Every New Yorker with a car knows about the Parking Violations Bureau, which is where one goes to get convicted (which is only slightly hyperbolic). The problem is that the judges are employees of the City and, while putatively there to fairly adjudicate parking tickets, the PVB has never been known for its fairness or concern for parkers. They’re not judges.

Neither are immigration judges, despite what anybody wants to believe.

Although immigration judges are employees of the executive branch, they’re judges in the truest sense of the term, presiding over cases that have enormous consequences for asylum seekers or people facing removal from the U.S.

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Prefatory note: My mean-ass editor started the week with a post on a goaded judge, so I thought it would be fun to end the week with my all-time favorite story of a goaded judge and the lawyer who pissed him off. For reasons I’ll keep to myself, I’ll just say the following is a true story, with names and certain facts changed to protect the parties involved—CLS

Harrison “Harry” Blodgette was a trial attorney in Driftwood County, Alabama. Possessed with an over-the-top personality, an outspoken demeanor and a never-ending supply of bravado, Harry’s claim to local legal fame was bankrupting a Wal-Mart franchise over workers’ compensation issues. While that lawsuit lined Blodgette’s pockets and helped him start his own firm, the judgment and its residual effects left a bad taste in the mouth of many who lost jobs and a place to find goods at low prices. Continue reading →

In a weird way, the approach taken by the Iowa Attorney General’s office on behalf of the University of Iowa in its defense against a Title IX suit by a male student expelled for “sexually harassing and assaulting two fellow students and by possessing and consuming alcohol on campus” not only makes sense, but was the natural progression of campus sex tribunals. Yes, consuming alcohol was in there too. Please wipe that shocked look off your face.

After all, campus sex tribunals are, despite the rhetorical denial that they’re anything more than just routine campus discipline mechanisms, no different than plagiarism, are most assuredly quasi-criminal administrative proceedings. While copying off someone’s test isn’t a crime, rape is. Continue reading →

Within minutes of my posting a snarky twit, the phone rang.

Scott, it’s Pablo. Why are you doing this to us, man?

Pablo Arredondo is Casetext’s co-founder, along with Jake Heller. I like these guys, even if I haven’t always been supportive of their coolest new ideas. They’ve had misses and hits, but they’re still standing which is far more than you could say about most of their brethren in the “legaltech” space, creating tools for lawyers that nobody wants or needs. But this time? Continue reading →

Moira Donegan started the “Shitty Media Men” list, which gave rise to an opportunity for women to tell their stories, whether real, exaggerated or completely false, without challenge or question. Did it help? Sure, it destroyed a few careers of men about whom lies were spread, but isn’t it worth it if they stopped just one bad man? Surely you understand that there will be collateral damage of innocent people in the war for gender hegemony.

So why not federal judges?

There’s a real problem in the federal judiciary. Whether you look at disgraced retired judge Alex Kozinski, who was accused of pernicious sexual harassment in 2017; the resignation of district court judge Carlos Murguia, who was reprimanded for his “inappropriate behavior”; the stymied inquiry into Kavanaugh’s behavior which disappeared because he left the D.C. Circuit when he got elevated to the Supreme Court; or the powerful testimony of Olivia Warren, who detailed the sexual harassment and abuse she was subjected to during her tenure at the Ninth Circuit by the late Judge Stephen Reinhardt, it is clear the legal industry needs to do something.

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The inaugural Rappaport Forum was held at Harvard Law School, starting with a panel discussion on “the role and limits of free speech on college campuses.” If the subject matter of the panel doesn’t immediately catch your eye, I’ll spell it out for you.

It wasn’t a panel on the protection of free speech, or the expansion of free speech, or even the assurance of free speech. It was a panel on the “limits” of free speech. As if limits were such an obvious need that the question was never “should there be a limits,” but rather what limits should there be.

In a discussion lasting roughly an hour on Friday afternoon, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychology professor at Northeastern University, and Jonathan Haidt, an ethical leadership professor at New York University, discussed the definition of violent speech and how the parameters of free speech have changed on college campuses with the advent of the internet.

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The op-ed was signed by a passel of prosecutors, all holding themselves out to some greater or lesser extent to be “progressive” in their view.

By Darcel D. Clark, Eric Gonzalez, Melinda Katz, Michael E. McMahon, Anthony A. Scarpino Jr., Madeline Singas and Cyrus R. Vance Jr.

Of course, signing onto an op-ed isn’t the same as writing one, and so one should take these names with the same equanimity as the op-ed that follows. Continue reading →

It opened with those dreaded words:

Yet when a good doctrine is combined with those dreaded words, the majority opinion written by Justice Alito, it’s enough to send chills down one’s spine.

There they were, at the start of the 5-4 decision in Hernandez v. Mesa.

JUSTICE ALITO delivered the opinion of the Court.

The case was a hard one, not because there wasn’t overwhelming belief that the Border Patrol agent, Jesus Mesa, Jr., who fired from El Paso, Texas into Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and killed 15-year-old Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca, took a life wrongfully and needlessly, but because it was such a bizarre and peculiar fact pattern. As the old adage goes, bad facts make bad law. Continue reading →

It’s almost as if America’s Dad, Bill Cosby, was never convicted, and yet the conviction of Harvey Weinstein for two of the five counts with which he was charged, Rape in the Third Degree (a Class E non-violent felony) and Criminal Sexual Act in the First Degree (a Class B violent felony), is held out as the case where everything changed.

What does the hard-won, long-overdue conviction of Harvey Weinstein demonstrate?

It shows how difficult it can be to bring abusers to justice, particularly when they are wealthy and powerful. It shows how much the #MeToo movement has changed American life. And it shows how far society still has to go.

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There’s a dirty little secret lurking behind the otherwise neutral rule of a Terry stop having to do with the ugliest part of the body. When stopped, surrounded by guys with shields and guns who you seriously doubt are there to be your pal and asking you questions just because they’re deeply interested in your personal welfare, what exactly is your status? Can you say, “hey, this was fun but I really have to go now. Bye,” and walk away?

The majority of the South Carolina Supreme Court held that Eric Spears had the right to do so, which would appear, on its surface, to be a positive ruling. As it turned out, this wasn’t a good thing for Spears. Continue reading →