Newberry College in Columbia, South Carolina, will offer a major in social media.

The college, for its part, explains that this is one of the first interdisciplinary social media majors. It says it blends graphic design, communications, business, marketing, psychology, and statistics, and that social media is such a vital part of marketing and other business habits that it’ll be a valuable qualification with a likely career path ahead of it. One way students will learn mobile marketing, the college says (via Fox 57), is by designing QR codes, “those little black and white scanners you use with your smartphone.” Apparently this is the “hot new way” to do marketing with mobile phones.

So…last time we looked, the QR code was frowned upon by almost everyone, everywhere (though it does linger in the U.S.). And surely one worry is that by the time students graduate in 2017, with the course starting in 2013, the rocket-speed development of social media itself will have outpaced their education.

No, this isn’t from the Onion, but from educators who are trying to become relevant in a young person’s world by getting ahead of the curve, even though there is neither a chance of success nor a need to turn culture into coursework, and cater to the interests of children.

What teenager wouldn’t be enticed by a major in Facebook with a minor in Pinterest?  Of course, if they offered this a decade ago, the major would have been Netscape and they would be working the counter at Dairy Queen today, if they were lucky.

What type of educator panders to youth culture in this way?  All types, actually.

Having taken lawprofs to task for the  inexcusable failure rate on the bar exam, it’s worthwhile to consider what has gone terribly wrong in the classroom. It’s not that lawprofs aren’t smart enough to adequately educate law students, though their interest in pedagogy as compared to indulgent scholarship is in question. But, from what I know of law professors in general, they want to teach students well, even if it’s not their primary focus.

So if it isn’t their capability to teach or knowledge of the law, then what?

My surmise is that a core problem is that lawprofs have allowed the inmates to take over the asylum. Law students today have a very different perspective of their relative worth. They believe their opinions are important. Stemming from an excess of unwarranted self-esteem and entitlement, borne of years of coddling, they view themselves as peers of their professors.

They have questions, and demand not only prompt answers, but answers that validate them. The will not tolerate the Socratic Method, as it belittles them and reflects a lack of respect.  There are no longer wrong answers in law school, but just answers not as right as they could have been. And when a student disagrees, asserting that his answer is every bit as good as the one the professor “suggests,” they have no qualms about informing the professor of her error.

What does not happen anymore is a professor informing a law student that they are wrong. Dead, completely wrong. Totally wrong. There is no Kingsfield to hand Hart a dime.  Any lawprof foolish enough to do so would learn that he was “condescending and disrespectful.”

And why, an old lawyer wonders, would any lawprof care what a law student thought of him? The dark side of empiricism, evaluations. I asked a lawprof for whom I have enormous respect what drives lawprofs to give a damn about evaluations. This is what I was told:

Deans probably give popular teachers a bit more money in salary, although it’s hard to know for sure and varies Dean to Dean. Bad teaching evals can make a lateral move less likely and tenure harder, too, although that’s probably only if the evaluations are really bad.   But I suspect the real reason professors care is that everyone wants to be popular, and to feel like their work is valued.  And for professors, evaluations are like their grades, and professors tend to be Type A people who are competitive and want to get high grades.

This is a shocking and deeply disturbing explanation.  A law professor cannot, by definition, be “condescending” to a law student. There is a reason why one is the teacher and the other the student. The teacher possesses superior knowledge. The student is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with the teacher’s knowledge.  At least that was the old concept, before they needed the permission and approval of students to teach them.

Plus, law students tend to be a pretty nice people, and it’s natural to want the nice people you work with to like you back.

Law professors do not “work with” law students. They teach law students. Or at least they used to, and many of us thought that was still the job.

Even though practicing lawyers may not know what happens in the classroom these days, we can see the attitude on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc., where law students are so bold as to school us on the law. One of my favorite examples was on Twitter, where a law student would twit her opinions on the law to me, which were ignorant and juvenile, and I told her so and explained why.  She was outraged that I didn’t respect her views, at my snide, arrogant and condescending attitude.

I responded that the fact that I acknowledged her existence at all was a demonstration of respect far beyond what she deserved. In what universe does a law student get to demand the attention of an experienced lawyer?  In her universe, I was told. In her universe, she was entitled to demand my attention and respect, and my failure to comply with her demands, and in the manner she demanded, made me unworthy.

