When local government, or a college campus, announces it’s a Sanctuary, they rely primarily on one thing: emotional people having no clue what it means. Plenty of words about respect of immigrants, with a caveat that says to the extent permitted by law. The goal of the announcement is a good one, to calm the fears of its residents, whether rational or irrational. Its secondary goal is to not let Trump’s gaming immigration fears undermine the ability of a locality to function.

But it’s largely a publicity stunt. And so too was the Executive Order purporting to threaten loss of federal funds to Sanctuary Cities. In its argument to Judge William Orrick, the government admitted as much.

The Government does not respond to the”>Counties’ constitutional challenges but argues that the Counties lack standing because the Executive Order did not change existing law and because the Counties have not been named “sanctuary jurisdictions” pursuant to the Order. It explained for the first time at oral argument that the Order is merely an exercise of the President’s “bully pulpit” to highlight a changed approach to immigration enforcement.

In other words, it was a big show put on for Trump’s supporters to create the appearance of doing something different than what was done for decades. There’s no mileage to be gained from saying, “we’re going to do pretty much what the federal government has always done.” Continue reading →

The Supreme Court declined to grant cert in Salazar-Limon v. City of Houston, a qualified immunity case in which the primary issue was whether summary judgment was properly granted. This was a petty question for so august a court, which constrains its limited resources to bigger issues than did the court below get it wrong.

In concurrence with the denial, Justice Sam Alito argues that the plaintiffs raised no material issues of fact.

Every year the courts of appeals decide hundreds of cases in which they must determine whether thin evidence provided by a plaintiff is just enough to survive a motion for summary judgment or not quite enough. This is one such case. Officer Thompson stated in a deposition that he shot Salazar-Limon because he saw him turn toward him and reach for his waist in a movement consistent with reaching for a gun. Record, Doc. 39–2, pp. 29–30, 33. Remarkably, Salazar-Limon did not state in his deposition or in an affidavit that he did not reach for his waist, and on that ground the Court of Appeals held that respondents were entitled to summary judgment.

Salazar-Limon says he turned away from the cop, was ordered to turn around and then, essentially, immediately shot. Alito is right, he never specifically says he didn’t reach for his waistband. Continue reading →

The legal lunacy, promoted by such legal scholars as Howard Dean, and empowering the special snowflakes to leap out from behind rocks to engage in physical violence, isn’t new. America went through a similar escapade long ago when the sides were switched and the hated speech came from the dreaded commies.

In Douglas’s book, The Right of the People, he wrote, “In recent years, as we have denounced the loss of liberties abroad we have witnessed its decline here in America.”

On May 11, 1958, Mike Wallace interviewed Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, an icon of what was then the left, about free speech and civil liberties. Change commies for haters and it is as fresh and important today as it was then. Continue reading →

Like many, the story she told failed to move me. That Alice Goffman was white or female didn’t matter a whit. What mattered was that she didn’t demonstrate a sufficient grasp of the legal system to not make people stupider.

She goes long on problems, though somehow neglects to mention that less appealing side of the problem, like when one kid murders another kid to steal his sneakers, or because he tried to horn in on his drug spot. There are certainly wrongful arrests and convictions. There are also proper arrests and convictions. Didn’t anyone tell her?

Yet, in the world of sociologists, she was something of a rock star, having spent six years “embedded” with black, inner-city youth in Philadelphia. That’s a commitment, if nothing else. She taught at University of Wisconsin, Madison, but took a visiting professorship at Pomona College. Yes, that Pomona, part of the Claremont-McKenna group, where “black intellectuals” knew all the right words and none of their definitions.

Yet again, there was anger at Pomona. Goffman was not their flavor of prof. Continue reading →

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 →