New Jersey has decided to get ahead of the curve, which makes sense given how it’s been unpleasantly far behind for most of its existence. A bill has been approved by the Assembly Law and Public Safety Committee to require the attorney general to create a training program for police to deal with future tech, driverless cars.

The State Attorney General, in consultation with New Jersey’s Transportation Commissioner, would be required to create a training course to prepare law enforcement to interact with autonomous vehicles under a bill (A-4977) approved Monday by the Assembly Law and Public Safety Committee. The legislation’s sponsors, Assembly Democrats Carol Murphy (D-Burlington), Annette Quijano (D-Union) and Raj Mukherji (D-Hudson) released the following joint statement:

It certainly appears that autonomous cars will be here soon, although it’s unclear how soon it will be. There is much to commend them, and much to question. At the moment, the cars aren’t being tested in New Jersey, so it’s not as if they have even a tiny problem dealing with them. Yet. Continue reading →

When dreaded Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos withdrew the “Dear Colleague Letter” and its ensuing “guidance,” then issued new regs which were put through the rigors of Notice and Comment as required by law, heads exploded. Providing the accused with minimal due process on campus was tantamount to giving rapists a free ride, activists screamed.

But it begged the question, would any of this matter? Would colleges care what the regs provided, or would they ignore them, continue to apply rules that deprived  males any chance to defend themselves? Absent mandatory language in the regs, or court decisions like Doe v. Baum, who was going to make colleges change?

Appearing at The Atlantic Education Summit, Shalala — who served as president of the University of Miami from 2001 to 2015 — criticized DeVos for her department’s rollback of several Obama-era regulations and guidance documents, including those regarding Title IX. Continue reading →

It was outrageously expensive, even by New York restaurant standards, for Italian. But Del Posto was able to pull it off because it had a celebrity chef at the top, Mario Batali. Had it opened with some other chef, say one by the name of Melissa Rodriguez, the food may well have been good, but it never would have made it. It’s not that there aren’t female celebrity chefs, or that every man-chef is a celebrity, but some chefs managed to become celebrities and others did not. Batali did. Rodriguez did not.

Today, Melissa Rodriguez is the chef of Del Posto, which retains its outrageous prices, but not Batali. New York Times food critic Pete Wells begins his re-review of this previously four-star restaurant with the most critical information about a restaurant possible.

Negotiations took more than a year, but Mr. Batali no longer profits from Del Posto, having sold his stake in March to a group led by his former partner, Joe Bastianich. Employees have said that Mr. Bastianich himself helped, at a minimum, to build the sexist and disrespectful environment in which Mr. Batali operated. Mr. Bastianich has apologized, saying that he had heard Mr. Batali speak inappropriately to employees, and that he should have done more to stop the sexual harassment.

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Just to be clear, I love my neighbors. They’re great people, and we’ve gotten along famously for decades. They respect our privacy and quiet enjoyment. We respect theirs. We dine together a few times a year, and we’ve watched each other’s children grow up. Having great neighbors makes life at home infinitely more enjoyable.

But would I want them to be able to ticket me?

Some D.C. residents may soon be receiving parking tickets from their neighbors.

A pilot program, called the Citizen Safety Enforcement Pilot Program, would allow up to 10 people per ward to dole out citations after receiving some training.

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It’s one thing to read tea leaves and claim they foretell the future. It’s possible. Maybe even probable, though it takes more than tea leaves to overcome the threshold of possibility and achieve probability. Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt may be the piece that pushes fear over the edge.

For UC-Irvine prawf Leah Litman, however, clawing from possible to probable isn’t fearful enough.

The Supreme Court made clear on Monday that Roe v. Wade may soon no longer be the law of the land.

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New York has never been a gun-friendly place, which made it a good venue to take the chance of sucking in Ohio gun seller, Charles Brown, when a gun he sold lawfully ended up being illegally sold to a “Buffalo gang member” and, ultimately, injuring the plaintiff. How far can New York’s long arm statute reach? Not that far, the Court of Appeals held.

