One of the mind-numbingly stupid things that clients would tell lawyers was what their back-yard neighbor, their Aunt Gertrude, their third grade teacher, said about the law, provided they didn’t also happen to be practicing lawyers.  And if they were, great. Let them represent you, but their say-so didn’t make the law whatever they feel it should be.  Getting past this was invariably a headache.

But at least they were actual people. People who had no clue what they were talking about, but people.  We’ve now gone a big step down from there, albeit in a different discipline.  JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, has an article about the use of “conversation agents,” Siri, for example, as the source of advice when someone’s life could be on the line.

Kari Paul, at Motherboard, whines that Siri isn’t doing a very good job of it.

Smartphones are often lifelines for people seeking to escape from or cope with interpersonal violence and sexual assault, but new research has found most conversational agents like Siri are unable to answer simple questions or provide help in the face of these crises.

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It’s a fair question whether a high school should be putting on a production of Mel Brooks’ “The Producers.”  While its comedy may seem childish, its themes are mature. But that’s not the issue for Bob Pritchard, Superintendent of Tappan Zee High School. The play can go on. Just not, you know, with the comedy part.

Administrators have ordered the removal of swastikas from a high school production of The Producers, the famous Mel Brooks film that makes fun of Nazism.

The New York school district that oversees Tappan Zee High School considers the inclusion of a swastika to be offensive and, possibly, a hate crime—regardless of the context.

“There is no context in a public high school where a swastika is appropriate,” South Orangetown Superintendent Bob Pritchard told the local CBS station.

For those of you who live under a rock, are under 12 or have no sense of humor at all, the play is about producers running a scam on their “angels” by over-selling ownership in a play that is so awful that they’re certain it will close in a night.  Brooks’ play gives us such heart-warming ballads as “Springtime For Hitler and Germany.” Continue reading →

There is no dispute. The DNA found in the vagina of the victim, 77-year-old Louise Talley, was that of Ronnie Byrd, a crackhead who hung out at a house next door in South Philly.  Case solved?  Nope. At least, not for Anthony Wright, who already spent 23 years in prison for the crime.

Nevertheless, on Monday Wright will again be tried in her murder.

This time, the District Attorney’s Office has a different theory for what happened: Wright didn’t act alone. But he was in the home when Byrd assaulted Talley, and when she was stabbed 10 times.

For 23 years, the prosecution was certain, beyond a reasonable doubt, that this was a one-man crime.  Then the Innocence Project came along with its DNA, screwing it all up. So poof, now it’s a two-man crime. Nothing to see here. Move along. Continue reading →

The spectacle of Emma Sulkowicz, Columbia University’s “Mattress Girl,” walking on stage at graduation carrying her mattress, may have been more than Paul Nungesser could take. Or, he waited until after he graduated to sue his university for taking the side of his accuser, despite clearing him of wrongdoing, by allowing, if not enabling, her to persist in her accusations against him with the official Columbia seal of approval.

So Nungesser sued, based upon his claim of protection against sex discrimination under Title IX. Now, his suit has been dismissed on motion by Columbia by SDNY Judge Gregory Woods.

In his decision, U.S. District Judge Gregory Woods wrote that Nungesser’s lawsuit would push Title IX too far, setting a precedent that would allow any students accused of sexual assault to sue a school that did not silence the student who had accused them from speaking out.

Disappointment in the outcome doesn’t stem from the court’s vindication of Mattress Girl’s actions, or Columbia’s complicity in them. Judge Woods had no kind words for either, and his ruling as to liability under a variety of ancillary state court claims was rather thin. Continue reading →

Prologue: Any writing about political candidates engenders a reaction in the intellectually challenged that if you don’t condemn the candidate they hate, you support him or her. I don’t support any of the candidates running for president. I’m appalled that in this nation, these are the best we can manage.

That said, Donald Trump is the candidate with the worst grasp of law, governance, history and logic. This, apparently, is why people support him, as he reflects their anger toward the political process and its mechanics. Anger and ignorance is not a good foundation for the presidency. Whether he will be nominated, and elected, has yet to be seen. But it has served to give him more space in the New York Times than any candidate could reasonably expect, which has done more to bolster his candidacy than the Times (which appears to despise Trump, though it does everything in its power to aid his candidacy) could imagine.

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The Trump rally in Chicago turned ugly. This time toward Trump, rather than some trailer park hero sucker punching a protester or a secret service agent body-slamming a photographer.   The New York Times blames Trump. Continue reading →

Could it possibly come as a surprise to the Crimson, to the student body, that the Harvard University Task Force on Sexual Assault Prevention was not fond of all-male Final Clubs?

