In the BT era, before every waking moment was spent obsessing over the hour’s idiocy from the White House, there was a quiet revolt taking place in the courthouse by a handful of United States Magistrate Judges challenging the government’s efforts to remain a few steps ahead of the law and technology. I dubbed it the Magistrate’s Revolt. Good times. Fond memories of when law was still something of interest.

It’s back. Well, not quite back, as in some critical mass of people focusing on the same government apparatus as flourished before Trump, but at least a a few finding it worthy of attention again. Most notably, the New York Times has shifted from its “All Trump, All the time” status to giving a little real estate to a substantive legal issue of monumental important and doubtful sexiness. It begins with the plight of poor Timothy Carpenter, as Cristian Farias describes, who won huge and will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Timothy Carpenter won’t be remembered for the circumstances that landed him in prison, but for the Supreme Court case that bears his name. Continue reading →

At Arc Digital,* Roderick Graham takes his best shot at defending the honor of what he calls “critical studies,” that strain of “scholarship” taken to task by the Sokal Squared hoax. Deep into his argument, he questions why non-academics, outsiders to critical studies, give a damn about whether it’s a legit field of scholarship.

Many who denounce critical studies are political grievers. Research identifying more instances of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth bear with them implications. At the least, it accuses whites, men, heterosexuals, and cisgendered people as a class — though not necessarily as individuals — as being in need of change. At the most, the research suggests adoption of policies that reduce racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. People who benefit from the status quo, or who are otherwise opposed to changing it, are less inclined to explore its flaws.

Political grievers are usually outside of academia and other forms of knowledge production, and often have only a passing interest in the actual production of knowledge. Continue reading →

It was the second call, after business hours, from the reporter for the London Times when she told me that long-time New York County assistant district attorney Elizabeth Lederer had announced that she would not be seeking reappointment to her post as adjunct at Columbia Law School. The first call was about whether she should.

There’s little doubt Columbia will be able to find a replacement. Adjunct lawprofs are a dime a dozen, even if it’s a bit harder to find someone who has the experience of prosecuting thousands of cases, trying hundreds(?), spending 39 years in the trenches of 100 Centre Street. Whether a prosecutor would be my personal choice for teaching trial practice to law students isn’t the point; that was Columbia’s choice and I get no vote. But apparently, she did it well enough to remain there, be asked to return year after year. Until now. Continue reading →

There was little doubt in the New York Times that this epidemic was destroying the City.

Despite the more than $500 million spent by the city in the last fiscal year on drug-related enforcement alone – more than twice the amount in fiscal 1986 -the presence of crack is more pervasive, more violent and more insidious in its effect on New Yorkers, particularly the poor.

Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer demanded action to stop this plague, and the Times completely agreed. Continue reading →

Proclaiming rights, be it housing, healthcare, food “security,” or whatever it is that people would really like to have, gathers around it fans of the benefit without much thought to the two questions that got shoved aside. What, aside from people would really like to have it, makes the thing people want a “right,” and how, as a practical matter, do we accommodate it in conjunction with other “rights,” including the “right” not to be subject to confiscatory taxes to pay for it?

This isn’t to suggest that we should let people starve to death in cardboard boxes on the street while suffering from typhus and depression. As a matter of sound social policy, we should have a social safety net to feed, house and treat people in need. But does that make it a “right”? Can a person demand his right to a split-level house, a steak dinner and rhinoplasty? What about a lawyer?

The Supreme Court held in Gideon that every indigent criminal defendant is entitled to a lawyer for his defense. a right that derives from the Sixth Amendment. We’ve done a mediocre to poor job of fulfilling that right, a problem that pops onto the radar fairly regularly, only to be displaced by some more radical concern a day, an hour, later. Continue reading →

It’s eminently understandable why participants in a Dyke March might be inclined to harbor some fear, given that Naxos stepped forward at the Motor City march to conclusively demonstrate the flaw in Darwin’s theory.

When word of gunshots spread at the D.C. March, running for cover was hardly an unreasonable thing to do. Continue reading →

Unlike the problems confronted by a male student on an ordinary college campus accused of rape, a male cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point was confronted with a better, and worse, scenario. The Uniform Code of Military Justice applied, rather than the manufactured pseudosystem at civilian colleges, but the political pressure on the military to follow the tough-on-sex crimes narrative has been intense.

“There is in my experience a tremendous amount of pressure from panels in the military to convict,” [William] Cassara said. “That was especially true at West Point.”

And convict they did. Continue reading →

SJ has been graced by the favors of Guitardave, and the very least I can do in return is thank him for his kind infusion of culture into this machine and provide a modest platform for the world premier of his latest song.

More than that, so much of what ends up on the screen here deals with the damage we do to ourselves and others, the destruction we wreak and suffer, leaving all of us damaged in its wake. This puts us to the test of whether we take the hit and give up, or pull ourselves together, stand up despite knowing that we’re likely to get hit again and do our best to survive. We may have been flawed before, and may be wrong to think we’re going to do any better next time, but we will not quit.

From Guitardave, Reconstructed Man.

Continue reading →

Too often, a young black man will be accused of an offense by the misguided assumption that he’s more prone to crime, more prone to violence, and when this happens, it demands redress. But sometimes, the young black man did it, and the person who accused him is wrongly accused of being a racist. Welcome to Oberlin College.

A student tried to buy alcohol with a fake ID and shoplift from Allyn D. Gibson, David Gibson’s son. Allyn D. Gibson followed the student out of the store, and the two got into a physical altercation.

