Is there a “bright side” to the misbegotten stop of Lt. Caron Nazario? Absolutely. He “only” ended up being pepper sprayed and not dead, like Daniel Shaver. Both presented two fairly common themes in police encounters. First, the person is not an “experienced criminal” who knows what to do when he’s confronted by the police, but is an ordinary, law-abiding citizen who has no reason to expect the police to feel antagonistic or threatened by him. Second, the police issued conflicting commands. Or to be more realistic, police simultaneously screamed  directly contradictory orders interspersed with threats and vulgarities.

These two factors aren’t inherently connected, and yet play out together. What’s an ordinary person to do when two police officers, with guns drawn and pointed, engaged you with professionalism, courtesy and respect? Continue reading →

Ed. Note: This isn’t a post about what happened to Lt. Caron Nazario. I make that absolutely clear up front because I will be brutal about it later in the comments. Don’t go there.

For the most part, the twitter account @BadLegalTakes has a fun, if overwhelming, time, retwitting screen caps of legally ignorant things being spewed on twitter, mostly by non-lawyers, but occasionally by lawyers and even the President of the United States. There is no shortage of legal ignorance, with a certainty of correctness that would make Dunning and Kruger blush. Continue reading →

The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union tried to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama. The employees voted. The union lost. Obviously, that can’t be possible unless Amazon did something wrong, because why else wouldn’t employees vote for a union to take dues from their paychecks?

“Our system is broken,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the union’s president. “Amazon took full advantage of that.”

Continue reading →

It was awful. Disgusting. Repugnant. But was it assault?

A Florida woman who was seen in a widely watched video intentionally coughing on a shopper at a Pier 1 home-goods store last summer, as fears about the pandemic raged, was sentenced on Thursday to 30 days in jail, court records show.

The woman, Debra Hunter, 53, had been charged with misdemeanor assault in June after she walked up and coughed on the shopper, Heather Sprague, who had been recording video of Ms. Hunter’s dispute with employees at the store, in Jacksonville.

Continue reading →

The following is an article from a British tabloid. I want you to soak in the headline. Bask in its glory. Then read the piece and come back here.

Mars Bars up arse champ branded a cheat for using the small multipack ones

1. This was from May of last year and none of you had the decency to send it to me when we really could’ve used the laugh? I’m ashamed of y’all. Continue reading →

For years, UCLA Lawprof Eugene Volokh has provided interesting and thoughtful commentary on First Amendment law, establishing himself as one of the foremost scholars of Free Speech in the country. Perhaps more importantly, Eugene has become something of a free speech guru at his long-standing blawg, Volokh Conspiracy, and some people, lawyers and lay alike, tend to take Eugene’s word as First Amendment gospel. It’s not that they necessarily find his arguments persuasive, but that if Eugene says so, then it must be.

Mark Bennett isn’t necessarily buying.

I’ve been writing for eight years now about how revenge porn statutes are unconstitutional because the Supreme Court has defined “unprotected speech” as “speech within narrow categories of historically unprotected speech,” and nothing about revenge porn puts it into any heretofore recognized category of unprotected speech.1

Continue reading →

He didn’t make it to the second year of medical school at the University of Virginia by being a slacker or none too bright. So when Kieran Bhattacharya decided to raise questions to a panel discussing the fashionable if unempirical notion of microaggressions, he chose to ask some questions. Pointed questions, but just questions.

Bhattacharya: Hello. Thank you for your presentation. I had a few questions just to clarify your definition of microaggressions. Is it a requirement, to be a victim of microaggression, that you are a member of a marginalized group?

Adams: Very good question. And no. And no—
Continue reading →

The question of what constitutes “consent” to sex has been in near constant flux for the past decade, employing various meaningless characterizations doomed to fail. For the most part, these battles have been waged on college campuses and civil courtrooms, with criminal law remaining modestly above the fray. A gang of woke academics tried to change the definition in the Model Penal Code to “affirmative consent,” but were beaten back by lawyers who grasped their definition was untenable and backwards.

NYS Assemblywoman Rebecca Seawright has proposed a bill to redefine consent. Penal Law §130.5 now provides that the prosecution must prove lack of consent as an element of the crime. Beyond force and incapacity to consent, the definition requires that the “victim” communicate lack of consent. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Another debate has broken out at SJ! Chris Seaton has called the question:

Resolved: in the interests of public health, safety, and reviving a struggling economy, the United States should require vaccine credentials for all citizens 18 years of age or older.

Chris will be taking the affirmative, and I will be taking the negative. Chris’s post follows, and I do my lame best here.

As you’re reading this, America is well over a year past “two weeks to slow the spread” of COVID-19. Many small businesses are gone. School children haven’t seen friends or teachers in person for over a year. We’re not to leave our homes without at least two face diapers over our nose and mouth. Our current way of life isn’t sustainable. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: Another debate has broken out at SJ! Chris Seaton has called the question:

Resolved: in the interests of public health, safety, and reviving a struggling economy, the United States should require vaccine credentials for all citizens 18 years of age or older.

Chris will be taking the affirmative, while I will take the negative. My post follows, and Chris’ post beating me to an old, smelly, radish pulp is here.

As of this writing, I’m one shot in, with the second coming soon. It took a lot of effort to schedule that first shot, but I wanted to be vaccinated. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the concerns other people raise about unknown consequences. They are reasonable doubts. I just don’t share them and have made my choice. I prefer to survive. Continue reading →