Mark Zuckerberg sat alone at a table in one of the most massive Senate joint committee hearings ever, with 44 senators, nearly half the Senate, in attendance so as not to miss the opportunity to speechify for the cameras. The senators understood one thing: the internet is bigger and more powerful than they are, and there was no way they were going to pass up the opportunity to create a record about how they’re going to protect the children.

My first joke was that Zuck’s entrance into the chamber brought the average age of the room down by 58 years. Cute, if hyperbolic, right? But what wasn’t an exaggeration was that Zuck showed up wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, a lavender tie, like a normie. He dressed respectfully, which means he didn’t have the guts to wear a Def Leppard tee. What a coward.

Even worse, he behaved himself. He listened to the 44 speechify, threaten, ask insipid questions (how many Nevadans had their data breached? Are you kidding?), and he responded. No snark. No ridicule. He played it straight. It was disgusting. Continue reading →

Donald Trump twitted “Attorney-client privilege is dead.” It was no less inane than any other Trump twit, but buried within the typically ignorant grasp of law is a matter of grave concern for lawyers and clients. The search of his lawyer’s office fell within the long-recognized crime/fraud exception, but the cheering and jeering of the groundlings should be disturbing.

Never before has the sanctity of the attorney/client privilege been so thrillingly dismissed. Even if, as is almost assuredly the case, there was exceptionally good cause to breach the privilege, it should never be taken lightly. It should never be treated as a facile resort, founded on mere probable cause.

Does Michael Cohen have other clients? What of their privilege? Does Cohen have privileged communications of his prime client that have no bearing on the evidence for which the warrants were issued? These privileged communications may well be seen as the feds parse Cohen’s papers, computers, for what they’re authorized to search for by the warrant. They may get what they came for, but they will get a whole lot more in the process. What if it’s not Trump that comes into plain view, but someone else? What if that someone else is you? Oops. Continue reading →

Ellery Dake graduated from Stanford in 2014, but whatever demons she possessed as an undergraduate have never left her. And she apparently has many demons, all of which were awakened by her #MeToo moment. And eight years later, she demands “alumni justice.”

While Ellery Dake ’14 was a Stanford undergraduate, another student — then a member of the football team — allegedly raped her. Nearly eight years later, this January, Dake began pursuing punitive action against him through Stanford’s Title IX Office.

The lede is somewhat misleading. Apparently Dake was raped with some regularity, and this is but one of them. And before she sought “punitive action” against a guy eight years later, after both had taken their diplomas and moved on, she engaged in “self help” by writing letters, as her feelings compelled her to do as her demons demanded. Continue reading →

When news broke that a warrant issued out of the Southern District of New York for multiple raids on Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s lawyer and, as some newspapers add, “fixer,” as if that’s not redundant, there was only one thing clear: this was going to be a big deal.

No, not a big deal as in the equivalent of a judge issuing a warrant to allow a cop to take pictures of a teenager’s erect penis. Nor a big deal as in an unarmed black man shot to death. Those are substantive “big deals,” as in they are real. This was a perceived “big deal,” as in millions of people lose their minds over every burp and fart by, for or to this president. And the SDNY case was “referred” by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

So this was a big deal, if you define that by the talking heads on cable TV discussing nothing else, and nothing they know anything about. because millions of people will watch, eat up every morsel of mindless and mindful speculation, believe in the most vague and meaningless weasel assertions without once stopping to ask, “wait, exactly how long is ‘many, many, many weeks,” because some WaPo reporter says that based on her experience, this “must have” been in the works for that long to put together such a complicated raid. None of this, by the way, is necessarily true, but it can be, or not, if she actually said anything substantive. Continue reading →

It wasn’t long after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United that serious, if not hysterical, concerns were raised about corporations expending huge sums of money to buy state court judges. With some exceptions, it didn’t come to pass. Given the way state courts work, it wasn’t a solid investment.*

But times change, and the Least Dangerous Branch succumbed to the screeches of politicization that permeated people’s perception of everything.

