The argument is straightforward: for people who are not going to hire a lawyer but want to fight a parking ticket, a chatbot that provides them with kinda obvious, albeit simplistic, guidance is better than nothing. So DoNotPay was born, and was a success.

So someone thought to create an app that walks you through the elements, the common defenses and how to document them so as to beat the ticket. That’s great! Silly as these things may seem to a lawyer, normal people don’t think in terms of elements, defenses and evidence. The worst that can happen is you don’t beat the ticket, and the best is that you learn what to do to fight it. What’s wrong with that?

Is it a substitute for a lawyer when your life is at stake? Hardly, but this is a parking ticket, not a capital prosecution. This fills a gap in the law that needed filling, and apparently provides a sufficiently sound how-to list to be pretty successful.

But extrapolating one success to another doesn’t always work the same way. It requires a deeper understanding of why one idea is good, or at least not incredibly bad, and why it doesn’t necessarily translate into another.  Continue reading →

Justice Clarence Thomas made headlines again by taking a shot at qualified immunity. His opinion highlights that the doctrine is a mess and rests on shaky historical foundations. When merely answering the door can get you shot three times by police officers, without any legal redress, you can question to what strange shores have you been brought by the tides of qualified immunity.

There’s a lot that can be said about the history of sovereign immunity, the Reconstruction Amendments and civil rights acts, and the policy justifications for qualified immunity. And it’s all very interesting legal and historical stuff. Really, it is.

But at the end of the day, a legal case is foremost about solving the dispute at hand and secondarily about reducing uncertainty about legal rights in future matters. At the risk of sounding like a realist, pragmatist like Judge Posner (shudder), all this precedence and historical evidence doesn’t really help the dead guy’s family or the next poor soul who dares open a door with a firearm in hand.

Many criminal procedure and constitutional torts (civil rights claims) are agency problems in disguise. Taking a step back, if I am operating a delivery service with my truck, and I negligently run someone over, I am responsible for the damage. Continue reading →

People are killed. Some by accident. Some by criminals. Some by police. Some by police who are criminals. Some are female. Some are white. Some are in their nightclothes, having called 911, unarmed and talking to an officer driving a cruiser by a cop named Mohammed Noor, with neither body nor squad cameras turned on, by shooting through the driver side door.

Just before 11:30 p.m. Saturday, Damond, 40, called 911 to report a possible assault occurring in an alley near her home between Washburn and Xerxes avenues S., in the Fulton neighborhood.

Damond, in her pajamas, went to the driver’s side door of the responding squad and was talking to the officer, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the case.

Moments later, Noor shot across his partner from the passenger’s seat, killing Damond.

No explanation for the killing has been offered yet, whether because the investigating agency, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, isn’t talking or Noor and his partner have invoked their union contract to conceal information about a killing that would have been sweated out of them had they been anyone but cops. Continue reading →

When Florida State Attorney Aramis Ayala announced the death penalty was off the table under her tenure, there was thunderous applause by some and denouncement by others.

“I will not be seeking the death penalty in the cases handled in my office,” Ayala said. “Let me be very clear, however, I will continue to hold people who do harm to this community accountable for their actions.”

Both sides took their respective position based upon their view of the death penalty. But what of the means, notwithstanding the ends? Was it up to Ayala to decide that the law enacted by the legislative branch of government was not to her liking, and so she opted to not enforce it?

The New York Times notes that marijuana pops in New York City result in significantly disparate treatment for blacks and Latinos. Continue reading →

Allan Ripp received a cover letter for the job opening he posted on Indeed for his press relations company:

Here’s how one actress stated her case: “Not only do I believe in Ripp Media’s ability to deliver human and intuitive touchpoints through physical and technological interaction, but I can contribute to this strategic investment for the modern enterprise by bringing my diverse experiences …” It was like reading Mad Libs.

What makes this particularly amusing is that Ripp repped Martin Shkreli, doing crisis management for the weasel who roared. Pitches from flacks find my mailbox constantly, most of which read pretty much like Ripp’s actress applicant. Mad libs. We’re a nation awash in meaningless gibberish, jargon words strung together haphazardly, conveying the barest impression of meaning without actually saying anything. Delete.

But sitting with a group of people a little more than a year ago, all of whom had an M.I.T. degree under their belt in STEM, buying them beers (because that’s what old guys do), I learned about changes since my day. Jobs were online. Much of the time, the job descriptions read like mad libs as well, replete with jargon about diversity and inclusion, collaboration and atmosphere, and, if lucky, maybe a sentence about what the actual job was. Even then, the description was nearly incomprehensible. Continue reading →

While it’s not quite there yet, Los Alamos will one day be a tourist attraction, to be visited like the Grand Canyon, after which people can stop at the gift shop a purchase their own faux plutonium nugget.

The Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos opened a new exhibit Friday to help the National Park Service scale that roadblock to providing visitors with the full range of experiences meant to showcase the history of the Atomic Age. Manhattan on the Mesa, an interactive exhibit, takes visitors “behind the fence” to five buildings within the Los Alamos lab’s Technical Area 18, which until 2005 had been storing sensitive nuclear weapons material.

The lab and the Energy Department funded the project, in partnership with New Mexico Highlands University’s Program in Interactive Cultural Technology. Students in the Highlands program used their technical expertise to create a “virtual tour” of the off-limit areas, a task that required some students to don protective clothing and make a real visit to the sites and film them.

Want to stand where Oppenheimer stood? Well, one day, perhaps, but for now, at least you can see it virtually. But what you won’t see, when that day comes, is the film about the lab, the secret town built around it, and the context in which it was created. Continue reading →

Lawprof Rick Hasen has been focused on election law long enough to know. He begins with a litany of internal problems.

In just the past few weeks, we learned that in the midst of the 2016 campaign the president’s eldest son, Donald J. Trump Jr., was willing to meet with a woman described to him as a “Russian government attorney” to get dirt on his father’s opponent. Voters across the country asked election officials to remove their names from voting rolls so that their personal information would not be turned over to the Orwellian Election Integrity commission that the president established to try to substantiate his outrageous and false charge that there were three million or more illegal voters in 2016. The president has stacked this commission with a rogues’ gallery of people with reputations for false and exaggerated claims of voter fraud. Democratic and Republican state officials have resisted the commission’s call to turn over voting lists.

Of course, there are problems like gerrymandering, felon disenfranchisement laws, voter identification law, which all serve to undermine the efficacy of the democratic process by either suppressing votes or negating them. Rick isn’t a big fan of Trump, however, so he puts that up top and then goes on to do his best to point to the sky, which will be falling any moment now.

And yet as bad as things are, the health of our electoral process is likely to deteriorate further, with some of the threats striking at the very basis of democratic society: our confidence that votes have been fairly and accurately counted. What’s worse, we cannot count on the courts, the president, Congress or state legislatures to save us. It will take bipartisan cooperation among state and local election officials, facilitated by nongovernmental organizations committed to sound principles of election administration, to get us past this dangerous point.

Continue reading →

The mantra “speech is violence” got a boost from Northeastern University psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, who sought to wrap up the argument in medical jargon to show that it’s not just feelz, but physiology.

But scientifically speaking, it’s not that simple. Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system. Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain — even kill neurons — and shorten your life.

After throwing out some medical words like proinflammatory cytokines and telomeres, she gets to her point: chronic stress. She then takes a grand leap of logic.

If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence. But which types?

Continue reading →

At its core, the Washington Post op-ed by Brooklyn College President Michelle Anderson is a facial lie.

I’m a college president. Betsy DeVos should help me deal with campus sexual assault.

No college or university needs the “help” of the Department of Education to deal with campus sexual assault. If the DoE got out of the business of pushing colleges to twist Title IX altogether, it would have no impact whatsoever on the choices colleges make in handling accusations of sexual assault or rape. What the DoE has provided was cover, the means by which colleges could discriminate and blame it on the DoE. “Lhamon made me,” they could cry. But it’s just a lie.

As has been discussed here in excruciating detail, Title IX was never intended to morph into a campus adjudicatory system for the crimes of rape and sexual assault, but slid down the slippery slope until bureaucrats with radical agendas circumvented law to push their vision onto colleges.

Even McIntosh, despite her dodging and weaving, concedes that Catherine E. Lhamon, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights and head of the DoE Office of Civil Rights has gone off the reservation.  She has no lawful authority to mandate colleges and universities adhere to her political whims, as reflected in her “guidance,” upon pain of losing federal funds.*

When asked (see 1:37 in the video) who gave Lhamon the authority to impose her personal will upon the nation’s colleges and universities, she responded, “with gratitude, you did when I was confirmed.”

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Following a debate between Judges Kopf and Bennett over the whimsy of discretionary sentencing, the omni-geeky Jake DiMare came up with the idea of the Sentence-O-Matic 1000.

Judge Richard Kopf raised the question of whether the language was so devoid of meaning and guidance as to render § 3553(a) worthless.  Judge Mark Bennett responded “Sentencing requires us to weigh that which cannot be measured,” to which Judge Kopf replied: “Let’s be honest then and declare that sentencing is entirely a matter of discretion…”  If so, this raises the specter of sentencing being so arbitrary and capricious, so captive to any judge’s whim, as to be a total crapshoot.

Jake offered this reaction:

Was there ever a task in the courtroom more ripe for automation?

Jake had a point.Remove the feelz component from the mix and reduce sentencing to cold, hard empiricism.

As a representative of the ignorant masses, I find comfort in the notion that everyone would be given sentences using the same criteria, and never again subjected to the whimsy of some of the judges.

Continue reading →