Which is the more useful skill for a successful life, to be able to speak before an audience or to be able to make excuses to justify failure? The newest discrimination is based upon the latter.

But in the past few years, students have started calling out in-class presentations as discriminatory to those with anxiety, demanding that teachers offer alternative options. This week, a tweet posted by a 15-year-old high-school student declaring “Stop forcing students to present in front of the class and give them a choice not to” garnered more than 130,000 retweets and nearly half a million likes. A similar sentiment tweeted in January also racked up thousands of likes and retweets. And teachers are listening.

Math is hard. Conjugating verbs is hard. Heck, picking words beyond “awesome” and “gross” is too hard for many young people to manage. But public speaking? Continue reading →

Finally, the draft of new Title IX regulations for campus sexual harassment adjudications has become publicly available. They’re unfortunately long, at ~120 pages, which is often confused with comprehensive rather than overdone. The more lengthy the explanation, the more confusing and confused it often becomes. But given the controversial nature of trying to put the genie back in the lamp, equivocation comes as no surprise.

The premise of the changes seems fine.

Ironically, the substance of Title IX,  20 U.S.C. § 1681(a), itself is short and to the point.  Continue reading →

It’s that time again. I’ve handed the keys to the SJ doublewide to wunderkind, David Meyer-Lindenberg and wished him the best, while Dr. SJ and I sip wine and think happy thoughts.

Consider this an open thread, to discuss amongst yourselves whatever is happening in the world, whatever interests you, whatever needs to be discussed, but without me. Have fun. Be kind to each other. Don’t make anyone stupider. I’ll be back. Eventually. Probably. Please don’t wreck the place while I’m away, and nobody touches the Healey. Thank you.

Having watched most of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, I deserve a medal. It was a passion play of epic nonsense, designed not to serve any useful constitutional function of “advise and consent,” but to inflame an audience ripe for fury. The Republicans played to their team. The Democrats played to their team. Nobody played to America. Nobody seems to remember that there’s an America out there that still believes there will be a nation after the current ship of fools runs aground.

Watching it with the eyes of a lawyer, knowing that this was a vote on the Supremes that would decide cases that would impact real people’s lives, was infuriating, not because Kavanaugh was the dreaded fifth conservative vote on the Court, but because it revealed so precious little about Kavanaugh. Continue reading →

Ed. Note: This is a guest post by Charles Landrum, who practices trademark and copyright law in Roswell, Georgia.

A headline caught my eye: “Brett Kavanaugh respects precedent about as much as I respect Brett Kavanaugh.” ¹

Good ol’ precedent. Bronze the ones you like, burn the ones you don’t. How often the passionate forget that Plessy was precedent. Until it wasn’t. Buck v. Bell still is. I clicked, expecting a typical confirmation-hearing article about how this nominee isn’t respecting those precedents that the author likes. What precedent had Judge Kavanaugh disrespected, out of his 300 opinions during his time on the D.C. Circuit? Was it so bad that, after granting cert, one of the nine benchslapped him from across town?

No. Not even close. Continue reading →

The New York Times did something that almost never happens: it published an anonymous op-ed.

I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

The op-ed goes on to do make two primary points, the first being that Trump is singularly unqualified to be president, by knowledge, experience, temperament and, perhaps, capacity. The second is that there are people within the White House who are interfering with the president’s performance of his office because they have decided they know better. Continue reading →

It may be Wednesday, but that doesn’t mean we can’t pretend otherwise, which has become something of a national pastime. As noted previously, there is a national prison strike happening, although no one who doesn’t focus on criminal law or prisoners’ rights would be aware of it. That’s unfortunate, as the striking prisoners have real issues and are taking significant risks with their welfare to do something about it.

One of the primary issues at stake is prison “slavery,” that prisoners are forced to work without wages, or for inadequate wages. The Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery in general, carved out an exception for people convicted of crimes. While slavery remains constitutionally permissible in prison, that doesn’t mean it’s either right or should be exploited. We don’t have to make prisoners slaves. Should we?

At the Washington Post, David Fathi of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, argues for why prisoners should be paid a reasonable wage for their work. Continue reading →

Having barely gotten through Eric Goldman’s post about the Vermont Supreme Court’s decision holding the state’s revenge porn statute constitutional, a horrible image popped into my head.

It was Mark Bennett, having put enormous time and effort into thinking about, arguing, fighting revenge porn laws in Texas and Georgia, only to learn that whoever argued the case before the Vermont Supreme Court blew it. Why didn’t they reach out to him, the guy who won Ex parte Jones.

But the lawyer from the state Office of the Defender General decided to go it on her own. And she lost. Now, Bennett is applying for admission to the Curmudgeon’s Club. Continue reading →

As it turned out, she didn’t have the $9,000 needed to pay. She was on her way to pay two “contractors,” which apparently means drivers working for her trucking company, M & C Gonzalez Trucking, but didn’t have the funds to pay. What’s a woman to do?

[Maria Gonzalez] told Fresno police detectives she’d been driving east at Floradora Avenue and 8th Street when she stopped for two dogs in the roadway, Dyer said.

She claimed two African American males wearing masks, one armed with a handgun, then got into her back seat and ordered her to drive. Gonzalez said she continued to drive for two hours in the Fresno area when she was asked to pull over. She said one of the males got into the driver’s seat and drove, and she was placed into the back seat.

Gonzalez said she then woke up alone in the back seat of the vehicle, with her hands tied behind her back, and gagged with a rag. She’d also said there was a bump on the side of her head from being struck or beaten, and claimed $9,000 was missing from her purse.

Continue reading →

As SJ has been around for more than a few Labor Days, I’ve largely played out as much as I’ve had to say about organized labor. But recently, I’ve twitted a bit about public sector unionism being a travesty. I have no burning desire to engage in a twitfight with people whose grasp of unions is limited to “solidarity, yah!”

To discuss any subject requires some small depth of knowledge about it. The platitudinous crowd knows what it feels, and needs to know nothing more, making any engagement neither fun nor useful. Workers deserve to be paid a “decent” wage? Sure, but that doesn’t address anything of value. What’s a “decent” wage? Who pays it? Don’t the people who pay it deserve to be paid a “decent” wage too, especially if the money taken from them to pay public employees leaves them impoverished?

And then there’s the entire concept of public sector unionism that’s fundamentally and irreconcilably flawed, not to mention the ability of public employees to influence their paymasters by both their vote and their union bribes. But I digress. Continue reading →