Two other students got involved, and police have said when they arrived the three students were hitting Allyn D. Gibson while he was on the ground.

Allyn D. Gibson is white and the students are black. The three students pleaded guilty in August 2017 to misdemeanor charges and read statements into the record acknowledging that Allyn D. Gibson was within his right to detain the shoplifter and that his actions were not racially motivated.

Shoplifting isn’t the biggest deal crime around. Nor is trying to use a fake ID. But it’s still a crime, and stealing, despite the views of some newly elected prosecutors, is still inherently wrong. Somewhere else, this scenario might have played out quietly, in the usual course of events, where the kid who stole got his hand slapped. But not at Oberlin College.

But in the two days immediately after the shoplifting incident, Oberlin College students protested in front of the bakery and passed out flyers urging people to boycott the bakery, alleging the bakery had a history of racial profiling. Oberlin College stopped ordering from the bakery after the protests but resumed in January 2017. The college once again stopped ordering from Gibson’s after the lawsuit was filed in November 2017.

Much as the “tough on crime” crowd takes a knee-jerk position that the black kid must have committed the crime, the Oberlin community did the same, but opposite. The white accuser must have been racist. Not just the students, but the professors and the dean of students as well.

The suit also said Oberlin Vice President and Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo and other college staff members “handed out hundreds of copies” of a flier to the community and the media stating that Gibson’s Bakery and its owners racially profiled and discriminated against the three students.

The court documents include a copy of the flier, which included the words “DON’T BUY.”

“This is a RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION,” the flier read, according to the lawsuit.

The dean subsequently “explained” that she was facilitating free speech by the students. Isn’t free speech good, as the apologists for hate speech keep crying? Oberlin’s general counsel Donica Thomas Varner made the argument.

Neither Oberlin College nor Dean Meredith Raimondo defamed a local business or its owners, and they never endorsed statements made by others. Rather, the College and Dr. Raimondo worked to ensure that students’ freedom of speech was protected and that the student demonstrations were safe and lawful, and they attempted to help the plaintiffs repair any harm caused by the student’s protests.

Nothing about Varner’s argument served to ameliorate the harm done to Gibson’s Bakery or the members of the family.

In May testimony during the trial, David Gibson said the protests “devastated” the bakery’s revenue, which forced staffing cuts. The bakery went from 10 to 12 employees with six to seven of whom were full time to six to seven employees and only one working full time, David Gibson testified during the trial.

This also included several family members working without pay. David Gibson and Allyn Gibson told the court they haven’t collected pay since the protests occurred, nor have David’s wife, son and grandson. David Gibson’s brother, who lives in Canton, works 40 to 60 hours a week at the bakery without pay.

The harm was reflected in the jury’s verdict, totaling $11 million,* which may yet be trebled when the issue of punitive damages is determined.

Aren’t students and staff at Oberlin entitled to protest? Of course they are, and they should be. But that’s not remotely the question here. The college didn’t get slammed for protesting, but for defamation. Defamation is not protected speech, nor does it become protected speech because the students at Oberlin passionately believes that any accusation against a black student must be racist.

There is, of course, a perspective from which this verdict must be wrong, the Gibsons must be racist and the shoplifter must be forgiven, innocent, even if he did what he allocuted to doing. After all, aren’t all white people inherently racist? Aren’t all black people inherently oppressed? And as a member of an oppressed community, despite going to one very pricey college, isn’t the student entitled to steal things from white-owned businesses?

These may well be questions properly pondered in the confines of academia, although the hyper-racialization of criminal issues has served to skew consideration away from the more difficult issues posed by facts and circumstances into the broader philosophical questions that allow any delusion to serve as a substitute for what happened in any individual case.

But when the assumptions of critical race theory manifest on the campus of a college, destroying a legitimate business and its owners, and its owners’ family, by tarring them with blind societal assumptions as racists when the facts ultimately show them to be nothing more than the victim of the petty offense of shoplifting, it’s got nothing to do with social justice. It’s just a wrongful attack based on false assumptions. And when it comes to a campus where the lie is prone to flourish, few places are more likely than Oberlin College.

The assumption that a young black man is likely to be a criminal is racist. The assumption that any accusation of a young black man committing a crime is false is similarly racist. Sometimes, the crime happened and defaming the accuser without regard to the facts is the wrong in need of redress, even if there’s no room in your worldview for facts and the possibility that the white guy isn’t the bad guy and this time, the black kid did it.

The jury heard the facts and Oberlin didn’t merely lose, but suffered a crushing damages verdict that will strain a college in dubious financial position, impact the tuition of future students who played no role in this delusion and likely change no passionate mind on one of the most progressive campuses in America, certain that it must have been racism because that explains everything.

That’s what happened at Oberlin College.

*”The jury awarded $5.8 million for David, $3 million for Allyn and $2.2 million for the bakery, with a further determination to be made of whether to award treble punitive damages. I defer to the jury on the appropriateness of the amounts awarded.

Whenever I return home from dinner with my oldest and dearest friend, Donald, Dr. SJ asks me how his kids are doing. I tell her they’re doing great, whereupon Dr. SJ gives me the stink eye. She knows me too well. She then says, “You didn’t even ask, did you?” It’s not true. I ask.

How are the kids?
They’re doing  great. How about yours?
They’re doing great too.

And then we talk about other things, like work and current events, or perhaps a humorous reminiscence about our old high school buddy, Spencer. You know what we never talk about? Continue reading →