In a scathing report released Tuesday, the University’s Task Force on Sexual Assault Prevention blasts historically male final clubs for “deeply misogynistic attitudes,” and calls on the College to formulate “a plan to address the problems presented by Final Clubs,” in what is one of the strongest University-sponsored condemnations of the clubs to date.

The clubs are private, which means Harvard can’t order them to be the clubs the Task Force wants them to be.  But it can tell club members that they can’t also be Harvard students.

“Either don’t allow simultaneous membership in Final Clubs and College enrollment; or allow Clubs to transition to all-gender inclusion with equal gender membership and leadership,” the group recommended to the entire task force.

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Back when neo-conservatives weren’t at all shy about the need to be ever tougher on crime, ever more controlling of our lost morality, someone came along to promise hope and audacity. At a critical point in time, when privacy from the government stood at the precipice, he went to South By Southwest, a place no former president had ever gone, to offer the most progressive view the executive had to offer.

“This notion that somehow our data is different and can be walled off from those other trade-offs we make, I believe, is incorrect,” he said.

The hope is that we should trust the government. The audacity is the rationalization for why.

But the president warned that America had already accepted that law enforcement can “rifle through your underwear” in searches for those suspected of preying on children, and he said there was no reason that a person’s digital information should be treated differently.

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William Powell’s intentions may have been pure, but that doesn’t mean he gets to do what he thinks is right at someone else’s expense.

A self-proclaimed “modern day Robin Hood” has been arrested after the former IHOP employee allegedly gave out thousands of dollars worth of free drinks to customers in Downtown Brooklyn.

According to the criminal complaint, William Powell, 27, has been charged with multiple counts of grand larceny, criminal possession of stolen property, and petit larceny after he allegedly gave out over $3,000 worth of free drinks to customers between August 2015 and February 2016 at the IHOP at 253 Livingston Street.

The complaint states that Powell defended himself after being taking into custody: “I am the modern day Robin Hood, I am not stealing, I am serving the ones in need, I take from the rich and give to the poor,” he said. “What’s the big deal, I’ve been doing this since I started here.”

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The name.  The Orange County District Attorney’s investigator who did this remains unnamed.  The name of the DA is Tony Rackaukas, and for the time being, Rackaukas is concealing the name, harboring a criminal and lying about it.

Date: March 10, 2016

STATEMENT
SANTA ANA, Calif. – The Orange County District Attorney’s Office (OCDA) has received inquiries about an OCDA Investigator’s employment status in regards to the courthouse incident yesterday, March 9, 2016. The California Employment Law and The Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights require that the OCDA have all the pertinent information into a matter under review before any HR action is taken. The OCDA is waiting on that information, which we anticipate will take several days, in order to make an appropriate personnel decision.

No further information will be disclosed at this time.

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In the scheme of Tony’s lies, this isn’t the biggest or worst. It would be impossible to top the scandal of his office putting paid informants in cells with defendants to get, or just make up, confessions to use against them in court. And it wasn’t just his lying to the defense about it, but he’s lying to the court as well. Continue reading →

Dan’s dad gave a Richard S. Levitt lecture at Iowa Law.  I can’t even imagine how much it cost the school to get Floyd to go to Iowa, but that’s neither here nor there.  Ronald K.L. Collins excerpts the lecture at Concurring Opinions, providing a time line of sorts on how free speech under the First Amendment has been perceived over time.

Many people, many of whom are now in college getting edumacated, struggle to appreciate the world in context, that the ideas they hold dear today weren’t always the ideas that others, while young, naïve and deeply progressive, held so very dear.  That’s where history comes in, institutional memory of where we came from to get where we are. Lessons of what worked and what didn’t. Learning what went wrong and why.

Not to make anyone cry, but learning the Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence.

Years Ago: In London with Justice Scalia & Nadine Strossen (then President of the ACLU): “We started talking about some First Amendment cases, particularly Hill v. Colorado, a ruling affirming the constitutionality of significant limitations on speech in areas near facilities in which abortions were performed. All three of us agreed on how terrible the majority opinion of Justice Stevens was and how enlightened Justice Scalia’s dissent was. (In those days, although not more recently, the ACLU, which Nadine then headed, took a strong First Amendment stand against such laws.) Justice Scalia, one could tell, enjoyed the conversation, and at one point leaned back, drink in hand, cigar in mouth, and said ‘you know, I’m not really bad about the First Amendment.’” Continue reading →