The young Yale student caught on video behaving poorly wanted a personal champion. Her complaint of Silliman College master Nicholas Christakis was that he failed to deliver.  He failed to fulfill the promise that the residential college would be her home.

She was unnamed in the post here, though she’s been doxxed elsewhere. Daniel Denzer had a point about what happened, that this was a child at her worst, and shouldn’t be forever tainted because her moment of childishness went viral.  What Greg Lukianoff’s video represented was an example of what was wrong, not a personal condemnation of the young lady who did it. You can’t blame a child for doing childish things. That’s their nature.

But a champion has appeared to explain the broken promise of which she spoke, and that champion is no longer protected as a child.  Vox’s Dara Lind is one of those non-lawyer writers who tries her hand at writing about legal issues. She may not be Radley Balko caliber, but she’s better than anyone at Slate and certainly the best Vox has to offer.  Mostly, she tries to get it right, which is worthy of recognition.

Lind wears her heart on her page to explain for the young lady who felt entitled to berate Christakis, and the other young lady who wrote a Yale Herald op-ed that was later removed because it was seen by unsympathetic eyes.  Lind offers her first-person view, that Yale broke its promise to Lind, as well as to these students, and outsiders don’t understand. Continue reading →

The details are about as far away from the usual cop killing as they come.  Jack Yantis was a rancher in Idaho, which is a state somewhere in the middle of nowhere.  That’s why they let their cows and bulls roam on the open plain. And by open plain, that includes U.S. 95, a highway where cars drive. It makes no sense to me, but then, I’m really not on top of bull issues.

It began with a phone call to Yantis from the Adams County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher.  The Yantis’ lived “near milepost 142 of U.S. 95, about 6 miles north of Council,” and apparently one of their “2,500-pound black Gelbvieh bulls, similar to an Angus, named Keiford” was hit by a Subaru station wagon. Apparently, it was left to Yantis, who was having a nice dinner with his friend, Rowdy Paradis, to put his bull down and clean up the mess.  Off they went, with Mrs. Yantis, to deal with the bull.

Jack Yantis told Paradis to get a rifle, the family’s skid-steer loader (a small front-end loader) and a chain. Paradis in turn asked his aunt to the get the family’s .204-caliber rifle and bring it to the road.

While Paradis was getting the skid loader, the deputies started shooting at the bull. At least one of them had a semiautomatic rifle, perhaps an AR-15, an adaptation of the military M16.

Continue reading →

A mere 24 hours ago, I was impressed by the determination of the University of Missouri football team.  Not that they were in bowl contention, but that they made the decision to take a risk, a huge risk, and put some skin in the game. The black players decided to strike, to refuse to play ball, and they had the support of their coaches and white players.

Their grievance? “Systemic racism,” they said. Their demand?

“The athletes of color on the University of Missouri football team truly believe ‘Injustice Anywhere is a threat to Justice Everywhere,’” the tweet read. “We will no longer participate in any football related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students’ experiences. WE ARE UNITED!!!!!”

The “injustice” wasn’t quite as clear. There were instances of claimed racism, but that’s not a basis for a claim that it’s systemic.  It appears that the heart of the problem was that Wolfe acted too slowly in condemning the instances. They felt he failed to “respect and value” their voices, whatever that means. Continue reading →

It can be soooo annoying when kids throw a loud party.  So call the Tuscaloosa cops to tell those darn University of Alabama kids to keep it down. Or else.

And if the tasing isn’t enough to teach a student a good lesson, there’s always beating him with a billy club too. High tech gadgets just don’t provide the same level of law enforcement satisfaction as a good hands-on beating.

Avoiding the compulsion to make a cheap pun out of the word “Sillimanders,” the name given the residents of Silliman College at Yale university, a post by senior Aaron Z. Lewis tries to clear up the misunderstanding reflected by outsiders, like me.

By now, you’ve probably seen the video of a Yale student yelling at a professor, the Facebook post about a “white girls only” party, or the email about offensive Halloween costumes. Unfortunately, the short YouTube clips and articles I’ve seen don’t even come close to painting an accurate picture of what’s happening at Yale. I’m a senior here, and I’ve experienced the controversy firsthand over the past week (and years). I want to tell a more complete story and set a few facts straight.

For starters: the protests are not really about Halloween costumes or a frat party. They’re about a mismatch between the Yale we find in admissions brochures and the Yale we experience every day. They’re about real experiences with racism on this campus that have gone unacknowledged for far too long. The university sells itself as a welcoming and inclusive place for people of all backgrounds. Unfortunately, it often isn’t.