Dear Lawprofs:  Take back your classroom.  These are not your peers, your colleagues. Perhaps one day they will be, but not now. When you seek their approval, you forfeit your authority to teach them.  If they are wrong, someone must tell them they are wrong. If they lack the capacity to become a lawyer, someone must give them a dime and tell them to call their mother.

But they won’t like you?  Too bad. Your job is not to be liked, but to teach blobs of clay to become lawyers. You do not need any more permission than the fact they sit in your classroom.  They disagree with what you say? Too bad. They are students. They know nothing. That’s why they’re there.  Their feelings will be hurt if you don’t apologize for anything less than glowing validation of their every thought, and they will take it out on you in their evaluations?

That’s why they pay you the big bucks.

The expectation of students is that you will honor and respect them, no matter what.  They can be wrong, yet you will find something positive to say because they cannot handle the slightest hint of criticism. They are fragile. They are delicate. They are special.  And since you want them to like you, you pander to their demands.

As the bar exam results prove, this hasn’t helped them to meet the minimal level of competency to become a lawyer. As unemployment rates prove, they are about to learn what real disappointment means. And as their skill in the representation of clients proves, real life will not be nearly as kind to their fragile self-esteem as you were.

You have done them no favors. You have not done your job. Perhaps they are now your dearest pals, but they didn’t need a friend. They needed a teacher.

As I pay attention to what lawprofs say and do, I also pay attention to what law students and new lawyers say and do. Some are remarkably astute. Some are mind-bogglingly misguided. They hate me for telling them when they are wrong. They call me snide, arrogant and condescending. And I don’t give a damn. They are not my peers, but children in dire need of guidance that no one else is willing to give them.

Of course, they won’t listen to me. I don’t coddle them and rub their little tummies. So as long as you concern yourselves more with sweet words on their evaluations, law students will continue to emerge from your classrooms incapable of the rigors of law and unsafe for clients. But who cares, as long as they like you.

This is the pedagogy you’ve created and perpetuated. If you have any balls at all, take back your classroom and teach your students well.  Hurt their feelings whenever their feelings need to be hurt. That may be the most important lesson you can ever teach them.  And stop caring more about your validation than what these ignorant, entitled misfits will do to clients some day.

There were other things that I expected to write about this morning, but they can wait. Tragedies happen with unfortunate regularity, but I can’t recall one that involved the murder of so many young children. Regardless, the deaths of 20 babies is beyond comprehension. The death of six adults is a nightmare. And whatever caused the shooter to do such a thing, both his sadness or sickness and his suicide are part of the tragedy.

It is all so mind-numbingly horrible.  Some focus on the “why” question. I don’t.  It no longer matters, It happened, and that can’t be changed by understanding it better. Nor will it change the next time it happens, any more than Columbine changed this time. It merely gives us something to do while the dead bodies of beautiful children lie in the Sandy Hook Elementary School so we don’t feel utterly useless and puny as we think about this from far away, unable to contribute anything that matters.

Yet, even as the bodies of the children that mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, loved and adored, held and kissed, played with and dreamed with, lie still, there are some who are so cold as to immediately calculate how they can use this to their own advantage.

Mike Huckabee blames “removing God from schools,” as the reason for the shooting.  Randazza disproves the usually sound view that ad hominems are never warranted.

UCLA Lawprof Eugene Volokh had  two posts up  on the merits of wider gun ownership before the sun went down. And conservatives rip the president for hinting that guns must be controlled, while liberal rip the president for refusing to utter those two words.

I borrow again from Tim Kevan, that priests believe, people feel, lawyers think.  Today is a day to feel, not think or believe. Feel for the parents, the loved ones, who lost their babies.  Don’t think. Don’t believe. Just feel.

There is no answer to a horror like this. For all the “answers” offered, all those inclined to see a tragedy and use it for their own purposes, the reality is that humanity has endured horrible tragedies before and will do so again, and no one, no group, no solution, has ever altered this course.  We have events of wonder and greatness, and events of horror and tragedy.  That’s the nature of humanity.

So too is it in the nature of humanity to seize the opportunity to use tragedy to further one’s own agenda.  This is not part of our better nature, and it demeans us and the tragedy. 

I cannot feel what the parents of the children murdered in Newtown feel. But I can feel the terrible sadness of such a tragedy.  For today, that’s all that can be done.

