There isn’t much point to holding a protest in your basement, as there’s no one there to appreciate your passion or point. This is why people take protests to the streets, where they are entitled to express their grievances. Yes, there are limits imposed, of dubious constitutional merit, but that aside, the message of protest is conveyed.

But then, if the purpose is to let people know of your grievance, then why not the mall? After all, that’s where the people are, plus it’s indoors, climate controlled and has a food court. So, to the Galleria they went.

Like many mass arrests in St. Louis County, the events leading up to a police roundup at the Galleria Mall last Saturday began with a peaceful protest.

Demonstrators gathered and marched at the mall, located just outside the city with the highest rate of police killings in the U.S, in response to the not-guilty verdict of former police officer Jason Stockley. They were there to call out law enforcement’s ubiquitous use of violence against Black bodies without consequence — to disrupt business as usual. But the nonviolent act ended with a militarized police response, the overnight detention of 22 people, and numerous criminal charges.

Continue reading →

KC Johnson twitted a survey conducted by YouGov for the Bucknell Institute for Public Policy on public perceptions of higher education. The results are . . . surpisingly normal. By normal, I mean that for all the shrieking of the fringes on either side, and despite the ordinary breadth of belief in how best to accomplish our goals, most of us want the same thing.

While the survey covers far more than this mere slice, for the purpose of this post I’ll focus on attitudes toward the Title IX sex tribunals, having written at length about the issues.

Continue reading →

Life moves fast these days. It was only Wednesday when Judge Kopf chose as an example of bootlicking the very twitter-popular justice of the Texas Supreme Court, Don Willett. By Thursday, Justice Willett had been nominated to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals by Trump. Coincidence?

Judge Kopf’s issue wasn’t Justice Willett’s brilliance, his integrity, and certainly not his sense of humor.

But Willett’s Twitter stuff is thin gruel. I readily agree he is funny, that he paints an accessible face on the Texas Supreme Court, that he is sometimes heartwarming, and that he is always a loyal homer for his God and our America. But what does Willett contribute to a substantive dialogue between the bench, the bar, and the public when he tweets?

Not much, in my estimation. Even though Judge Willett is brilliant, I surmise that he doesn’t want to defend himself on social media from substantive yet penetrating criticism of his libertarian judicial views. Given his talents, that is a shame.

Continue reading →

The word went out that there would be students protesting, disrupting, a talk by Alan Dershowitz at Columbia University. So Dersh took to the Daily News in a pre-emptive strike.

On Wednesday evening, I am scheduled to engage in a public conversation at Columbia University about the prospects for peace in the Middle East. The question — a critical one at a time when far too many campuses are hostile to ideas that challenge existing dogma — is whether I’ll be heard or shouted down.

By Wednesday evening, he means yesterday as of this writing. This post awaited the talk to see whether Dersh would get the Milo treatment. As of this morning, I can’t find anything to suggest anybody protested, no less disrupted, his talk.

I am a centrist liberal who voted for Hillary Clinton. I support a two-state solution. I have long opposed Israel’s settlement policies. I am not one of those hard-right provocateurs who come to campus in order to stoke the flames of controversy (though they too, have First Amendment rights). I am a retired professor who wants to contribute to the education of students with regard to a complex, divisive issue. Continue reading →

This is going to piss off many of you, but consider that Salt Lake City detective Jeff Payne, who was universally condemned for his arrest of nurse Alex Wubbels, isn’t an animal, a terrible human being, a bad cop. Consider instead that he was a pretty ordinary cop, following orders, trying to perform what he understood to be his duty. Consider also that on another day, he would save a kitten from a tree, walk an old woman across the street and play b-ball with orphan kids.

Consider that Jeff Payne was a good father to his children, a loving husband, a pillar of the community and a charitable human being. But the only thing we know about Payne is what he did to Wubbels, and since that was awful, he’s awful. Some will argue that if he’s awful, that’s all they need to know. Some will argue that his awfulness reflects the systemic problem with cops, flexing their muscle at the expense of other human beings, equally (if not more so) worthy of being treated with dignity and respect. Some will argue that Payne embodied what’s wrong with policing, and no kittens in trees make that go away.

All of these things are fair arguments. But Stephen Hartney, president of the Salt Lake Police Association, didn’t make these arguments or refute them. Instead, he went by the book. Continue reading →

A bootlicker is an obsequious or servile person, so says the Oxford Living Dictionary.  It is an “Americanism dating back to 1835-45” according to another dictionary. “Foot-licker” in the same sense dates back to around 1610. Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary (2017).

