As usual, New York is following California’s lead, this time by seeking to turn independent contractors into employees, or else.

A bill before the New York state Senate seeks to reclassify many independent contractors as employees, advancing a standard similar to that of California’s ruinous Assembly Bill 5, or A.B. 5. The proposed S2052 would implement the “ABC Test,” which classifies workers as employees unless the (a) worker is free from the control of the hiring entity, (b) the work performed is outside the hiring entity’s bailiwick, and (c) the worker is “customarily engaged” in the type of work he is hired to do.

Continue reading →

One of the earliest reactions to Title VII of the Civil Rights Law of 1964 dealt with whether customer preference constituted a bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ), an exception built into the law to provide an escape hatch for what would otherwise constitute unlawful discrimination.

Was upper body strength a necessary requirement of the job of firefighter such that women were not physically qualified to perform the necessary functions of the job? Must prisons allow female guards when part of the job required they oversee showers, thus denying male prisoners privacy? Could movie producers only cast women in roles of women? Continue reading →

I should probably start this week with an apology. I’m in a mood. This happens to me every once in a while, and the only thing I can really do to get rid of it is motherfuck somebody into next week. My sainted grandmother, God rest her soul, used to call this mood of mine “getting a case of the red ass.“

This week’s target of my ire are dinks. “DINK” is an acronym for “dual income, no kids.” if you ask me, it’s also a shorthand for selfish brats with zero desire to accomplish anything with their lives. Like I said, it’s just my opinion. Continue reading →

As Ron DeSantis is paving his role at the killer of wokeism, does that make him the enemy of education? Paul Krugman says yes, and that the bigger picture is that the right has become the enemy of higher education writ large.

What’s going on here? It’s easy to get drawn into debating accusations about particular courses or institutions, but that’s missing the fundamental context: the extraordinary rise in right-wing hostility to higher education in general.

Continue reading →

With some regularity, I’ve argued why “law is hard.” To put together words with sufficiently precise definitions and limiting principles so as to say exactly what’s intended, and to do so within the bounds of the Constitution, is a daunting task at best. When applied to such fraught concepts as race or gender identity, it’s damn near impossible. In fact, it may well be impossible, as no one has as yet been able to accomplish the task.

It is not, contrary to what shallower minds understand, to say that there are not very real problems arising that a great many people feel require redress, require government intervention by the creation of a law to prevent insidious activists from “sneaking” it into education, discourse and indoctrination. That there are some who see no problem with it doesn’t mean it’s somehow wrong that others see a very real problem, and reject the notion that there is nothing they can do to prevent the infiltration of ideas they deem dangerous, radical or harmful from being taught to their children. Continue reading →

In stark contrast with the usual simplistic activists, UCLA lawprof Joanna Schwartz offers no fantasy panacea that eliminating qualified immunity will somehow end wrongful police violence. But Schwartz has done some of the most important scholarship on QI, including this article in Yale Law Review on how qualified immunity fails, and so what she has to say deserves serious consideration.

In an excerpt from her new book, Shielded, How the Police Became Untouchable, Schwartz offers some interesting measures to hold individual police officers responsible for their actions. Continue reading →

It’s at the complaint stage, so that the allegations have yet to be proven. But if true, they raise a question that few would have anticipated would ever be asked. Joshua Diemert works for the City of Seattle as a “program intake representative,” which means his job was to “connect city residents with public resources.” He held the position for nine years until he could take no more. The reason was that he had become the enemy and he could no longer suffer the hostile working environment. The reason, he contends, was because he was a white man.

“The city of Seattle believes that race representation is paramount, and they believe that people should not be judged by their individuality or their individual actions, but should be judged by their collective race,” says Diemert. “In fact, they say that if you judge people by individuality, that was actually a tool of white supremacy used to oppress people of color.”

Continue reading →

David Bernstein at VC brought up an essay by New York Law School prawf Rebecca Roiphe about two things, the role law is now believed to play in the society and why Jews are blamed for it. The gravamen of the post is about Jews, and it’s certainly worth reading. But as David highlighted, there is the dogma behind it that has seized control of how law is viewed by academics and students that is independently worthy of some discussion.

Many, if not most, students have bought into academic lessons peddled in the 1980s and ’90s as an outgrowth of what’s often called critical legal theory. Among them: Continue reading →

One of the glaring omissions in New York criminal law had been the lack of an expungement law, a means by which someone could get an ancient conviction off his record so that it would no longer affect everything from jobs, licensure, deportation, credit and even voting. After all, what you did at 17 really doesn’t mean much when you’re 47 and have led a law-abiding life every since. But in New York, it didn’t matter. One you were convicted, you were convicted forever.

That’s now been changed with regard to marihuana (which is the New York statutory spelling; I didn’t make the law) with the enactment of Penal Law Article 222, which legalized personal recreational use quantities of weed and the Marihuana Regulation & Taxation Act (MRTA), which mandated expungement for low level pot convictions. No other crime, but just marihuana. The New York Times says the law contains a typo, and that typo is preventing some people from being relieved of the burden of conviction. Continue reading →

By all accounts, Jen Angel was as sincerely devoted to her progressive beliefs as anyone could be. It didn’t prevent her murder.

Angel was running errands for her business on Monday, including a stop at the Wells Fargo branch near Webster and 21st streets, her fiance, Ocean Mottley, told the San Francisco Chronicle. According to a spokesperson with the Oakland Police Department, around 12:30 that afternoon, “an individual broke into” Angel’s car while she was in it and stole an item from her, then ran back “to a waiting vehicle.” Continue reading →