What happened in a bar between a couple drunken people ordinarily doesn’t make the front page. But then, it doesn’t ordinarily involve a lawyer and a former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney either. Eli Cherkasky was both, and was convicted after a non-jury trial for his actions.

Eli Karl Cherkasky was convicted in 2015 of “criminal obstruction of breathing or blood circulation and assault in the third degree and harassment in the second degree,” the court recounted. He had been “drinking heavily for many hours” when he got into a verbal altercation with a woman that ended up getting physical, it said.

According to Cherkasky, the woman hit him in the eye with her arm [which was sufficiently severe to cause him a black eye] and then threw a beer at him. Continue reading →

Dear SJ Readers:

After numerous discussions with my mean-ass editor this week, it is with a heavy heart that I  am forced to announce that the Friday Funny will be suspended, effective immediately, for at least seven days due to coronavirus concerns.

“But Chris,” you might say, “this is just a blog post chock full of your one-liners, silly zingers, and semi-fictional stories you write each week to make us smile!” I know, I know. This move is not taken lightly and out of an abundance of caution to keep you, the SJ reader, as healthy as possible. Continue reading →

A few months earlier, a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals panel in an opinion by Judge Alice Batchelder held that a female accuser did not have a cause of action against the college for allowing the accused to remain on campus. Or to put it bluntly, not suspending or expelling the male student did not allow the female student to claim she was harassed by having to suffer his mere presence on campus.

In short, we hold that a student-victim plaintiff must plead, and ultimately prove, that the school had actual knowledge of actionable sexual harassment and that the school’s deliberate indifference to it resulted in further actionable sexual harassment against the student-victim, which caused the Title IX injuries. A student-victim’s subjective dissatisfaction with the school’s response is immaterial to whether the school’s response caused the claimed Title IX violation.

Continue reading →

Arguments over the seriousness of COVID-19 should be behind us. Whether millions contract it, even die from it, will be a matter how it’s dealt with, and that will only be known after the fact. Ironically, if we deal with it well, or at least better than expected, it will appear that it was less of a threat than many thought, even though it would have been every bit as dangerous had we dealt with it less well. Go figure.

In any event, among the many places where the normalcy of operations creates needless risk are courts and jails. Some have already taken measures to limit or shut down in anticipation of “penal distancing.” Many have not. It’s time to deal with the reality that the legal system has a host of reasons, some good, some not so good, to do things the way it does. But this changes the balance: death from disease is not the punishment. Continue reading →

Some might take away from Joe Biden’s win in the primaries in Michigan and Mississippi that the Bern has lost the vote of blue collar workers and black people. They may not be happy with the world, but socialism isn’t the solution. Some might take away from Elizabeth Warren’s dropping out that that her intersectional woke agenda had the complete support of Twitter social justice warriors and no one else.

But that’s not Jamelle Bouie’s takeaway.

There’s every chance for the progressive left to make this happen on a national scale. It looks like Biden will secure the nomination, but Sanders won the policy argument. Democrats in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina support Medicare for All; Democrats in California, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee and Virginia support free college. And the future of the Democratic Party — the youngest voters — are with Sanders. Continue reading →

There isn’t much the radical right and left share except methods, which was made glaringly clear when the Department of Justice invited no less a knowledgeable scholar on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act than, wait for it, Mary Anne Franks. It was a smart move by DoJ, as who would be happier to play the “carceral fool” than Franks, together with her sidekick, Carrie Goldberg?

The Justice Department panelists included lawyer Carrie Goldberg, who started a high-profile fight with Grindr over a horrific harassment campaign; University of Miami professor Mary Anne Franks, who helped draft the first “revenge porn” law; and Yiota Souras of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. All laid out — sometimes in graphic detail — ways that abusive partners and sexual predators have weaponized the web.

This happened in mid-February, and with a speed unheard of in government movement, the DoJ has miraculously come up with its solutions! Continue reading →

Mario’s smarter son came up with a solution for the dearth of hand sanitizer in New York:

The governor showed off gallons of the liquid — grandly unveiled from behind a thick curtain — at his now-daily coronavirus briefing and presented it as a novel solution to price-gouging of name-brand sanitizer. And he seemed genuinely taken with the product, saying the state would be capable of making 100,000 gallons per week and warning online retailers again that they should stop overcharging.

No doubt Governor Andy Cuomo thought this fix would receive plaudits, simultaneously put an end to price-gouging, a time-honored New York tradition, create an abundance of much-needed hand sanitizer, and do so by putting to use inmates in New York State prisons, who are paid an average of about 62 cents per hour for their labors and given something to do to pass the time. Andy was mistaken. Continue reading →

Tenth Circuit Judge Monroe McKay “said” the words out loud:

This concern is only heightened when there is not only evidence that the school exhibits an anti-respondent bias generally but also colorable evidence that the school employed that bias in the sexual-misconduct proceeding at issue. Here, for instance, there is colorable evidence that the investigators:
• refused to follow leads that were potentially exculpatory; Continue reading →

It’s not as if he were arguing that the earth is flat or gravity doesn’t exist. Still it cost him his job as a tenure-track professor.

My troubles began in October 2019 when I was invited to address an evolutionary group at the University of Alabama. I had decided that I would discuss human population variation, the hypothesis that human biological differences are at least partially produced by different environments selecting for different physical and psychological traits in their populations over time. I planned to defend this view as most consistent with a Darwinian understanding of the world.

Sound crazy or like, well, science? Continue reading →

David Leonhardt says the left has a problem. They just can’t stop losing.

The biggest lesson is simply this: The American left doesn’t care enough about winning.

It’s an old problem, one that has long undermined left-wing movements in this country. They have often prioritized purity over victory. They wouldn’t necessarily put it these terms, but they have chosen to lose on their terms rather than win with compromise.

He’s certainly got a point, that what they call a “progressive” agenda is so absolute that it tolerates no discussion, question or challenge. And as Leonhardt notes, many people generally approve of much of the agenda. Continue reading →