At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf uses the Bari Weiss twitter attack as a vehicle to challenge the value of “call-out culture,” the social justice reaction to whatever is perceived as a violation of their orthodoxy.

The writer Mark Joseph Stern, who had the last reaction, argued that “the original tweet—while not maliciously racist by any means—perpetuated the real and serious problem of the ‘perpetual foreigner’ stereotype that dogs so many Asian-Americans.” Agree or disagree, anyone can understand that critique. What I don’t understand—what I’d still like to understand—is the approach taken by the many people who treated the tweet as if it were malicious; or who attacked or “dragged” Weiss; or treated her with fierce hostility. I want to know if and why they believe their approach can plausibly advance social justice.

Was Conor’s question, what purpose is served by attacking Bari Weiss even if one exists in the same neighborhood as Stern where everything must be scrutinized, twisted, rationalized, to find its inherent if unintentional heresy, itself a wrong? Enter Vox co-founder, Matty Yglesias. Continue reading →

Malarkey won’t pay the bills, as the ABA delegates were told. It’s dying and executive director Jack Rives gave the bad news.

Quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., ABA Executive Director Jack Rives told the ABA’s policy-making body that “this is no time to … take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,”and called on ABA leadership to take action to increase lawyer members.

Whenever someone gratuitously quotes MLK, the stink of desperation permeates the air. And the ABA’s circumstances are nothing if not desperate.

Forty years ago, 50 percent of the lawyers in the United States were members of the ABA. The ABA currently has a 22 percent market share.

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It must have been awful, aside from the huge paychecks, working for Google.

[A] pervasive environment of disparaging jokes and demeaning language amongst colleagues; a climate of bullying, mocking, and personal attacks from superiors and others in power; an open endorsement by superiors of bullying (referred to internally as social pecking); an unwillingness by superiors and administrators to act upon threats of violence; the use of incentive programmes to promote and celebrate harassment; a set of training programmes that foment hostility through emotionalised and unnuanced company-endorsed lectures; and a number of other mechanisms that disincentivise or punish political expression,…

No, this wasn’t the way minorities were treated. Nor women. This was the way they treated anyone who failed to keep pace with social justice As James Damore found out the hard way. the claims that they were open to criticism may have been exaggerated.  Continue reading →

Stare hard at Philadelphia’s new district attorney, Larry Krasner. He is the poster boy, the first really serious reform prosecutor to be elected. Sure, there are Democrats elected prosecutor, many of whom talk progressive and, to some extent, are engaged in reforms, but compared to Krasner, they barely scratch the surface.

Larry Krasner is going at it hard.

On the same day a Philly.com op-ed was published in which Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (and Mayor Kenney) admitted the failure that was the “War on Drugs,” in the 1980s and ’90s, the DA’s office announced that it is suing 10 pharmaceutical companies in connection with the opioid epidemic and is dropping all outstanding marijuana possession charges.

Whether it’s the job of a prosecutor to sue anyone is a dubious proposition, but that’s how Krasner is interpreting his mandate. But that he’s “dropping all outstanding marijuana possession charges” is another matter. Continue reading →

The open letter from SAVE, Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, was not only well argued and fully footnoted, but signed by a great many lawyers, academics and advocates. Almost 140 of them. And as its title said, it argued strenuously against the “trauma-informed” approach to sex offenses under both Title IX and in the legal system.

It’s a good letter, and cites to some important thought, statistics and arguments. The short version is that “believe the victim” reverses the presumption of innocence and rationalizes away due process for the accused. No regular reader of SJ is unfamiliar with these views. That almost 140 people signed their names to the letter, particularly the profs for whom questioning the ideology of victimhood could be career-ending, is significant. They thought this worthy of taking a huge risk on a hot bonfire.

So what’s the reaction? The first is the unsurprising fallback that relies on a grasp of statistics colored by belief. Continue reading →

The best argument to be made for closing the notorious Rikers Island is that it’s hard to get to, isolated and thus a logistical problem for getting defendants to court as well as families visiting their loved ones. Of course, that was also its primary benefit, as it kept prisoners isolated. Not only was it harder to escape from an island, but it meant you didn’t have a jail next door.