The symposium at  Concurring Opinions on  Convicting the Innocent has been less than energetic in its forward momentum, about as controversial as chick peas and less than enthusiastically received. In fact, I suspect I’ve been one of twelve people total to bother with it, but still I press on. 

In a post by Northwestern lawprof Steve Drizin, director of the NU Center for Wrongful Convictions, he discusses the issue of contaminated police testimony about feeding facts to a defendant giving rise to a false confession.

In the absence of an electronic recording of the entire interrogation, suspects don’t stand much of a chance of convincing a jury that their confessions were coerced or false.  As Dan Simon points out in In Doubt, jurors have great difficulty accepting the idea that anyone would confess to a crime they did not commit, especially a murder or other crime that could result in death or a lengthy prison sentence.  Moreover, in a classic case of the “cover-up being worse than the crime,” the trial process actually encourages prosecutors to prepare police witnesses to testify that the details came from the suspect in an uninterrupted narrative with no prompting, prodding or persuasion from the police.  It’s not a case of suborning perjury.  Without a recording, everyone has plausible deniability about police contamination.  The collective memory of the officers involved —  often months or years after the fact — is washed clean of any contamination.  During trial preparation, prosecutors prepare the officers to testify in ways that are persuasive to juries.    There is nothing more persuasive than a police officer who testifies that the reason he knew the suspect was guilty was because the suspect came up with details that only the true perpetrator could have known.

At first glance, this seems to be the conventional wisdom, that everyone is just doing their job under difficult circumstances, with nothing nefarious going on, and it just works out badly.  Even the “collective memory of the officers involved…is washed clean of any contamination.” Time heals all wounds.

But it’s not so.  There are two fundamental flaws that routinely occur that undermine this overly kind view of contaminated testimony.  First, the police officer takes the stand and testifies that he remembers everything, everything, as if it happened yesterday.  As much as we might want to wish away any suggestion of perjury, there is no rationalization that allows the cop to testify as to facts as if he recalls them perfectly while simultaneously  justifying his absolution from responsibility for contaminated testimony by the fact that “months or years” have elapsed.

Either he remembers the facts or he doesn’t. Which is it?

The second flaw is that the feeding of facts to a defendant in the course of attempting to extract a confession isn’t mere happenstance.  It’s no accident. It is something police officers are trained to do.  Sure, they occasionally get a defendant who spills his guts, committed the crime and tells all, but that’s not the situation under discussion. Rather, Drizin speaks to the false confession, the seemingly inexplicable circumstance where a person who didn’t do the crime manages to come up with a confession replete with intimate details.

In exculpating the cop, he ignores what Larry Barksdale was kind enough to tell us, it’s the police officer’s job to get the confession.  It is the police officer’s job to get a confession that will stick, that will suffice to convict the defendant. It is not his job to make certain that it’s truthful. If the confession is false, it’s our job to prove it.

In the sanitary world of theory, we don’t point fingers and accuse anyone of doing bad things. It’s just not polite.  But trials don’t happen in the sanitary world of theory, and people do bad things.  To testify under oath that nobody planted the details that bolster a confession, but that they came from the defendant alone, is fine, except when it’s a lie.  What it is not is a mistake. It is not forgivable. It is not excusable. Even though we may want to be polite and hurt no one’s feelings, it’s just not real.

This is a tough business, and the stakes in the real world are very high.  If there is to be a solution to the problem of false confessions (whether by the innocent or the guilty, or the somewhat guilty), it has be based on how things actually happen in the courtroom.  Police don’t innocently forget that the seeded the confession with details. Police do so to make the confession stick. They do so because their job is to make the confession stick.  They do so because they believe the defendant is guilty, and the ends justify the means. They don’t lose sleep over it.

This isn’t to say that Larry Barksdale is wrong about his perspective, that it’s a cop’s job to get a confession that nails a defendant to the wall, even though it’s the prime reason for false confessions.  But it is to say that no worthwhile discussion of false confessions can be premised on the notion that it’s all a big mistake and cops would never deliberately testify falsely about a confession because they can’t remember how they contaminated it, They remember. They contaminated the confession on purpose.

With that in mind, let the discussion continue.

