There are things that should never happen, one of which is that a person ends up dead in the back seat of a police cruiser. Yet, 17-year-old Xavier McMullen is very much dead.

AKRON, Ohio — A 17-year-old boy in police custody died of a gunshot wound to the head while sitting in the back of an Akron police cruiser, a police spokesman and the Summit County Medical Examiner said.

The incident happened about 11 p.m. on 7th Street between Kenmore Boulevard and Maryland Avenue, Akron police Capt. Daniel Zampelli said. Xavier McMullen was later pronounced dead at the scene. An officer found a gun next to McMullen, Zampelli said.

McMullen was taken into custody along with two others for an armed robbery. Somehow, the police found their way to three young men. Continue reading →

A couple weeks ago, one of the writers from Fault Lines told me that he heard from another, ending in the salutation, “fuck you.” He said nothing to the potty-mouthed pal. Not just nothing to justify such a foul reaction. He said nothing to him at all. Rather, he was expressing some thoughts that were middle of the road, which means they weren’t progressive and failed to include that Trump was literally Hitler.

This was enough to cause a colleague to respond, out of the blue, with outrage and venom.

On the twitters, insanely stupid replies from random twitterers is the norm. The nature of the beast is that some will understand a twit and others will react with outrage. For me, it’s usually outrage from either right or left, as I constantly disappoint them both. The alt-right has a simple message, that America is and should be a white Christian country, to the flagrant exclusion of others. It’s an easy message to reject, so it needs no Gertruding to reject.

Yet, failure to respond in kind to insanity breeds insanity. If you are not sufficiently dedicated to howling epithets, you are complicit.

In a New Yorker interview, which was actually more of a debate, between Columbia prof Mark Lilla, who has either become the embodiment of old school liberalism or a racist academic pariah, and David Remnick, the issue was revealed: Continue reading →

When Joe Patrice explained his deepest thoughts as to why it was horrifying, it became clear that there was merit to the idea.

This actually tells you everything you need to know about the laughable swill these two dropped on an unsuspecting public this week. This dynamic duo of dumb spend the op-ed concocting a theory as terrifying as it is bereft of factual support when they posit that all of America’s woes really do stem from failing to live up to the ideals of an era when (white) men were men and everyone else kept their goddamned mouths shut. Make America Great Again indeed.

What could possibly be so dumb, so laughable? Two lawprofs who argued that America was paying the price for the breakdown in “bourgeois culture.”

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

These basic cultural precepts reigned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement. Adherence was a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.

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On a Friday night with a disastrous hurricane bearing down on Texas, North Korean missiles exploding and a full dump of news that would otherwise give CNN a day apiece of outrage, President Donald Trump issued his first pardon to a man awaiting sentence for contempt for his refusal to abide by an order requiring him to stop violating the Constitution.

In hard terms, the pardon won’t have an impact on the real world. The man is out of power, at least for now, and it’s not as if the man, at 85 years of age, will go out on the streets again to viciously harm people. The purposes of prosecution and incarceration will not suffer terribly by this pardon. But this was the rarest of cases where the symbolism, sending a message, mattered far more than the actual fact of imprisonment. Not that the image of him in a pink tent wouldn’t be cherished by a great many people.

Joe Arpaio was pardoned.

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Kevin O’Keefe and I disagree often about whether technology is the solution to all the problems facing law schools and the legal profession. But one thing we both agree about is that too many of the hypesters are snake-oil salesmen. So Kevin pointed me to the National Law Review to take a peek at the bio of the author of a post on the glories of technology for small law.

If your law practice’s viability relies on the Chief Imaginist’s education in “postcolonial and feminist literature with an emphasis on food studies,” you should give serious thought as to whether you’re cut out for law. I thought you should know.

It’s hardly surprising that a guy screaming about all the racial injustice in the world perpetrated by the police would gain a following. But that he got a gig writing for the Daily News bordered on shocking. Sure, they wanted his followers to pump up their eyeball numbers, but doesn’t credibility count? Then again, as it turns out, Shaun King worked cheap, so it makes more sense now.

For our Brooklyn apartment, my family of seven currently pays more in monthly rent for what is literally the second smallest of the fifty-five homes my wife and I have lived in between the two of us. The smallest ever was our first New York apartment. The monthly rent here is more than my entire Daily News paycheck.

Unlike others, my problem with King isn’t with his perspective, though he’s the first to praise the cops who serve his ends with the same absurd hyperbole as he uses to accuse them of destroying humanity. Well, minority humanity, anyway.