Defendant Charles Brown, a federal firearm licensee, was authorized to sell handguns only in Ohio and only to Ohio residents, which he primarily accomplished through retail sales at gun shows held in various locations in Ohio. Brown did not maintain a website, had no retail store or business telephone listing, and did no advertising of any kind, except by posting a sign at his booth when participating in a gun show. In a series of transactions in 2000, Brown sold handguns to James Nigel Bostic and his associates. Prior to the transaction involving the gun at issue here, Brown consulted with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to ensure its legality. For each transaction, the necessary forms required by the ATF were properly completed and submitted, the purchaser passed the required Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) background check before the firearms were transferred, Brown verified that the purchaser had government-issued identification demonstrating Ohio residency, and notification of the purchases was timely sent to local law enforcement and the ATF as required by the federal Gun Control Act (see 18 USC § 922).

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He may only be woke lite, but South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg asked the question (at ~the 9 minute mark) to “what extent do you invite those people, or appear to be conferring honor on them?” By “those people,” he was referring to criminal defense lawyers in general, and Harvard lawprof Ron Sullivan, in particular, for representing Harvey Weinstein.

Of course, Sullivan wasn’t up for the Nobel Prize for his representation, but stripped of his position as Winthrop House dean. Is it too nuanced for Buttigieg to distinguish conferring an honor from being punished? He was a Harvard College grad, a Rhodes Scholar, but then again, he’s not a lawyer. Perhaps he just lacks an appreciation of the Constitution, in general, and the Sixth Amendment, in particular.

Except what appears otherwise obvious to lawyers, that the right to counsel is fundamental, is now subject to “reasonable” dispute among a certain cohort of lawyers, the public defenders. Continue reading →

It came after the protests, the  crying, the deeply-hurt feelings of unsafety expressed by the students so brilliant they are capable of transmuting the pain of people far, far away to their own world, via a transmission system leaping from actress to movie mogul, from movie mogul to lawyer, from lawyer to housemaster faculty dean, and from there to students, to house culture, to the threat in the middle of the day or the middle of the night that waves of rapist threat will somehow permeate Winthrop House at Harvard College.

After all, this, the savvy students searched history like a twitter feed for that errant twit they could throw out and scream, “AHA!!! He was always awful.” And they believe it, because despite all their brilliance, they remain insipid children.

Harvard College, by its dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, decided not to renew the appointments of law prof Ronald Sullivan and his wife, law instructor, Stephanie Robinson, as faculty deans of Winthrop House. They were out. They were out because Sullivan joined the defense team for Harvey Weinstein. Continue reading →

Not until the end does Malcolm Harris give it a name, and it’s a good one: Subprime Kids. Like puppies, kids evade criticism, as they possess an innate purity that shouldn’t be subject to cynicism. While they may turn bad, turn sour, along the way, no child starts out that way, and so each deserves their chance to be all they can be. It’s got enormous appeal.

But Harris’ description of I.S.A.s, income share agreements, otherwise sounds like a pretty good pitch.

Now private capital is starting to find its way into I.S.A.s, through a handful of online computer science training programs. With names like Pathrise, Thinkful and the Lambda School, these “career accelerators” provide tech companies with certified coders and provide participants with a credential in months, not years. Students in these programs can pay by way of an I.S.A. that is financed and serviced by investors gathered under their own Silicon Valley-style names like Leif.

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Much to the chagrin outrage of many of the unduly passionate advocates for criminal law reform, I’ve refused to succumb to the facile, if simplistic, mantra of “everything is racism or sexism.” Indeed, I’ve explained why this is both wrong and a dangerous conflation of two extant problems that exist side by side, but separate, which is why they don’t want to hang out with me anymore. If you’re not part of their tribe, you’re part of their enemies’ tribe.

When it comes to an issue like the death penalty, invariably emotionally charged and particularly susceptible to reduction to absurdity, the calls that the system is broken because it’s racist are particularly loud and strident. It’s bad enough that so many advocates think only black and brown people are arrested and imprisoned, rather than grasp that they may be disproportionately targeted, but the same system puts white people in prison as well.

In California, where the death penalty remains a theoretically available punishment, the problem with this misguided understanding of the problem came to a head. Continue reading →