I remember when German Lopez first began writing on criminal law issues at Vox. His posts were both progressive and shallow, reflecting that superficial gloss that people longer on passion than knowledge tend to embrace with the certainty of the righteous. He’s come a long way since then, suffering the slings and arrows of the left for his acceptance of facts even when they fail to push the preferred narrative.

This might not seem particularly brave, but for someone who leans left, enjoyed the camaraderie of the woke and works at Vox, it was damn near begging to be cast as a traitor to the cause. As has become abundantly clear, the gravest enemies of progressives aren’t conservatives, Republicans or white supremacists, but liberals who offer a more viable, realistic, free and less hateful path toward achieving many of the same goals. Authoritarians hate the competition. Continue reading →

When I wrote about the ACLU’s attempt to twist the meaning of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s words, I avoided addressing the elephant in the quote. It has since become a “big deal,” forcing ACLU’s reimaginative executive director Anthony Romero to apologize.

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Monday that he regretted that a tweet sent out recently by his organization altered the words of a well-known quote by the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“We won’t be altering people’s quotes,” Mr. Romero said in an interview on Monday evening. “It was a mistake among the digital team. Changing quotes is not something we ever did.”

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Decades ago, there was a push to eliminate all discretion by police in making domestic violence arrests. If a woman accused a man, the man was arrested, regardless of whether the evidence supported the accusation. The argument for it was that cops didn’t take domestic violence seriously. The joke was that it was because they were often its perpetrators, and it wasn’t a very funny joke. But the flip side became a tool that was abused, with women using it to exact revenge on men for ulterior reasons, to deflect their own culpability as the abuser to their victim, which was often the case though rarely said aloud.

Like most efforts to overcome one perceived problem, it created others. The notion was that the only way to overcome police failure to take domestic violence seriously was to remove their discretion. That meant the innocent men, or male victims, were burned in the process. It was a price activists were willing, if not happy, to pay. Continue reading →

Peak? Quintessential? Bizarre and idiotic excess? The blazing speed with which it all happened was shocking in itself, but even as lines are drawn, sides are picked, tempers flare, the questions raised are already ripe for consideration. It began with one guy, a black author with a significant following on social media, putting his indictment, with fuzzy video, on twitter to evoke a reaction.

https://twitter.com/FredTJoseph/status/1441919836112650242

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There are many cockamamie notions whirling around the damp minds of criminal law reformers which wind up with legal academics grasping at straws to write some hip, radical  article or book to promote a means of fixing the broken, invariably racist, system. Some, like jury nullification or eliminating plea bargaining, have gained traction.

A nascent notion came from the fertile imagination of a Stanford sociologist, with a courtesy appointment at Stanford Law School, Matthew Clair, who wrote a book that was excerpted at Inquest, which bills itself as “The Decareral Brainstorm.” Such sites, dedicated to such one-sided causes without a discouraging word, have a tendency to promote ridiculous ideas because there’s no one around to point out that they’re, well, ridiculous. And Clair’s idea is not merely ridiculous, but dangerous. Continue reading →

It “occurred” to me when it was rubbed in my face that the posts here are only one piece of the SJ puzzle. There are a bunch of people who keep this hotel open, from the friends who fix the program when it goes awry to those of you who help pay the freight of keeping a website on the ‘net.

There’s my editor, Beth, without whom I would look far stupider than I do otherwise, and the bouncers in the hotel bar, Skink and Sgt. Schultz. And there are the voices of reason who talk me off the edge (thanks, Judge Kopf) and the voices of unreason who drive me toward it (I’m looking at you, Barleycorn). And then there are the SJ cultural muses, Howl and Guitar Dave, whose music video selections have become as integral to my doing this gig as the catharsis of writing posts in the wee hours of the morning. Continue reading →

It was a bold idea, one that might well have bridged the gap between the high cost of legal representation and the inability of many to pay the price for the banal requirements of legal advice and assistance to perform so many common tasks. And yet, Washington State’s attempt to make Limited Licence Legal Technicians, or 3LTs as I called them, a thing died.

The reasons are somewhat speculative, as there is no empirical study explaining the problem and the rationalizations are driven by political agendas, those determined to create a lesser tier of legal representation to provide “Access to Justice” (A2J) blaming external causes rather than an inherent failure of the plan. Continue reading →

Happy Friday everybody! As you read this, I’m most likely asleep in my bed. The house is quiet. I have the entire place to myself for the day.

How did your humble humorist get such a blessed day of respite from the usual household clamor? Easy: the kids are in school and it’s Conference weekend for Dr. S.

Conference weekend is my pet name for her yearly weekend marathon Continuing Education lecture series. If you’ve ever wondered about differences in medical and legal CE, let me dispel any myths for you: everyone’s still sitting there bored, listening to a lecturer drone on, and half the attendees are probably checking sports scores or playing solitaire on a laptop to pass the time. Continue reading →

One of my ongoing concerns has been what words to use to characterize the subjects of my posts. When I speak of the right, are they “alt-right” or “white supremacists,” as I’m reliably informed by the left? And when I speak of the left, are they “SJWs,” “woke” or “progressives”? On the one hand, none of these words have sufficiently defined meanings to preclude the requisite wiggle room to disclaim membership. On the other hand, what starts out as a badge of honor for one side morphed into a pejorative when seized upon by the other.

I remember someone dismissing a post because I used the phrase SJW, which obviously meant I was some right wingnut. So what word or phrase should I use? Berny Belvedere parses the dilemma at Arc Digital. Continue reading →

Up to now, the the scheme consisted of accusation, the presumption of guilt and swift conviction, whereupon the only sentence imposed was by the mob and its enablers: death. One of the complaints, and only one, was the disproportionality of sentence, that not every accusation by a woman against a man warranted his “cancellation,” his being fired, thrown off the island and disappeared, never to be heard from or admitted into polite society again.

Shelly Ross was Chris Cuomo’s former boss. Chris, the angelic and perpetually sincere host on CNN of all causes progressive, and definitely Mario’s better looking son, did the dirty to Ross back in 2005 and she kept the receipt. Continue reading →