The New York Times says so? Huff Post? Me? Neither stories in the mainstream media nor the blawgosphere, and SJ in particular, tell it all. They can’t because of space and limited comprehension. I can’t because I don’t know anymore than what they say, unless I have the source materials.  This point was driven home  after my post about Jack McCullough, convicted 55 years after the murder of 7-year-old Maria Ridulph.

After checking to see where people came from who read my post, two sources sent a few people by, and I decided to check them out. 

Aside: For those of you who want other blawgers to know that you exist or have written something relating to what others are writing, links are an excellent method of letting others know. Most of us are curious to see where people come from, and are interested in learning about new neighbors in the blawgosphere. This is a great way to make that happen.

How do we know the NYTimes and Fox News are telling the whole story?  We don’t. We only know what they’re telling us.

As recently noted, the new diagnosis whenever someone dies following a tazing is “excited delirium,” which Steve Tuttle from Taser International advised me was not their invention, even if they seized upon it as an awfully facile excuse. But there is another word in the lexicon of force to note: superhuman.

Who doesn’t think it sounds pretty darned cool to be described as a “man of steel”?  Except the word gets trotted out not as a compliment, but a rationalization. From Work Without Dread :

Bartholomew Williams, the unarmed African-American graduate student shot dead on Sunday night by Cal State San Bernardino campus police, showed “superhuman strength” as he struggled with them, according to police. If that sounds familiar, that’s because superhumanity is a lot more common than has been thought. Roberto Laudisio-Curdi, an unarmed student killed by police in Sydney in October, also had “superhuman strength.” A man on a stolen motorcycle who resisted arrest in South Carolina last September had “superhuman strength” too, although it seems to me that it was more to his advantage that he had a gun, which the deputy through superhuman strength of his own got control of. Last summer in Maryland, a guy in a shootout with police “held on to his gun” after being hit by a bullet, which led a police spokesperson to remark, “The PCP just provokes superhuman strength.” And at about the same time, police in Georgia said that a delirious man that they arrested “had superhuman strength and admitted being high on bath salts.” (See also State of North Carolina v. Jonathan Howard Norton, No. COA10–1544, June 2011.)

The post goes on to argue that the use of the characterization “superhuman” is the new means of dehumanizing the target of police violence.

You don’t have to be Foucault to see that superhumanity functions as subhumanity; it allows the nonhuman to be eliminated while releasing the perceiver from having to answer for seeing someone as nonhuman. Like last spring’s “bath salts” hysteria itself, the phrase “superhuman strength” reflects police discomfort with mental illness–or even just “irrationality”–on the one hand, and with the unaccountable phenomenon of resisting arrest on the other.

While this explanation delves deeply into the police psychology of viewing non-cops, the us-and-them mentality, as lesser humans unworthy of concern or compassion, my sense is that the description isn’t so much a tacit reflection of their dehumanization as it is another in the long list of convenient words that can provide a ready excuse for the use of force. It’s easy, quick and immediately explains why they had to shoot, taze, beat a person whose conduct otherwise compelled no need for force.

As is often the case, the word is used in conjunction with the underlying criminal accusation, such as the use of PCP or bath salts, playing upon public hysteria and ignorance. After all, how many people are going to rush to the aid of the dead man claiming they use PCP all the time and never had superhuman strength?  On the other side, the mythology surrounding crazy, wild things that happen to people who do demon drugs plays right into a claim like this.  As Judy Tenuta liked to say, “it can happen.”

While police are frequently uncomfortable with mental illness or irrationality, though the latter usually reflects the peculiar police perspective that failure to immediately comply with their commands constitutes irrationality per se, the use of force isn’t limited by any stretch to those who suffer from some mental impairment.  With increasing frequency, it’s just a matter of time and convenience, where they have the means to end an incident now, and use it, or don’t feel much like chasing down a perp and just shoot instead.  It’s quick and easy, the only thing needed is an excuse. 

The beauty of characterizing a person as having “superhuman” strength is that it not only provides a justification for the use of force that would otherwise be inexcusable, but it can’t be tested later for veracity.  Much like the beloved “furtive gesture,” it happened only because the police officer said so, and then it’s gone.  In the case of furtive gesture, the result is a search. In the case of superhuman strength, there’s usually a dead body.

