Why anyone would invite a worthless pimple like Richard Spencer* to speak on campus is a mystery. The only potential explanation is to be provocative, since he’s otherwise got absolutely nothing to offer. But that, of course, isn’t the point when it comes to free speech. Not unless one exalts experience over reason, as Ulrich Baer tries to do.

While he opens with the usual anecdote, as is the trend for inductive reasoners, Baer’s is a curious one.

At one of the premieres of his landmark Holocaust documentary, “Shoah” (1985), the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann was challenged by a member of the audience, a woman who identified herself as a Holocaust survivor. Lanzmann listened politely as the woman recounted her harrowing personal account of the Holocaust to make the point that the film failed to fully represent the recollections of survivors. When she finished, Lanzmann waited a bit, and then said, “Madame, you are an experience, but not an argument.”

Continue reading →

Now that Harvard has announced that it’s doing away with the standardized test, the LSAT, in order to assure diversity if not intelligence or capability, the door is open to sweeping change. And a group of passionate students are rushing through with their demands.

As Harvard Law School gears up to welcome a new class of students to campus this fall, we urge the administration to evaluate and disclose how it deals with the admission of students investigated or found responsible for, sexual misconduct at their previous college or university. We seek transparency on this issue so the university can engage in productive dialogue with students and administrators on how best to protect its students from sexual assault and discrimination. This information is particularly critical in light of the 2015 campus climate survey, which found that 7.6% of female graduate students experience sexual assault while attending Harvard University.

Welcome new students! Rapists to the right, victims to the left. One might initially draw a distinction between people merely “investigated” for sexual misconduct, since an accusation standing alone is meaningless, and those “found responsible.” They used to teach such things in first-year crim law, back when HLS taught law. Continue reading →

With a client, a juvenile, sitting in the can, Rick Horowitz found himself in a quandary.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I was retained to defend a juvenile, and the District Attorney told me that I needed to log on to Evidence.com to download discovery.

Evidence.com is an SaaS solution, owned and operated by Axon. For those who don’t know, “Taser International is now Axon.”⁸

And neither Evidence.com, nor Axon—not even in its prior incarnation as “Taser International,” for that matter—are listed in WIC 827 as lawfully able to receive, or disseminate, juvenile records. No corporation is.

The prosecution has discovered the internet, and it’s not by accident. The nice folks over at Taser, seeking to expand their product line of tech items to a decidedly not tech-adept crowd, figured out that one of the areas where the “trust” they developed with law enforcement, and by extension, prosecutors, could be exploited was cloud storage and delivery.  Continue reading →

Why anyone wants to hear the words that come out of Ann Coulter’s mouth are beyond me. She lack’s Milo’s fabulousness and sense of style, and he’s little more than an empty provocateur. If Coulter twitted at you under a ‘nym, you would dismiss her as a nutjob, one of the myriad crazies that inhabit social media twitting stupid stuff.

But somehow, she became “someone,” and so she was invited to speak at Berkeley by two conservative campus organizations, the Young Americans for Freedom and the Republican Club. Whatever. If they want to listen to this dolt, who cares?

It’s not about the dolt, however, but about trolling the Antifa.

In explaining why it had canceled a speech by Ann Coulter scheduled for next week, the University of California, Berkeley, said that it had “very specific intelligence” that Ms. Coulter might be in “grave danger.” Continue reading →

Following Vermont’s governor for life’s pronouncement on the twitters that hate speech isn’t free speech, a rain of lawyers and scholars poured down on his head. But Howard Dean was not to be silenced.

For WAPO and others raising issues about hate speech not being constitutionally protected, read “Chaplinsky v New Hampshire SCOTUS 1942

— Howard Dean (@GovHowardDean) April 22, 2017

So what if Eugene Volokh, and every other lawyer with even minimal knowledge of First Amendment law, banged their head on their desk? Continue reading →

Arkansas put Ledell Lee to death after the Supreme Court denied a stay by a 5-4 margin. Is his blood on the newest associate justice’s hands? Of course it is. Just as it’s on the hands of the other four judges who refused the stay. And all the state court judges who did the same. And Governor Asa Hutchinson.

But the New York Times uses new math to make this all about Justice Gorsuch.

It’s not entirely fair to judge a Supreme Court justice based on his first vote. Urgent matters arise unexpectedly, and the court must sometimes act quickly.

