A New York City subway car during rush hour is a vicious place, with people packed like sardines, pushing to get into a blocked door, as people push to get out, knowing that the next train could be right behind or 15 minutes away. If the latter, you’re late for work, having already waited 15 minutes for the train to come. The longer the wait, the more packed the train and the more desperate riders on the platform to force their way on.

And bodies touch. Hands touch. Torsos too. One person pushes and five others push back.

Sometimes, the groin of one person rubs against the body of another. Sometimes, it’s because of the laws of physics. Sometimes, it’s because the person whose groin does the rubbing is engaged in a sexual assault. There is no doubt it happens, and many women on the train can attest that they have felt a groin push up against them, grinding. Some scream. Some punch. Some freeze, not certain what to do, not certain if this is the errant groin on a packed train or a perv getting his thrills. Continue reading →

While the calls for the elimination of the Electoral College as a fundamentally undemocratic institution are often dismissed as sour grapes for Hillary’s loss, that’s not exactly a strong argument for its existence or continuation. After all, the intuitive reaction to a mechanism for electing a president that, as it’s argued, ignores the will of they majority by over-valuing the votes of sparsely populated small, rural states, certainly seems to emit an unpleasant whiff.

Jamelle Buie says it’s not just about Trump, even if he’s the poster boy for how the EC went horribly wrong.

In February, I wrote about the Electoral College, its origins and its problems. Whatever its potential merits, it is a plainly undemocratic institution. It undermines the principle of “one person, one vote,” affirmed in 1964 by the Supreme Court in Reynolds v. Sims — a key part of the civil and voting rights revolution of that decade. It produces recurring political crises. And it threatens to delegitimize the entire political system by creating larger and larger splits between who wins the public and who wins the states.

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I never watched Fear Factor. I’m no fan of UFC fighting. And I truly despise podcasts, preferring to read to get information. This is my way of saying that the only thing I know about Joe Rogan is what I read and one funny but politically wrong song. On the other hand, I’m familiar with Justin Peters because he stepped onto my turf.

We are living in the dumbest period of modern American history, where our centering institutions have destabilized, our governing social norms seem unenforceable, and our fast-food restaurants routinely insult one another on Twitter. Into this breach have stepped myriad articulate charlatans, aggro-provocateurs, and other confident dullards who seek to capitalize on the end of authority by using the internet to proclaim their own truths. Their goal is to convince the world’s least-informed people that they are actually the most-informed people, and they are very good at their jobs.

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But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint a Starry Night again, man!’ You know?

–Joni Mitchell, Miles of Aisles

Did you know that some cops commit crimes? What about the limits of Artificial Intelligence, constrained by garbage in, garbage out, providing algorithms that are either grounded in racism by proxy or manipulated to prove the belief that, since there can be no such thing as a disparity between races, the results are faked to align with fantasies?

Did you know that cops, of all colors and genders, are more afraid of young black guys than anyone else, and so respond too quickly to fear and kill them? Did you know that prosecutors understand their fear and don’t prosecute them? Continue reading →

As Erik Wemple satirically noted, the great experiment is how long cable news can talk about a report it doesn’t have? Lionel Richie had the answer. Since the day after the 2016 election, well-intended people have been pounding away. At every twit. Every policy, appointment, act and utterance. I warned some friends, smart and passionate people, who took that path that they would not only fail to achieve their goal, but would undermine their cause by doing so.

One lie is a tragedy. One million is a statistic.

Call it burnout. Outrage fatigue. It’s not that Trump’s every act wasn’t worthy of criticism, huge or trivial, significant or merely the sort of twist that could only matter if your hatred was so deep that you were blind to the fact that no one outside of your echo chamber cared. Yet, there they were, pounding away. Daily. Hourly. Pounding, pounding, pounding. Only the most passionate bothered to listen anymore. It was obvious this would happen. Continue reading →

Whoever drafted the EO for the president did his best to make it viable.

It is the policy of the Federal Government to:

(a) encourage institutions to foster environments that promote open, intellectually engaging, and diverse debate, including through compliance with the First Amendment for public institutions and compliance with stated institutional policies regarding freedom of speech for private institutions;

To the extent there’s any point to this, it’s to direct the Department of Education to get off its butt and do something. It’s not as if the First Amendment wasn’t there before for all to see. And the reaction from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, was a grimace and a shrug. Continue reading →

The saga of Mississippi death row inmate Curtis Flowers, whose case was just argued before the Supreme Court following his sixth trial for the murder of four people at a furniture store in 1996, struck even Justice Sam Alito as too much to endure, calling it “troubling,” and Justice Brett Kavanaugh was as clear as possible in asking Mississippi Assistant Attorney General Jason Davis:

“Can you say, as you sit here today [that] you have confidence in how this all transpired in this case?”

Flowers has spent 22 years in custody up to now, after his first through third trial convictions were reversed, his fourth and fifth trials hung, and his sixth resulted in the current conviction. The issue is Batson, the use of peremptory strikes by District Attorney Doug Evans to remove as many black people from the jury as he could. Continue reading →

Life with a criminal record has its undeniable hardships. Some would argue that if a person commits a crime, then they’ve brought it on themselves and deserve nothing more than the life they’ve created. While the argument has some simplistic appeal, it ignores the fact that the impact has exploded, from credit ratings to housing, from SORA to mugshots on the internet, to preclusion from education and licensure. How could anyone trust a barber with a record?

Then there’s the liability potential, as causes of action have been created by myriad laws holding people accountable for the acts of others, in the workplace and at the apartment complexes. Responses to the sad tears of the moment’s victims made complete sense to some, but created a purgatory where not only could a past crime, for which the debt had been paid in full, remain as a permanent taint, but a hard fact that not even the most empathetic of souls could overlook.

In law, there is a mechanism called “expungement,” the legal elimination of a criminal record as if it never happened. Can this end the taint, give those who made a mistake, or copped a plea even though they didn’t commit the crime, the chance to enjoy a productive, law-abiding life? Continue reading →

While Tamara Lanier of Norwich, Connecticut, sent a letter to then-Harvard president, Drew Faust, in 2011, explaining how she comes to the claim of lineage, the content of the letter remains unknown. She calls him her great-great-great-grandfather. She calls him “Papa Renty.” She claims to know his story. It’s possible she does, though it’s unlikely.

Renty, along with his daughter Delia, were slaves in South Carolina. They were the subjects of nude photographs by a Harvard biologist, Louis Agassiz, who was engaged in “research” to prove the inferiority of the race.

At the center of the case is a series of 1850 daguerreotypes, an early type of photo, taken of two South Carolina slaves identified as Renty and his daughter, Delia. Both were posed shirtless and photographed from several angles. The images are believed to be the earliest known photos of American slaves. Continue reading →

The opinion in Nielson v. Preap would naturally be dreaded, given that Justice Sam Alito wrote for the majority. It does remarkably little to the law, essentially holding that “when released” under 8 U.S.C. § 1226(c)(1) means at any time after a non-citizen is released from criminal incarceration. The upshot is that once seized as deportable under a few subsections of law that cover essentially everything short of a speeding ticket, the person can be held without opportunity for bond in, essentially, perpetuity.

The opinion is beyond tedious, which may explain why this ‘splainer seems nearly unrecognizable to anyone who actually read the decision. Trigger warning: if you read this from the syllabus, you will hate yourself for not listening to my warning. Continue reading →