There are others words like “butt-kisser” that may be substituted if you lack my slavish devotion to taste and decorum. But you need to be careful about substituting “butt-kisser” for “bootlicker.”  As I shall next show pictorially, there are subtle differences.

Thus, for this post, I will use the term “bootlicker” because it fits better for those who have studied law and are thus trained to understand nuance.[i] Having solved, I hope to your satisfaction, the definitional issue, I now turn to substance. Continue reading →

*Yes, it’s not Tuesday, but days of the week are mere social constructs. Get over it.

The devastation in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria isn’t merely extreme, but different than that which occured on the mainland. Look at the costs imposed by the Jones Act, which should be repealed, and at least suspended until the Americans on our isle are returned to normalcy, and the logistics of getting aid to PR given that it’s an island.

As an aside, this would be an opportunity to donate to a worthy cause. Not the Red Cross, but there are other, localized organizations, who can be trusted to put the money to its intended use.

And then came a twit from Fault Lines’ Ken Womble in response to a twit from his FL colleague, Caleb Kruckenberg.

Introduce a bill for Puerto Rican statehood. Now.

— Ken Womble (@BrooklynWomble) September 26, 2017

Continue reading →

If there was one thing, just one, that could happen to make the fight for free speech more difficult, more tainted, more deserving of the ideological condemnation of the forces against hate speech, what would it be? Meet Jeff Sessions.

The set up for the Sessions speech was gross, but the content of his thoughts were those of a fledgling tyrant. Sessions promised “enforcement” of free speech protections, but didn’t even veil that what he means by that is to stamp out peaceful protests.

Elie Mystal’s description is outrageously hyperbolic, to the point of arguing about how Nazis shouldn’t have First Amendment rights, and yet not nearly as irrational as Joe Patrice’s “blow-by-blow” of how the invitation-only speech was limited to those invited, which proves they’re all snowflakes and Georgetown lawprof Randy Barnett is a Sessions lackey.

But is Sessions wrong? Generally, no, but he’s not entirely right either.  Continue reading →

In her very first New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg digs deep into her Slate-level thoughts to come up with a way to circumvent the electoral college and save the Union (from the apocalypse).

Since Donald Trump’s cataclysmic election, the unthinkable has become ordinary. We’ve grown used to naked profiteering off the presidency, an administration that calls for the firing of private citizens for political dissent and nuclear diplomacy conducted via Twitter taunts. Here, in my debut as a New York Times columnist, I want to discuss a structural problem that both underlies and transcends our current political nightmare: We have entered a period of minority rule.

I don’t just mean the fact that Trump became president despite his decisive loss in the popular vote, though that shouldn’t be forgotten. Worse, the majority of voters who disapprove of Trump have little power to force Congress to curb him.

On the one hand, Goldberg may be misreading the way in which elections happen in America. If presidents were elected by popular vote, the dynamic across the nation would change. People who might have voted but stayed home because they figured they were in the minority in their state, and their vote wouldn’t have mattered anyway, might have voted. Continue reading →

Judge Denise Cote sentenced former United States Representative and New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner to 21 months in prison. The government asked for a sentence between 21 and 27 months*. The defense sought probation.

Cote, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, seemed to struggle with the decision she was about to make. One the one hand, she acknowledged she was dealing with a defendant who is unwell: “He has a disease that involved sexual compulsivity. Some call it a sex addiction,” she said, as she credited the treatment he’d been receiving, which she considered “effective.” For a moment, it seemed as though she was leaning toward probation — especially when she suggested that Weiner could “make an enormous contribution to society” and provide a “true public service” if he somehow became an advocate for people suffering from his same disease.

But on the other hand, she recognized Weiner committed “a serious crime that deserves serious punishment.” And that the “strong compulsion” that had already led to two very public downfalls had reared its head once again. Treatment and probation alone may not suffice to cure him this time around. Something more was needed.

Much is wrapped up in Weiner’s crime, his downfall, those whose lives were implicated as a result, and his sentence. His inability to control his behavior was manifest; he refused to stop engaging in his “dalliances.” It’s not as if the price wasn’t enormous, for him, his former wife and, possibly, others. Not that any of this seemed to make any difference to Carlos Danger. Continue reading →