What I’m about to tell you is the most painful, traumatic, outrageous, outlandish, over-the-top story of government sanctioned police brutality, wrongful imprisonment, wrongful convictions, forced testimony, widespread corruption, money, lots of money, and deep, deep, deep soul-snatching psychological abuse in modern American history. I would not have believed it had I not seen it all for myself. The rabbit hole I am about to take you down is deep and twisted. It should lead to the termination of a whole host of officials. Many should be arrested and a comprehensive independent investigation should begin immediately.

Sounds serious, right? So what is this “most” awful thing ever? Continue reading →

Not long ago, a post here linked to the twitter of a woman who went down the passive-aggressive rabbit hole to lie about what Mario Machado twitted at her. Almost immediately, she took her account private. Her pseudonymous friend* explained that she didn’t do so to conceal her unhinged twits, but because she feared being stalked or doxed. That’s what males do to females, she informed me.

“By whom?” I responded. “Lawyers and judges are going to stalk or dox her?” In rode the cavalry of bold scolds and white knights, resulting in screams of “misogyny.” According to her allies, pointing out that a woman was unhinged was a centuries-old sexist charge against women, that while men were jerks, women were nuts.

Had I been more interested, I might have inquired what, then, one calls a woman who’s unhinged, if it’s sexist to be accurate. I wasn’t that interested, having suffered enough nonsense already. Plus, being called names by the deeply passionate isn’t really an issue for me, no matter how deeply it hurts their feelings. The twitters are filled with foolishness, not the least of which resides with the kids who need to form a club on twitter for self-protection and validation. It’s not like they’re lawyers or anything.

But what if this happened with the President of the United States? It’s bad enough we’re stuck with Idiocracy at the moment, but Jill Filipovic tries to rationalize why it could have, should have, been a victimocracy. Continue reading →

Scott Shackford at Reason noticed it first, the sudden appearance of myriad op-eds arguing against free speech “absolutism.”

This week, The Washington Post joins several other large media outlets in giving commentary space to an academic who thinks the First Amendment maybe shouldn’t protect so much free speech.

I’ll give Jennifer Delton—Skidmore College’s “Douglas Family Chair in American culture, history, and literary and interdisciplinary studies”—this much: She’s not disguising her calls for censorship of conservative opinion by claiming this will achieve some sort of racial enlightenment or equality. She openly describes this censorship as a tool for stopping the spread of political arguments she sees as dangerous.

The title given to Delton’s polemic reflects not just a peculiar take, but a very bold attempt at using the big-lie theory to make her case. Continue reading →

When charged with crimes, some consider themselves defendants while others hold themselves out as martyrs to the cause. Former Diablo College adjunct philosophy prof, Eric Clanton, is the poster boy of the martyr.

My name is Eric. I’m currently facing years of prison time as the result of accusations made in the most shockingly hateful parts of the internet. On April 19th I began being targeted by a dedicated swarm of internet trolls known for spewing racism, xenophobia, and misogyny onto the web. Suddenly a hit piece by Milo Yiannopolis caused the targeting to go viral. Several old social media photos were posted, online accounts hacked, addresses published, hundreds of calls to my employers, and countless threats of physical violence made against me, my coworkers, friends and many others. This harassment campaign is where the accusations against me originated.

That’s the view of life of the martyr. The retelling, however, isn’t quite accurate. He’s not facing prison time as a result of accusations, but as a result of hitting a guy on the head with a metal bike lock for being a Trump supporter at a Berkeley protest. Continue reading →

On August 14, 2017, the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability of the Judicial Conference of the United States (the Committee) considered the petition filed by United States District Judge John R. Adams seeking a review of an Order of the Judicial Council of the Sixth Circuit (Judicial Council) finding Judge Adams committed misconduct as understood within the meaning of the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980 (“Act”), 28 U.S.C. §§ 351-64, and the Rules for Judicial-Conduct and Judicial-Disability Proceedings (“Rules”) (amended Sept. 17, 2015). See here for a well-written and thorough news article summarizing the matter and here for the rulings of the Committee and the Judicial Council.

The Committee made a decision of first impression that is both extremely important and yet chilling:

In this matter of first impression under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act and the Rules for Judicial-Conduct and Judicial-Disability Proceedings, we reject Judge Adams’s constitutional and statutory challenges to the Judicial Council’s finding that he committed misconduct and directing him to undergo a mental health examination. For the reasons discussed, the Act and the Rules authorized the Special Committee’s request that Judge Adams submit to such an examination, the Special Committee was justified in making the request based on its findings concerning Judge Adams’s behavior, and Judge Adams’s objections to the examination do not justify his failure to cooperate in the investigation.

Committee Opinion, at pages 38-39.

However, the Committee reversed the Judicial Council’s decision stripping the judge of his cases for two years. The Committee wrote: Continue reading →