For some of us, mere competent customer service is such a stunning improvement from the norm that we applaud it. After all, how often are we able to get anything accomplished, no less done right the first time without insufferable fuss? But for an employee with a form of Tourtette Sydrome, coprolalia, performing the job isn’t enough but for his disability. And in Cooper v. Dolgencorp, LLC, the Sixth Circuit held that’s not discrimination.

Cameron Cooper has a disability that causes him to involuntarily utter racist and profane words. Even with the disability, Cooper (like many adults in America) needs to work to earn an income. Fortunately, the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) provides a remedy for an employee whose employer discriminates against him for having a disability. But to access the remedy, the employee must be able to perform the functions of his job, with or without help (an accommodation) from his employer. Continue reading →

The Ohio law made sense when enacted and it still makes sense. The problem isn’t with the law, but with the cultural shift that entitled some people, a tiny cohort, to use their name of choice and condemns their real name as “deadnaming.” There was no such thing as “deadnaming” back then.

The law, which was passed in 1995 to prevent deception, requires candidates who have changed names in the last five years to list previous names on election petitions. It has become an obstacle for Mr. Faber, who has not legally changed his name, and the three other transgender people seeking a seat in Ohio’s Legislature this year.

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It’s a truism in law that a right without a remedy is worthless. It’s cool to say “you have a right to speak,” but if you’re precluded from speaking, whether because of cancellation, disruption or pressure of being shunned, it’s an empty right. The American Bar Association, flexing the one power that it oddly still possesses, accreditation of law schools, decided to take a stand for free speech in law schools, in ironic conflict with its prior stands against free speech in Model Rule 8(4)(g) for lawyers, by approving Standard 208.

A law school shall adopt, publish, and adhere to written policies that encourage and support the free expression of ideas. A law school’s free expression policies must: Continue reading →

Back during the days of Fault Lines, my mean-ass editor tasked me weekly with compiling a post called the “Friday Fail.” It was a short post detailing what I thought were the biggest criminal justice failures of the week. We let readers vote on what they considered the worst in an informal poll for audience interaction. It was a fun little bit.

And we’re kind of bringing it back today because hoo boy do I have a doozy for you. This is probably the biggest fail I’ve seen since I started writing about America’s criminal justice system. Continue reading →

Anthony Rupp isn’t going to get rich off the case. Buffalo police officer Todd McAlister isn’t going to go broke. How Rupp’s lawyers will get paid would be anybody’s guess, but for the fact that Tony Rupp happens to be the founder of the law firm, Rupp Pfalzgraf, and, well, doesn’t have to take it.

McAlister picked the wrong guy to violate his constitutional rights when he informed Rupp that he could be arrested for yelling at the cop to “put your lights on, asshole,” after almost hitting two women crossing the street as the cruiser without lights almost ran them down. Instead of saying “sorry,” and turning on his lights, McAlister informed the law firm’s name partner and civil rights lawyer, “You know you can be arrested for that.” As Tim Cushing at Techdirt explained, Rupp was not amused. Continue reading →

For Trump supporters, it happened when Trump was first impeached for his “perfect” telephone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, 2019, where he  suggested that $400 million in military aid to Ukraine would be conditioned on Zelensky alleging that Joe Biden and his son Hunter were under investigation for corruption. Not only did they believe the conspiracy theory against Biden, but they believed that Trump did nothing wrong by using foreign aid to get to what they believed to be the truth.

The difference was that Trump was both exceeding his authority, as the aid had already been approved by Congress, and extorting Zelensky and Ukraine for his political benefit, regardless of whether his conspiracy theories were true, which they were not. Is abuse of authority and extortion a “high crime and misdemeanor”? At the very least, it was plausibly criminal. While impeachment may have been a stretch too far for Trump’s supporters, at least it related to the purpose for which impeachment exists. Continue reading →

On February 13, 2007, I was hanging around the house and getting in Dr. SJ’s way with whatever she was doing. To be rid of me, she suggested I start a blog, knowing how much I liked to write. So I did. Simple Justice was born.

As of today, SJ has 13,336 published posts, of which about 12,960 are mine. There are 300 drafts in the hopper, posts that I wrote (or at least started to write) and then decided not to post. There are 14,960,345 unique visitors and 170,781 comments after moving from my original platform at GoDaddy to WordPress when the original platform was discontinued in 2013. How many visitors and comments before the switch are lost to the ether. Continue reading →

The characterization of Joe Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory” in Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report was intentionally damning. There were a great many other ways to express his point, that Biden would have made a sympathetic witness had he testified in a prosecution, without calling him a doddering and demented old man. While it wasn’t Hur’s job or inclination to be kind to Biden, it also wasn’t his job to do as much political damage as possible while declining to prosecute, which was never seriously on the table given Biden’s cooperation with the FBI and his immediate return of all classified documents.

But what isn’t well understood is that Hur, as special counsel, had a duty to explain his decision not to prosecute to the attorney general in a report. Continue reading →

Wherever the interest began, I wasn’t there. But over the past few weeks, there have been more than a few people talking about polyamory. Before that, it had been a niche concern, the sort of thing that young people trying to navigate the shoals of marriage and sexuality latched onto to make their confusion appear more intellectual and less banal. But it has now hit the New York Times, elevating polyamory into a real thing that some might take seriously.

It’s hard to miss the growing interest these days in polyamory and ethical non-monogamy, the term du jour for having multiple romantic relationships. The new year kicked off with a slew of articles on the subject from a number of publications that shed light on the practice and lifestyle. Continue reading →

Without reading the complaint itself, it’s hard to determine whether Northern District of Florida Judge Kent Wetherell was being fair or harsh with pro se plaintiff lawyer Allan Kassenoff. That a lawyer proceeded pro se is a red flag, as with anyone else. That the lawyer’s complaint was 110 pages was another red flag, although it’s not all that unusual in the age of computers for complaints to run needlessly long, just like judicial opinions.

But what plaintiff was fighting was not merely the battle to win a defamation case against a tiktokker who called upon his minions to destroy Kassenoff by bombarding his law firm, Greenberg Traurig, until they capitulated and fired him, but the ruination of him and his children on social media to millions. Continue reading →