. That’s how governance works in America. And, Melber says, Chuck Grassley has given this reform his blessing.

Top Senate Republicans and Democrats have reached a bipartisan deal on criminal justice reform, a breakthrough that has been years in the making.  The proposal, which may be announced as soon as Thursday, has the crucial backing of Sen. Chuck Grassley, the conservative chair of the Judiciary Committee.

Grassley, you see, believes that criminals in prison are criminals who can’t commit crimes, so the drop in crime experienced in America is due to our laws putting far more people in prison for far longer lengths of time, together with the penumbras of coerced cooperation and the rush to plead guilty.  All good for Grassley. Continue reading →

One of the Ivy League schools that participated in the American Association of Universities’ study on campus rape and sexual assault, the University of Pennsylvania, picked up on the discrepancy that advocates of the outcome ignored.

About a third of Penn female undergraduates say they’ve been sexually assaulted, according to the results of the American Association of Universities’ Campus Climate survey, whose results were released on Sept. 21. Specifically, 27 percent of female undergraduates have experienced “nonconsensual penetration or sexual touching involving physical force or incapacitation” since entering college.

But there’s an interesting discrepancy when the statistics are examined more closely: Only 30.7 percent of women who said they were sexually assaulted while at Penn actually reported it by senior year — a small fraction of the total number of women.

At the same time, 58.1 percent of students overall believe that a report will be taken seriously by the administration, raising the question of why Penn students don’t speak up.

Continue reading →

He may be no Ken Jennings, but then, being a Jeopardy! champion eleven times is nothing to sneeze at.  So when Arthur Chu took to writing for TechCrunch after learning that there was no more savory way to monetize his moment of fame, it was worthwhile checking out what a mind filled with trivia had to say.  And Chu did not squander the opportunity.

After launching into a shallow homage to anti-Gamergaters, “[p]erennial troll targets Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn,” Chu eventually got to the point of his cry for attention: End the safe harbor of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  This “loophole,” Chu posits, is how mean people on the internet have been allowed to so deeply hurt the feelings of Sarkeesian and Quinn.  It must die.

Right now you can’t sue digital platforms for enabling harassment on their services, even if they enable harassment through flagrant, willful neglect. If your harasser is able to take fairly basic steps to keep himself anonymous — and if the platform he chooses enables and enforces that anonymity — then there is literally nothing you or the government can do, even if his actions rise to the level of major crimes like attempted murder.

Well, maybe not “attempted murder,” which actually involves the use of a telephone, rather than the internet, and isn’t exactly attempted murder, though SWATTING is a awful thing.  But Chu is on a roll, even if he refuses to put it in the form of a question. Continue reading →

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done a readers mailbag here, mostly because there isn’t much to say about the ten millionth email offering ten free “leads” if only I attend a conference by the city bar where a couple of biglaw washouts will teach me how to become famous on twitter for two ethics credits.

Unless, of course, you think that would be something worthwhile to read about, but I digress. Incoming was this email:

Dear Simple Justice:

I’m a small-firm lawyer with a modest practice in the midwest. Most of my clientele come from referrals, but I do have a modest online presence. Part of this online presence was “claiming” my profile on Avvo. I suppose I did this for fear that someone else might claim it instead, which was the dumbest assumption I’ve ever made as a lawyer.

Five years passed, and the only thing that happened for me at Avvo were modest increases in my score (based on longevity, I presume) and monthly cold calls from individuals suffering from borderline personality disorder. It never put a single additional penny in my pocket. If anything, it robbed me of time I could’ve otherwise spent with my paying clients. Continue reading →

The new term of the Supreme Court begins next Monday, and as usually happens, lawyers and academics will gaze and gush over their pontifications, because it is the Supreme Court, a branch of government unto itself and, if not infallible, definitely final.

But there isn’t much discussion, amidst the gushing and fawning, of the fact that the Supreme Court is doing one exceptionally poor job of things.  As Jeff Gamso graphically shows, they’ve grown lazy.

Now some numbers.

• 142
• 143
• 159
• 143
• 91
• 79
• 85
• 77
• 68

Continue reading →

Contrary to popular belief, the idea that compassion and empathy are missing from police training is hardly a new idea. And, ironically, much of the concern isn’t about police empathy toward others, but the lack of compassion and empathy shown police.  For those inclined toward emotional solutions, the idea that things will get better if we all share a big group hug seems sound.

And yet, what situation could be more universal, more susceptible to compassion and empathy, than a woman being rushed to the hospital to give birth?

The cops who stopped the car, guns drawn, ready to kill, fell a bit short on the empathy meter. Continue reading →

Resident advisers reacted well, to no one’s surprise.

The room erupted in appreciative finger snapping (the new clapping).

Clapping, I’m told, is potentially traumatic, giving rise to needless anxiety.  I thought the solution was jazz hands, but apparently snapping is okay too. Who knew?  Apparently, the incoming crop of RAs at the University of Michigan did, as they sat through a lecture on their duties as “mandatory reporters.”

But in recent years, the job has become much more intense. The federal government has laid out new guidelines about universities’ responsibilities in investigating, addressing and responding to allegations of student sexual misconduct. These measures have helped open a national conversation about sex and sexual assault on campus, and the role of the university in prevention, awareness and disciplinary measures. At the same time, binge-drinking and drug-taking, which often play a role in campus sex and sexual misconduct, continue to escalate.

Incoming college students, fresh the bosom of their parents’ oversight, are about to be given the opportunity to make personal decisions, whether to drink, to take drugs, to have sex.  For many, this is a new freedom, and with new freedom comes new feelings.  Many turn to their RAs for answers, viewing them as a friend, a confidante, who can empathize with their changes in lifestyle and ensuing new emotions.  And RAs are fed the answers from college administrators. Continue reading →

Chain-snatching. When was the last time anyone bemoaned the nightmare of chain-snatching?*  It was a huge crime issue in the 1970s and early 1980s, when crime was “rampant” because of junkies needing their next fix. Of course, it seems almost quaint today, when discussion centers on killing people with bullets. Much like the 1950s obsession with World War II gravity knives in a world where guns are ubiquitous.

In a New York Times op-ed, NYU urban studies professor Michael Fortner proffers the “real” roots of the 70s drug laws, starting with the dreaded Rockefeller Drug Laws, based on the theory that if draconian penalties are applied to possession and sale of drugs, people will stop using and selling them. The theory seemed reasonable. It failed miserably, unless you were looking for a job as a screw, in which case it was a huge success.

Fortner dredges up a modern view of history as a justification for the antidote to the Black Lives Matter movement. Continue reading →

As a freshman at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, I was required to take Labor History. My professor, Roger Keeran (who was also my advisor) was a bit of an anarcho-syndicalist and a huge fan of the Wobblies.  It cost him tenure.

I liked Prof. Keeran a lot, though I disagreed with him about pretty much everything. Except the music. The IWW had the best music of any labor movement. I still have a cassette tape of Wobbly songs he made for the class.  But his politics was off the charts, and served to turn many of my fellow frosh into passionate pro-union advocates.

When I was there, the only source of news was the Cornell Daily Sun. A few years after I graduated, the Cornell Review was founded, with some undergrad named Ann Coulter as its editor. Despite this, it offered an alternate voice, and still does. It’s introduction to Cornell’s new president, Elizabeth Garrett, made me think that Roger might want to reapply for his old job.

“We must heed the call to be radical and progressive.”

Continue reading →