This is a curious intro, as it creates a veneer of fairness, deflects criticism, by conceding that it’s “not entirely fair.” But it raises a strawman. Was the problem an emergency stay? Was it too urgent for the new kid to grasp? Was he forced to act too quickly to make the right decision? Was that the problem? If he had more time, might he have done as the Times believes he should have done? Please. Continue reading →

The announcement that Whittier Law School was closing couldn’t have been a huge surprise. Too many law schools pumping out too many graduates for too few jobs and too little money. At SJW law blog, Above the Law, Staci Zaretsky slyly posed whether it was being shut down because “it’s full of minority students.” The 2016 bar passage rate for Whittier was 22%.

Make of that what you will, but it seems inconceivable, bordering on impossible, that any law school could do that badly. Yet it did. What has gone so horribly wrong?

At the Atlantic, Leigh Abramson, a former lawyer, writes that law is the only profession that has an industry devoted to helping people quit.

I went to law school because I didn’t know what to do after college and I’m bad at math. Law school seemed like a safe, respectable path and gave me an easy answer to what I was going to do with my life. And, as part of the millennial generation obsessed with test scores and academic achievement, I relished the spoils of a high LSAT score, admission to an Ivy League law school, and a job offer from a fancy corporate law firm. Continue reading →

The Constitution and social justice aren’t good friends. The talk may make it seem as if they are, but talk is cheap. Former Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont governor for life, Howard “The Cowboy” Dean nailed that on the twitters.

Maybe somewhere, but not in this country. Defending the Constitution, even though it means forsaking the passionate feelz of social justice, used to be the mission of the American Civil Liberties Union, a shoestring organization that took up unpopular causes because, well, that’s how the Constitution gets defended. Popular causes don’t need a defense.

But then came the Muslim ban, and no longer were they constrained to drink tap water. Flush with millions of dollars of contributions, they could now afford the fizzy stuff from France. So what if the nice folks sending loot didn’t grasp the organization’s mission. They weren’t going to dissuade them, and they surely weren’t giving the money back. Continue reading →

Arkansas executed Ledell Lee last night, even though he may have been innocent.

In Lee’s case, the records show shocking failures of his defense attorneys, both at trial and post-conviction, which were compounded by egregious conflicts of interest. His trial judge was having an affair with the prosecutor; the two would later get married. The same judge later expressed his regret at appointing a lawyer to Lee’s state habeas proceeding who showed up to court obviously intoxicated. A state prosecutor raised concerns that the attorney was slurring his words, stumbling in the courtroom, and speaking incoherently, while “introducing the same items of evidence over and over again.” Later, the judge told the lawyer that he was unaware he had only recently been in rehab. “If I had known that, I would not have put you on this case,” he said.

Capital punishment is usually rationalized as acceptable with slogans like “the worst of the worst,” to make us feel not nearly so awful about the state killing a person in our name. Maybe Lee was the worst, but 20 years after the death of Debra Reese, doubts persist. While fortune-cookie slogans bring comfort to the simplistic, it’s impossible to think this legal system sufficiently trustworthy, adequately effective, to kill a man. It’s just not that good.

As the days, minutes edge toward the killing hour, we obsess over the individuals few knew, or cared, about up to then. When there was a chance to put a stop to the gears that end in the machinery of death, they’re invisible. The cases get little attention and nightmare scenarios, like the judge dating the prosecutor, fliy under the radar. Continue reading →

Brown University is an Ivy League school, such that one might suppose the education to be received will be worth the cost and effort, and assure its graduates of a successful and happy life in whatever their endeavors. But the acceptance letter sent out this year might give rise to some doubts.

The problem isn’t that you didn’t get in, but that “they” did.

Brown University has pushed these changes even further in its acceptance letters this year by using “they” as the “gender-inclusive” pronoun.  Thus the letter refers to “their” achievements when referring to the singular admitted student.

For many, the use of such plural pronouns for a single individual is confusing and ungrammatical.  However, the Associated Press recently adopted the use of “they” as a preferred pronoun in recognition of transexual and other individuals who may not be comfortable with traditional genders.

The AP style book has long been a source of acceptable writing. It’s no Strunk and White, but still. And if they AP says plural pronouns can be used for single individuals, it can’t be confusing and ungrammatical. But more importantly, it will prevent those who eschew traditional genders from feeling uncomfortable. Continue reading →