Last week in Wisconsin, an election for an open seat on the State Supreme Court was so bitterly contested that voters were barraged with more than $2.6 million in television and radio ads. Most of the money was spent by partisan outside groups attacking the candidates, who were nominally nonpartisan, for past decisions in criminal cases.

Continue reading →

Whenever the push is on for private platforms to censor their environment, someone will raise the issue of free speech, and someone else will respond that the First Amendment only applies to government. Of course, that’s correct, and every private company, be it Facebook, Youtube or Twitter, can choose to censor its platform as it sees fit.

But as Jesse Walker argues, as legally accurate as that may be, it’s not the full story.

When YouTube, Facebook or Twitter cracks down on some form of expression — conspiracy theories, radical rants, terrorist propaganda — some of the targets inevitably complain that their freedom of speech is under attack. (This feeling of victimhood may be what sent Nasim Aghdam to YouTube headquarters, gun in hand.) There is a strong retort to this: These are private platforms with a right to decide what they publish. It is no more a violation of the 1st Amendment for YouTube to muzzle a channel it finds offensive than it is for this newspaper to refuse to run a column calling for Minnesota to invade Wisconsin. Continue reading →

Is there any group of academics friendlier than philosophers?

In February, a group of philosophers, including me, submitted an amicus curiae brief to the New York Court of Appeals in support of legal personhood for Kiko and Tommy. (Members of the group contributed to this article as well.) The court is considering whether to allow the case to proceed.

Kiko? Tommy? They’re philosophers’ friends too. Continue reading →

It was back in 2012 when the now-woke Preet Bharara made his huge splash by revealing his prosecution of a massive fraud being perpetrated by former employees of the Long Island Rail Road. Massive. MASSIVE!!! How much we adored Preet for protecting the public fisc from these lying, scheming miscreants. No one adored Preet, and accepted his every word about this massive (did I mention massive?) scheme, as much as the media. Rumor is that there was a shrine to Preet at Newsday.

In contrast, an old lawyer called bullshit. He did so over and over, not just because it was “mostly” a sham, but because almost everything being told the public about it was false. And in the process, this “massive” group of individuals and their families affected by this sham found themselves in an impossible position.

Reviled by the public for being fraudsters. No one in the media willing to listen, to learn, that they were spewing prosecutorial nonsense. Their disability payments cut off, threatened with prison, the loss of their homes and savings, humiliation, these were people who not only suffered from a disability in real life, but now suffered from the threat of their lives being destroyed in futuro. And the public was thrilled by it. Continue reading →

The point of a business is to make money, and some entrepreneurs try to distinguish their business with unusual gimmicks. Remember the topless car wash? Whether it’s a good idea isn’t the point. The point is to bring in business, which brings us to the highly competitive enterprise of coffee.

Starbucks? Who would have ever believed that normal sentient beings would spring for $5 to buy a cup of joe they could purchase for $1? They gave the sizes odd names, and came up with beverages by adding -ccino to the end of unrelated words, all to create the fiction that their peculiar tasting grind was better than the swill you could buy for a fifth of the price. And it worked.

That meant that people who wanted to compete had to come up with something different, and so Hillbilly Hotties was born. What’s their gimmick? The police were not amused. Continue reading →

There have been no shortage of screw-ups, from the years of delay in the murder trial of Brian Solano to the 2015 video of the interrogation of Justis Colon, admitting he had the murder weapon at time of the murder, that has miraculously emerged since.

Prosecutors with the Bronx district attorney’s office did not disclose video of a key 2015 NYPD interview until April 2017. But the video, in which another man, Justis Colon, told cops that he possessed the murder weapon, was leaked to Solano’s private investigator Manuel Gomez and provided exclusively to In Justice Today.

As to why each of the three Bronx assistants neglected to turn this over to Solano’s lawyer, Dawn Florio, nobody seems to know much of anything. Oopsie. Sorry.  Continue reading →