It’s good that Lewis wants to tell a more complete story. I want to learn a more complete story. It appears that the “complete story” is that Yale is a hotbed of racism and its administration didn’t admit its failing fast enough. Continue reading →

Jane McManus, an ESPN reporter, wrote about how her middle school daughter was less-than-enthusiastically received by a boy when she chose to learn football at school.

My daughter got off the school bus and came straight to find me in the office upstairs. In gym class, her teacher, Ms. Rivie, asked the students to pick which sport they wanted to learn: football or soccer. She picked football, and persuaded two of the girls in her sixth-grade class to join her.

“That’s great, Charlotte!”

Why “that’s great” isn’t clear, and isn’t given any further thought.  McManus’ daughter was given two options and picked one. Wasn’t that the point of options?  Perhaps no girl had ever chosen football before, which made it “great.” Perhaps it reflected a choice that finally broke away from gender stereotypes, and Ms. Rivie was thrilled to finally have a girl take the football route. If so, it’s unsaid.

But I could see by the look on her face that what happened next was not good. One of the boys said that girls couldn’t play football, then made a “Real Housewives” comment about the trio and laughed.

“It’s not OK,” she said.

Continue reading →

What to do when an otherwise credible legal journalist lets her emotions and gender politics blind her to the facts? Emily Bazelon’s answer is to acknowledge her mistake.

Last February, I wrote a long article for this magazine about the relationship between Ellie Clougherty, a recent Stanford graduate, and Joe Lonsdale, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and alumnus of the school.

Lonsdale was Clougherty’s mentor. They had a sexual relationship. Guess what happened next?

After the relationship ended, Clougherty accused Lonsdale of sexual assault.

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When Western District of Texas Judge Earl Leroy Yeakel III ruled, heads began to explode all over the place.

U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel dropped manslaughter charges against former Austin Police Department Detective Charles “Trey” Kleinert Thursday afternoon, thus ending any chance that the APD veteran will see any sort of criminal recourse for the death of Larry Jackson, Jr.

He didn’t, of course, “drop” anything, but then, it’s not like journalists work with words, so the Austin Chronicle’s Chase Hoffenberger can be forgiven his inept phrasing. Rather, Yeakel held that the Constitution precluded state prosecution of a federal agent for the performance of his duties:

In a 27-page opinion, Judge Yeakel concluded that the state’s assertion that Kleinert should not be entitled to Supremacy Clause immunity because Kleinert’s interactions were not within his federal-task-force duties is not concurrent with the law, and that “by virtue of Kleinert’s deputation, he was authorized to investigate federal crimes committed in his presence. Continue reading →

At Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene quotes from the decision of Maryland District Court Judge Thomas Selby Ellis III in Wikimedia Foundation v. N.S.A.:

The amici curiae in this case argue that standing can be established on the ground that the alleged government surveillance chills speech protected by the First Amendment. See Br. of Amici Curiae American Booksellers Association, et al., at 12-17; Br. of Amici Curiae First Amendment Scholars, at 9-19. As with plaintiffs’ argument, the amici curiae’s argument fails for the reasons articulated in Clapper. 133 S. Ct. at 1150-52. Both amicus briefs, which focus chiefly on the chilling argument, have been carefully reviewed and found unpersuasive.

It is also worth noting that the only other nine individuals who cite their own works as frequently as do the nine authors of the First Amendment Scholars amicus brief are members of the Supreme Court, who, unlike the amici, do so out of sheer necessity.

Ouch. That had to hurt.  And from this, Eugene draws a lesson that he shares with other academics: Continue reading →

There are full posts at The Fire by Haley Hudler and Reason by Robby Soave, and they say what needs to be said about the very angry, very fragile, students at the very elite Yale University.

What was Christakis’s crime? His wife, an early childhood educator, had responded to a campus-wide email about offensive Halloween costumes by opining that it was inappropriate for the college to tell students how to dress. According to The Washington Post:

“Whose business is it to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that,” wrote Erika Christakis, an early childhood educator and the wife of Nicholas Christakis, the Silliman College master. Both later took to social media to defend the e-mail, incensing students by tying it to debates about free speech and trigger warnings. At a Wednesday night forum hosted by the Afro-American Cultural Center, Erika Christakis sought to leave the meeting during a discussion of her e-mail, further provoking student anger. …

And it’s already been made abundantly clear how critical Halloween costumes are to the safety of society.  If you don’t yet appreciate it, consider the harm:

I have had to watch my friends defend their right to this institution. This email and the subsequent reaction to it have interrupted their lives. I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns. I feel drained. And through it all, Christakis has shown that he does not consider us a priority.

Continue reading →