Nobody wants a jail next door.

But the cries for closing Rikers have now reached the promise stage.

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday unveiled his long-awaited plan to close the troubled jail and open or expand slammers in four boroughs to house the extra inmates. Continue reading →

Back in the heyday of the crack epidemic, automotive artists created secret compartments in cars in which uptown drug dealers hid their stash. They were called “clavos,” and could only be opened by some bizarre combination of actions. When the cops figured out that drugs were being secreted in these hidden car voids, it presented a problem.

Not just the problem of finding the clavos, since they were never going to discern the actions needed to pop them open, but doing the search itself, since they were done on the street, on the fly, and there was neither basis nor interest in getting a warrant. But there was the “consent search” exception, whether real or manufactured. They would ask, “mind if I take a look around?” Then they would dismantle a car on the street, ripping off fenders, shrouds and carpeting. Often, body parts were dented when they were tossed to the side.

For years, challenges to these “consent searches” were losers. Courts held that if a person consented, then that was that. The argument was that the consent was to “look around,” not to take apart and destroy. An ordinary person’s understanding of the words “look around” was just that, to look, not touch. Judges shrugged. “Consent,” they muttered, right before “denied.” Continue reading →

I, for one, deeply appreciate New York Times Opinion honcho James Bennett being a faithful SJ reader, even if he doesn’t always agree. So his response to me deserves to be aired.

A lot of the work we get to do in Opinion is fun: We get to tackle big ideas, write with verve, experiment with new forms and ways of making arguments. But this is also a real struggle we are engaged in. It’s not easy to believe passionately in certain positions and then work with people who see the world very differently. This is one reason, I think, that departments like ours, and even many newsrooms, have always been at risk of becoming homogeneous in various ways over time. It’s particularly hard now, when an echo chamber in social media grabs hold of one piece we publish and treats it as the whole, rather than one of dozens of opinions we publish in running arguments across a week. It’s particularly hard now because, even as we keep getting attacked from the right, left-wing sites are insistently telling the same story — that we’ve added conservative voices in a rightward frogmarch — while ignoring inconvenient realities like the powerful new voices from the left that have also joined our ranks. It’s hard because some of the critics like to resort to labels without actually contending with the arguments our people make. (The good ones contend and sometimes out-argue us. They’ll make us better.)

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Eastern District of New York Judge Charles Sifton was a soft-spoken guy, not prone to emotionalism or hyperbole, and razor sharp. For him to have named names is, well, serious. Yet he did.

AUSA Weissmann’s myopic withholding of information must also be viewed in the same context: while reprehensible and subject, perhaps, to appropriate disciplinary measures, it does not begin to approach the level of uncivilized and indecent behavior that would necessitate the extraordinary relief which defendants seek.

The defendants of whom Judge Sifton wrote were soldiers in the Colombo mob. Bad dudes. Bad enough that AUSA Andrew Weissmann’s concealment of Brady material, reprehensible though it was, wasn’t bad enough to cut killers free. A new trial was sufficient. It was, however, bad enough to name Weissmann in the decision, something that almost never happens.

That was in 1997. So what’s become of Andrew Weissmann? Summarily fired from the EDNY United States Attorney’s office? Disbarred? Humiliated? Disgraced for his reprehensible Brady violation? Have you been paying attention? Continue reading →

Rarely has the aphorism “his reach exceeds his grasp” been more applicable than to black activist Shaun King. His social media following is huge, but he’s a simplistic dolt. That could explain his appeal. Unfortunately, his “reach” has made him a hot commodity for those who have little reach of their own.

When King hooked up with Harvard’s Fair Punishment Project, he gave them a huge audience they would never otherwise have. And they gave him cred he would never otherwise have. And never deserve.

Eventually, even Shaun King processes things that other people, smarter people, figured out long before him, and he’s capitalizing on one such idea. For some time, Democrats holding office as prosecutors have spouted reform rhetoric, but then gone about their jobs as usual. As my joke goes, Republicans were happy to put people in prison. Democrats felt badly about it, but locked them away nonetheless. The upshot was the same. Continue reading →