A year ago, pussy hats were all the rage. They have since become iconic, and so the New York Times asked women where  they are now.

Nicole Cesare of Philadelphia stashes hers in a “go bag” along with pens, a notebook and snacks in case she needs to rush to a protest. Whitney Logan of Fairway, Kan., puts hers on when she makes phone calls to her senators and representatives: “It gives me courage,” she said. Emily Kilbourn, in Bethlehem, Connecticut, wears hers when she’s going somewhere she knows she’ll run into conservatives: “Amazing what a smile, wave, and a tip of the pussy hat will do!”

Amazing, indeed. What will it do? She doesn’t say. But yesterday, women marched again. It was glorious, if the faces of marchers are any reflection. Continue reading →

Algorithms were going to save us, make our system more fair, more precise, more . . . real. Even bad algorithms were better than no algorithms, leaving it up to biased, if minimally competent, judges to make decisions they were incapable of making. Algorithms. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

There were, of course, some Luddites who didn’t appreciate the power of numbers, complained that algorithms would never be capable of taking into account the particulars of every defendant’s world. They would homogenize decision-making, reduce people to caricatures and, ultimately, end up replacing human bias with machine bias. We would feel more science-y about the law, but it would do nothing more than provide algorithmic cover for the same shallow bias it replaced.

For example, when ProPublica examined computer-generated risk scores in Broward County, Fla., in 2016, it found that black defendants were substantially more likely than whites to be rated a high risk of committing a violent crime if released. Even among defendants who ultimately were not re-arrested, blacks were more likely than whites to be deemed risky. These results elicited a visceral sense of injustice and prompted a chorus of warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence.

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Try it. Screw the old lawyers who harp on things like law and ethics to keep young lawyers down. It’s a new world, and the only thing that matters is your passion. So Ian James Christensen decided to follow his dreams.

[I]n 2013, less than three months after being admitted to The Florida Bar, Respondent founded IJC Law Group, P.A., and began offering legal services and advice to clients. At the time, Respondent had no training in the area of medical marijuana. Six months later, Respondent formed Health Law Services (HLS), and five months after that, incorporated Cannabinoid Therapy Institute (CTI). Respondent listed IJC Law Group, P.A., as CTI’s registered agent and nonlawyer Christopher Ralph—a self-professed expert in the medical marijuana industry—  represented himself as CTI’s director. Ralph was also the “Legal Administrator and Consultant” for HLS.

Weed lawyer. Create a medical marijuana ecosystem, from medical necessity to “Official Legal Certification,” so his client could show any police officer that he wasn’t just a pothead, but a certified medical marijuana user. Cutting edge stuff, and all the gurus said young lawyers should seize the world and make it their own. Christensen was owning it. Continue reading →

In the early 1990s, AOL disks were ubiquitous. They had two huge virtues. They were free and they were the internet. AOL owned it. Its competitors, Compuserve, Prodigy and Netscape, couldn’t touch it. The reason was simple. AOL was where the people were.

To get online, one opened the AOL desktop program by typing aol.exe at the C:/ prompt (yes, it was DOS-based back then, before Windows 95 ruined everything) and dialed it in, listening to the painful tones of modems connecting in the hope that you would find an access line that wasn’t overwhelmed. And if so, boom, you were part of the internet.

Last night, just after 9 p.m., my AOL desktop died. About a month ago, a popup announced it would be end-of-lifed, but it didn’t hit home until last night, when a message announced that the AOL desktop was no longer supported, and automatically signed off. Forever. Continue reading →

Word spread of a letter from mommy to her darling baby boy, written by Liz Corsini.

Dear Son,

You are coming of age during an exciting era; gender norms redefined, the proud
expression of pro-nouns, marriage equality, and the visible ongoing fight for racial
equality. There is no shortage of injustice and the #MeToo movement is now leading
the charge against arguably the most pressing public health crisis of our time, gender
violence. #MeToo is raising the voices of empowered survivors of sexual harassment
and violence. These voices are speaking directly to you my son. Continue reading →

The blind squirrel is alive and well in Florida, as the Bar Association gets one right.