Does anybody actually have this “superhuman” strength? No and yes.  No, there is no such thing as Superman, and no one suddenly manifests abilities beyond those of mere mortals, regardless of whether they’re wearing a cape.  But drugs do cause disinhibition, where a person will exert his very human strength to its fullest, without any reluctance, despite doing so in the face of police force.  The fact is that a person on PCP may well beat a cop in fight; cops don’t necessarily have secret cop-fu that allows them to come out on top in hand-to-hand combat.  They can be beaten. They can be hurt. They are not inclined to let that happen.

At the same time, use of such shorthands as “superhuman” strength build a mythology that’s hard to resist. It becomes a mantra, where just saying the magic words makes whatever comes afterward perfectly understandable. What could the cop do in the face of this drugged up guy with superhuman strength? He had no choice but to shoot.  And another unarmed person lies dead on the street, and there is no way to dispute it.  Except it isn’t real.

H/T FritzMuffKnuckle

For a long time, the three most important letters to lawyers on the internet were SEO.  But now that everybody on the internet is an SEO expert New York criminal defense lawyer, and page 1 of Google hasn’t gotten any longer, the cool word has changed to branding. 

Establishing yourself as a skilled, hard-working lawyer based on what you do is, well, really hard. It takes not only effort, but time. Nobody can be bothered with the first or can wait for the second. The car payment is due, the kids are hungry and we need money now. So rather than make the long, hard, uphill climb to success, why not just create a brand that will make clients want you more than any other lawyer around?

Yes, yes, you say?  Marketing guru  Seth Godin explains how:

Apple’s naming approach is inconsistent, it begs for lawsuits (offensive and defensive) and it shouldn’t be the model for your organization. iPhone is a phone, iPad is a pad, iPod is a … (and owning a letter of the alphabet is i-mpossible).

Procter and Gamble, on the other hand, has been doing it beautifully for a hundred years. Crisco, Tide, Pringles, Bounty, Duracell–these are fanciful names that turn the generic product (and the story we believe about it) into something distinct.

No, you dope. You don’t want to rename your practice The Crisco Law Firm. You completely misunderstood Godin.  Plus, it carries some unfortunate implications for lock-up that may not entice new clients to come to you.

So many lawyers are striving to find a way to distinguish themselves from all the other lawyers who have carefully crafted their online personas to bring in the clients, and frankly, it’s damn hard. We’re all pretty much the same on paper. Sure, some have been around longer than others, but an old fool is worse than a young fool, so that doesn’t tell the full story.  Some of us have higher Avvo ratings, but that just means you haven’t figured out how to put inconsequential nonsense into your profile to fool the algorithm. 

In some jurisdictions, lawyers aren’t allowed to practice under a trade name.  Those old men just don’t get it. They are branding idiots, determined to make life miserable for anyone with a flair for the cool and enticing.  They wouldn’t know cutting edge if it bit them in the butt. 

But even such archaic rules can be played. After all, hasn’t Morrison Foerster become MoFo? 

Worse still, if you’ve got the terrible misfortune of having an Anglo name like Smith, following in the footsteps of your father and grandfather, the naming options will kill you. Smith, Smith, Jones & Smith?  You’ve got to be kidding. Google is going to slaughter you. Page 37 at best, and nobody will ever know you exist on the web.

At this point, you probably wonder how someone like me, avant-garde and all, plans to rebrand himself to take advantage of this vital and cutting edge marketing concept.  While I’ve considered some of my options, like Curmudgeon Law, Scott “If you have to ask, you can’t afford me” Greenfield and The Law Office of the Guy Who Writes Simple Justice, they’ve gotten a lukewarm reception.  Apparently, my knowledge of the concept of branding is far better than my execution.  I am so ashamed.

But just because I suck at branding doesn’t mean you will. Go for it. Remake yourself into something far, far cooler than you are. One fanciful name will do the trick, and the next thing you know, you’ll be rolling in dough.  Brand, baby, brand!

If it works for laundry detergent, you know it will work for you.

A man asks a woman if she would be willing to sleep with him if he pays her an exorbitant sum of money. She replies affirmatively. He then names a paltry amount and asks if she would still be willing to sleep with him for the revised fee. The woman is greatly offended and replies as follows:

She: What kind of woman do you think I am?

He: We’ve already established that. Now we’re just dickering over the price.

