UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is the left coast version of Harvard’s Larry Tribe, sans the candlelit dinner with Louise Mensch. There isn’t a progressive cause he won’t embrace. Until now, and for that, one is constrained to wonder: How utterly awful must something be for it to be too far over the line for Chemerinsky?

The “something” is Stanford law professor Michele Dauber’s war against Judge Aaron Persky.

The effort to recall Judge Aaron Persky, which has submitted signatures to be on the ballot in Santa Clara County in June, is misguided and a threat to judicial independence. If there is disagreement with a judge’s decision, the appropriate remedy is to appeal the ruling, not to seek removal of the judge.

Such recall efforts are a serious threat to judicial independence as judges will fear that unpopular rulings will cost them their jobs. Justice, and all of us, will suffer when judges base their decisions on what will satisfy the voters.

Continue reading →

Queens detective Thomas Rice found a way to hack the “hard and dangerous” work of protecting and serving. He never got off his butt.

The thief used Hitlall’s credit card at a Lefferts Blvd. deli right away – a detail he provided to police. But as time passed, the investigation never seemed to go anywhere, he said.*

“I called them several times asking if they found anything,” the 41-year-old dad said. “The cops never got back to me.”

Unknown to him, there was a sinister reason. The case detective, Thomas Rice, had closed the “investigation,” and his lieutenant approved it just four days later.

There are two reasons to close an investigation. The first is that they’ve arrested the perp. The second is that they’ve decided they’ll never find the perp. Rice closed it for the second reason. But then, his report told the story of the great effort he put into solving the case. Continue reading →

Is it the price of being “privileged” to live in a superpower, the land of plenty, to assume responsibility for the poor of the world? Perhaps. Empathy isn’t a bad thing, except when its focus of the moment fails to include the reality that some of your fellow Americans aren’t living any better than the downtrodden elsewhere. What are the chances Ethiopia is going to send foreign aid to Milwaukee?

Surely no one in the United States today is as poor as a poor person in Ethiopia or Nepal? As it happens, making such comparisons has recently become much easier. The World Bank decided in October to include high-income countries in its global estimates of people living in poverty. We can now make direct comparisons between the United States and poor countries.

According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they are the world’s very poorest. Of these, 3.2 million live in the United States, and 3.3 million in other high-income countries (most in Italy, Japan and Spain).

Continue reading →

Long before it was assumed that campus sexual assault was an epidemic, or the tentacles of #MeToos of Hollywood emanating outward in all directions, there was a call for the military to end its blight of rape. And the military appeared ready to do whatever it could to convey the impression, if not the fact, that it was dealing with its problem.

Petty Officer Riesbeck was convicted of rape, two charges of making false statements and one charge of communicating indecent language. The jury sentenced him to three months of confinement, a reduction in rank and a bad-conduct discharge. Adm. Zukunft approved the punishment.

The defendant was tried under the Uniform Code of Military Conduct, one peculiar aspect of which is that the military, theoretically at least, abhors something called “command influence.” For obvious reasons, this is an overarching problem in military adjudications, given the hierarchical nature of command, such that a ranking officer could order a subordinate to do something that would influence the outcome. For the most part, the military takes this problem very seriously. But not always. Continue reading →

The answer to some who believe “hate speech,” whatever that may be, should not be protected under the First Amendment and, absent such protection, can either be criminalized per se or punished ad hoc, is to respond in kind. After all, law is like magic.

Eariler this week, Georgia State Sen. William Ligon, a Republican, introduced the Campus Free Speech Act, a bill designed to uphold students’ First Amendment freedoms. Following a year in which there were plenty of campus speech meltdowns, this bill attempts to address the growing resistance to a free and open campus, though it also creates new concerns.

The bill, which is based on the Goldwater Model, would require universities to take action against students who shut down speakers. Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and co-author of the Goldwater proposal upon which this bill was based, feels strongly about this specific bill.

Continue reading →

Women aren’t just marching. They’re running. And it’s about time.The failure to tap a vast pool of American society, whether because of sex, race, sexual preference or any other irrelevant criterion, has deprived all of us of contributions that could make us a better, smarter, stronger nation. And finally, women are going for it. Continue reading →

For quite a while now, readers of SJ have “informed” me that they agreed with my posts about criminal law, but hated my posts that addressed the blight of identity politics and social justice. How could I be so right about one thing and so wrong about . . . wait for it . . . JUSTICE!!!

But it wasn’t just that I was wrong, but needlessly and gratuitously wrong, since none of this had anything to do with the real world. Until it did.

For some time, a fixation on identity politics, a culture of reflexive outrage, and a scorched-earth approach to trivial transgressions have been all hallmarks of student activism and academic radicalism. They are now becoming increasingly evident in American life as a whole. In the name of defending women and ethnic and sexual minorities — all reasonable goals — progressives on and off campus are taking illiberal stances that polarize society, put a chill on free speech, and erode respect for due process.

Not long ago, tropes such as “white privilege” or “rape culture,” which reduce a vast range of social dynamics to racism and misogyny, were seldom heard outside the radical wing of the academy; today, they’ve joined the mainstream.

Continue reading →

It outraged the many people who were absolutely certain Bill Cosby was guilty, because they read stories in the paper and believed, that the jury hung. This was still in the early days of believe the victim, evidence be damned, and why not toss out all those legal technicalities which prevent the “survivor” from obtaining “justice.”

But Cosby has been off the radar, as others who have done terrible things, nothing, and who-knows-what have become the targets of public castigation. In the interim, Cosby retained a new defense team, headed by Tom Mesereau, and they’ve been quietly doing the work of lawyers.

Defense lawyers Thomas Mesereau Jr., Samuel W. Silver and Kathleen Bliss filed court documents Thursday contending alleged victim Andrea Constand previously testified the sexual assault occurred at Cosby’s Cheltenham home before Jan. 20, 2004, forcing prosecutors to prove that the incident occurred on an evening somewhere within a 22-day window between Dec. 30, 2003, and Jan. 20, 2004. Continue reading →

I like maple walnut ice cream. Other people may not, and based upon my experience at ice cream parlors, it’s not a sufficiently desirable flavor to be worth the freezer space. But I like maple walnut. I like it a lot. When it’s there, that’s the flavor I order. Because I like it.

It’s not that I hate other flavors. I like pistachio (the real kind, not the funky green stuff). I like vanilla. I like other flavors too. But I really like maple walnut. It’s my favorite flavor. So to me, maple walnut is the best flavor of ice cream. I don’t care for chocolate. I know, but it’s true.

You disagree? You’re wrong. It’s not that you can’t prefer a different flavor. It’s not that you can’t proclaim that maple walnut ice cream bites the big one. You can hate on maple walnut all you want, but that doesn’t change anything as far as I’m concerned. I like it. Whether you do or not has nothing to do with what I like. Continue reading →

There’s an old joke that captures the problem pretty well:

I love humanity.
It’s people I can’t stand.

And while you may be unable to see the connection, it’s painfully obvious to those calling the shots. You are full of empathy, until you’re not.

In a twitstorm, Fordham law prof John Pfaff pointed out a reality that has long been clear to those of us engaged in criminal law, but miraculously eludes the unduly woke. It discusses a poll showing that Americans, by a margin of 85% to 13%, favor rehabilitation as the goal of the criminal justice system. Continue reading →