A well-meaning attempt to strengthen protections against bullying in the legal profession may have gone too far, at least according to the Board of Governors.

This fall, the Rules Committee voted 7-0 to add guidance that subdivision (d)’s prohibition applies to “bullying and intimidating other lawyers,” in the comment to the Misconduct Rule (4-8.4). The proposal grew out of a recommendation by the Florida Bar Special Committee on Gender Bias.

Of course they have a special committee on gender bias, and what would you expect such a special committee to do? The rule they sought to change is 4-8.4(d), which makes it misconduct to: Continue reading →

The needless imposition of low-level bail keeps poor defendants in jail pending the disposition of their case, which almost invariably means they will cop a plea to get out. Progressive Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance announced that his office will no longer seek needless bail for “most misdemeanors,” and no doubt that will start happening any day now. Any day now.

And New York Governor Andy Cuomo saw that it played well, and seized his opportunity.

The fundamental tenet of criminal law in the United States is that all those accused of a crime in this country are presumed innocent unless proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That fundamental principle is not limited to American law; it was also part of Roman law, Islamic law and English common law. This bedrock safeguard has been ratified on more than one occasion by the Supreme Court and is codified in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Well, if the United Nations says so, it must be true. Continue reading →

According to Anna North, “A woman’s account of her date with the actor reveals our broken attitudes toward sex.” According to Caitlin Flanagan, “her story . . . was 3,000 words of revenge porn.” And according to poor Bari Weiss, trying desperately to thread the needle and not outrage her readership, “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader.”

But the most revealing commentary, albeit not in the way she intended, is provided through the back door. First, the writer of the original Babe post, Katie Way, viciously attacks Ashleigh Banfield for her age, her lipstick color and her hair. And then Lindy West explains how years and years of effort by the lunatic fringe went into this moment of affirmative nonsense.

The notion of affirmative consent did not fall from space in October 2017 to confound well-meaning but bumbling men; it was built, loudly and painstakingly and in public, at great personal cost to its proponents, over decades. If you’re fretting about the perceived overreach of #MeToo, maybe start by examining the ways you’ve upheld the stigmatization of feminism. Nuanced conversations about consent and gendered socialization have been happening every single day that Aziz Ansari has spent as a living, sentient human on this earth. The reason they feel foreign to so many men is that so many men never felt like they needed to listen. Rape is a women’s issue, right? Men don’t major in women’s studies.

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The use of guilty pleas as a coercive means of getting an innocent, or not quite as guilty as charged, defendant to compromise is nothing new. Prosecutors believe a defendant is guilty, and defendants profess their innocence. Stop the presses.

After Fred Steese spent two decades in a Nevada prison for murder, evidence indicating that he was innocent was found buried in the prosecution’s files. It was proof that Mr. Steese, as he’d always claimed, had been hundreds of miles away on the likely day of the murder and couldn’t have been the killer.

Concealing Brady material, which oddly goes unmentioned, is also nothing new. Most of the time, the undisclosed information doesn’t so much prove anything as provide fodder for trial that might have changed the calculus of taking a plea, or enabled a decent lawyer to raise a sufficient doubt for acquittal. Rarely, as in almost never, does it prove innocence.  Continue reading →

It must be a good question to ask of nominees for the federal bench, since Hawaiian* Senator Mazie Hirono is a lawyer, and she should know how to ask a simple question. If there was any doubt, it received the official seal of approval of Dahlia Lithwick, graduate of Stanford Law School, and sycophant of Judge Alex Kozinski until she revealed that she was a victim of stare rape.

Sen. Hirono actually came up with two questions, taking upon herself the weight of female angst and fear, tears and pain.

Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors or committed any verbal or physical harassment or assault of a sexual nature?

Have you ever faced discipline or entered into a settlement related to this kind of conduct?

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