The old joke, attributed to George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill and others, has been given new life.  The amount has now been conclusively established: $1.92 billion.  Via the New York Times :

Federal and state authorities have chosen not to indict HSBC, the London-based bank, on charges of vast and prolonged money laundering, for fear that criminal prosecution would topple the bank and, in the process, endanger the financial system. They also have not charged any top HSBC banker in the case, though it boggles the mind that a bank could launder money as HSBC did without anyone in a position of authority making culpable decisions.

The reason is that HSBC is too big to fail. If indicted or convicted of money laundering for drug cartels and terrorists, as alleged, London based HongKong Shanghai Banking Corporation could have toppled the banking system, with devastating consequences.  It would have been a disaster for the economy, both ours and the worlds.  Too big to fail.

So the government decided, in an exercise of discretion, to take whatever spare change they had in their pocket and call it even. 

The New York Times editorial, while recognizing the impact such a prosecution would have on the global economy, argues that this decision has eliminated any deterrent effect laws have on “too big to fail” multinationals, and converted them into another cost of doing business.  True.

But HSBC can take care of itself. What about you? What about your business? What about the bank down the street?  Need I say it? Not too big to fail. Your family, your employees, your customers? They will suffer, but the economy will survive. And really, isn’t that what criminal law is all about?

The cynical will mention “equal protection,” that phrase in the Constitution that says the government can’t treat you any differently than anyone else, even if the other guy is too big to fail. It’s often chiseled into the lintel over courthouse doorways. But as we now know, that’s only for us little guys. 

Prosecutors will scoff at you if you mention the HSBC settlement. You’re no HSBC, they will say. And indeed, you’re not.  Judges will impose sentence with a straight face, perhaps expressing righteous indignation at the things you’ve done and the harm you’ve caused, as they mumble triple digit numbers that are crucial to the preservation of society.  You must be imprisoned so others will know that you cannot do such evil things and get away with it.

The criminal justice system, like every system relied upon by government to keep its vision of the wheels of society greased, has both a pragmatic as well as principled component.  The problem is that it’s principled only when the government is willing to pay the price.  Whether that means releasing prisoners when the cost of keeping them incarcerated exceeds what they are willing to pay, or cutting a multinational bank a break when the economy is too fragile to take a major hit, they trade off otherwise inflexible principle that drops on the head of lesser defendants like a ton of bricks.

No one suggests that what HSBC did, or its scope or pervasiveness, was inconsequential. Just the opposite.

There is no doubt that the wrongdoing at HSBC was serious and pervasive. Several foreign banks have been fined in recent years for flouting United States sanctions against transferring money through American subsidiaries on behalf of clients in countries like Iran, Sudan and Cuba. HSBC’s actions were even more egregious. According to several law enforcement officials with knowledge of the inquiry, prosecutors found that, for years, HSBC had also moved tainted money from Mexican drug cartels and Saudi banks with ties to terrorist groups.

This is serious stuff. Whether it’s true is another matter, but that will never be tested because they found the government’s tipping point at $1.92 billion.  So what if the government takes every penny you or your company ever made, and levies fines and forfeitures for a million times what you could ever make under their facile way of calculating what it’s due.  You don’t have $1.92 billion to give, so you get prosecuted.

It sucks to be the little guy in a world where “justice” carries a high price tag.  But at least there is one thing no one need endure any longer, after this choice by our government.  No longer can any government official, any judge, any prosecutor, opine with righteous indignation about how a crime demands punishment.  Even if they can do it with a straight face, they surely can’t be angry with you for laughing at their joke.

Now that we’ve established what kind of system of justice we have, the rest is just dickering over price.

When Trekkie Terrance Huff  posted the video of his stop by Collinsville cop Michael Reichert, it caused a bit of angst for the locals. You see, Collinsville made money off two things, its cops and its hotel rooms, used by passers-through as a place to stop before going to anywhere else in the world that was a better place to be than Collinsville.  It was a good plan, until Huff screwed it all up.

After posting his nerd video, Huff posted a video of Reichert’s deposition, where he explained how he tested his drug-sniffing dog by rubbing drug scent on cars parked in motel parking lots.  That could be used to follow the previously parked cars on the highway, run the dog around them and get a hit.  Of course, Reichert would be the guy who put the scent on the car, but a hit is a hit, and that means a search.  And one never knows what a search will turn up.

It was this type of ingenuity that made Reichert a local hero.  Via Pro Libertate :

In January 2011, Reichert was given a commendation by Collinsville Police Chief Scott Williams.  In April, Reichert was named “Officer of the Month.” This was a reward for what was described as exemplifying “the proactive and innovative philosophy of law enforcement prescribed to [sic] by the Collinsville Police Department. He has demonstrated this by his aggressive approach to drug trafficking in the area.”

“Officer Reichert had 166 total incidents with 6 arrests and 7 citations in 13 working days,” explained the department’s report. “In addition to this he had 3 self initiated significant incidents that is very worthy of praise [sic.]”

Reichert’s initiative, however. was not universally admired.

This routine was described by Federal Judge Michael J. Reagan in a 2005 ruling that described the officer as a “polished performer” and revealed him to be someone from whom lies flow as easily as bile from a ruptured liver.

“By simply adding up `suspicious’ factors while ignoring non-suspicious or mitigating factors [in the Zambrana traffic stop], Reichert misused the `totality of circumstances’ principle as a sword to unjustly pierce Zambrana’s cloak of Fourth Amendment protection,” concluded Judge Reagan.

“I just got an e-mail from the city attorney asking to have the [Lodging in Collinsville] video taken down by the end of the day,” attorney Louis Meyer informed Pro Libertate in a December 4 phone interview. “He didn’t explain why he thought Mr. Huff had to do this. It is a publicly available document attached to our motion for summary judgment. There was nothing placed under seal, and all of this information – including the video of the deposition – was available to anybody willing to go into the clerk’s office and ask for it.”

As if turned out, Huff wasn’t the only out-of-state driver to fall prey to Reichert, and the bit of notoriety his video caused brought out others who, like Huff, fell victim to what Huff’s attorney, Dan Kiss, called “pirates in police uniforms.”

Much as courts embrace the War on Drugs in terms of saving society from the ravages of this blight, compelling judges to endorse pretext stops and imbue cute doggies with magical powers to justify warrantless searches, few take notice of the banality of cops like Reichert and towns like Collinsville just feeding off the drug trough.  No hotbed of gangs or crazed hippy addicts, but a sleepy town that makes a living off unsuspecting travelers.

Until Terrance Huff made a video.  But for his videos, you couldn’t get a room at the Collinsville Red Roof Inn. 

Update: The Collinsville city attorney sought relief in federal court to force the removal of Huff’s video from Youtube. The court refused.

H/T  FritzMuffKnuckle
 

The New York Board of Bar Examiners  released the passage rate numbers by law school for the July, 2012, bar exam.  While discussion of what becomes of debt-laden students when there are no jobs to be had are left to the lions of the legal academy, who are busily arguing about edge tweaks, the chart reveals something far more disturbing and real.

When nearly a third of a law school class fails to pass the bar exam, it can’t be chalked up to first time jitters or a few students having a real bad day (or two).  An alarm has to go off that the school, and more precisely, its professoriate, has failed.  Somehow, these students attended, and paid for, three years of law school and were incapable of passing the bar in massive numbers.

Law professors, you failed. The students may not have shined, but this isn’t their fault. It’s yours. It is impossible to have such a large percentage of a law school class failing without it being the fault of the faculty.  And lest we point fingers at NYLS alone, there are plenty of exceptionally crappy numbers here.

Frankly, I’m appalled that the first three schools on the list, admired by all, didn’t have 99% pass rates. The bar exam just isn’t that hard to pass.  I’d cut Columbia a break at five students failing the exam just because their brains froze. When the number is three times that, it’s shocking. That the state average is 85% is alarming, given all these students having spent all this time, all this money, with the single-minded goal of passing the bar exam, and yet 15% failed.

Where are the mea culpas?  Are lawprofs rending their hairshirts in penitence?  Get real.

At PrawfsBlawg, Dan Rodriguez supports the creation of the “baby bar,”

Declaration against interest from an institutional standpoint as dean, but I am strongly drawn to Sam Estreicher’s “back to the future” suggestion of an option for students sitting for the bar after two years.  Such a system, if adopted, would respond in some meaningful way to student debt issues, allowing the financially burdened student to postpone — or, in some instances, avoid entirely — the third year and the corresponding tuition costs.

A fabulous idea, with but one little kink. If they can’t pass the bar after three years of law school, how will they pass after two? Of course, most law students take a bar exam prep course (by a private provider, paid for separately) because they can’t remember enough to pass based on law school alone.

Some will argue that the bar exam is meaningless anyway, reflecting little of the actual practice of law and expecting students intent on practicing in a specific niche to know obscure details of the law from A to Z which can be easily looked up if needed. 

There is a little bit of merit to this, but the fact is that having completed three years of law school, students ought to possess a sufficiently broad swath of legal knowledge to breeze through the exam. It’s not that hard, and more importantly, we are licensed as generalists and expected to have a basic knowledge of the law. All the law, even when basic courses like evidence are no longer required.  It’s just not that much to expect of lawyers.

But it requires lawprofs to teach students. Teaching. It’s a dirty word in the Academy, denigrated by association with trade schools that offer refrigeration repair. Except it’s needed to pass the bar exam. Scholar, unfortunately, consider the notion quaint and beneath their dignity.  They exist to think big thoughts, and show up in class only because someone puts a gun to their heads.

In a response to Brian Tamanaha’s book, Failing Law Schools, which lawprof Jay Sterling Silver cleverly describes as the “Motel 6 Model of Legal Education,” he offers his view of society’s need for legal scholars:

As a wise colleague pointed out to me not long ago, “The legal professoriate develops suggestions for law in the common interest that are not produced by the powerful lobbies generating laws today. If we are reduced to teaching automatons, we would leave the field to those who buy their spokespersons.” Stripping law faculties of the time to contemplate the weaknesses of the law and the injustices of the legal system, and discarding the tenure necessary to instill meaning in the words “academic freedom,” reduces a vital social resource to a cog in the current structures of power. Under the guise of fiscal management, law professors willing to take on the wielders of power in the public and private sectors would be silenced.

Obviously, no scholar wants to be reduced to a “teaching automaton,” especially given how society so desperately needs their brilliance to “contemplate the weaknesses of the law and the injustices of the legal system.”   Orin Kerr wasn’t impressed with the argument, that maintaining “the status quo is the best possible world requires more than just patting ourselves on the back about how society is very lucky to have us.”  I think Orin was far too kind.

Think big thoughts on your own time, if that’s what you think you’re doing. Society isn’t paying you to ponder the legal universe, but law students are paying you to teach them how to be lawyers.  You’re failing. And, much as I hate to be mean, your big thoughts about injustice are, with rare exceptions, puny and worthless.

Much of the focus is on the dearth of jobs for law school graduates, and it’s a monumental problem.  But if the grads can’t even get in the game because they can’t pass the bar exam after law school in such huge numbers, then this failing falls on the legal academy. Not a third. Not a fifth. Frankly, even a tenth of a class is far too much. If the students don’t have the chops, then hand them a dime and stop taking their government-backed tuition payment, but do not spew them out the back of your law school incapable of passing the bar.

No amount of self-congratulatory scholarly baloney can conceal the inability to produce students capable of jumping the first hurdle of becoming a lawyer.  This cannot happen, and I blame the law professors.

When  Ken White and  Ron Coleman stepped in to defend conservative blogger and Los Angeles County prosecutor Patrick Frey of Patterico’s Pontifications from a frivolous and censorious attack on free speech, it was a mitzvah, especially since no conservative lawyers were willing to take up pro bono arms on behalf of their good buddy. 

But as Ken reveals, his earlier words came back to bite him:

A Note About Sarcasm

I’m only going to address one minor issue in the briefs and the tentative ruling, because it involves me and this blog. In March, well before Ms. Naffe sued and I appeared in this case, I wrote a post about Ms. Naffe’s threats against Mr. Frey. In that post, referring to Mr. Frey’s point-by-point questioning of Ms. Naffe’s accusations against James O’Keefe, I dropped this line:

The defense attorney in me is tempted to say that this is the most thorough consideration of exculpatory evidence that I have ever seen from a Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney, but that would be uncouth, so I will not, and you should definitely forget that I brought it up.

I thought that this was self-evidently a joke, a friendly swipe by a snarky criminal defense lawyer talking about a prosecutor. I was rather surprised to see both Ms. Naffe’s counsel and — in response – the judge seem to take it literally. Such are the hazards of sarcasm. Or maybe I should say, as I always do to my wife, kids, law partners, and anyone who will sit still, that nobody understands me.