He may be no Ken Jennings, but then, being a Jeopardy! champion eleven times is nothing to sneeze at.  So when Arthur Chu took to writing for TechCrunch after learning that there was no more savory way to monetize his moment of fame, it was worthwhile checking out what a mind filled with trivia had to say.  And Chu did not squander the opportunity.

After launching into a shallow homage to anti-Gamergaters, “[p]erennial troll targets Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn,” Chu eventually got to the point of his cry for attention: End the safe harbor of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  This “loophole,” Chu posits, is how mean people on the internet have been allowed to so deeply hurt the feelings of Sarkeesian and Quinn.  It must die.

Right now you can’t sue digital platforms for enabling harassment on their services, even if they enable harassment through flagrant, willful neglect. If your harasser is able to take fairly basic steps to keep himself anonymous — and if the platform he chooses enables and enforces that anonymity — then there is literally nothing you or the government can do, even if his actions rise to the level of major crimes like attempted murder.

Well, maybe not “attempted murder,” which actually involves the use of a telephone, rather than the internet, and isn’t exactly attempted murder, though SWATTING is a awful thing.  But Chu is on a roll, even if he refuses to put it in the form of a question. Continue reading →

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done a readers mailbag here, mostly because there isn’t much to say about the ten millionth email offering ten free “leads” if only I attend a conference by the city bar where a couple of biglaw washouts will teach me how to become famous on twitter for two ethics credits.

Unless, of course, you think that would be something worthwhile to read about, but I digress. Incoming was this email:

Dear Simple Justice:

I’m a small-firm lawyer with a modest practice in the midwest. Most of my clientele come from referrals, but I do have a modest online presence. Part of this online presence was “claiming” my profile on Avvo. I suppose I did this for fear that someone else might claim it instead, which was the dumbest assumption I’ve ever made as a lawyer.

Five years passed, and the only thing that happened for me at Avvo were modest increases in my score (based on longevity, I presume) and monthly cold calls from individuals suffering from borderline personality disorder. It never put a single additional penny in my pocket. If anything, it robbed me of time I could’ve otherwise spent with my paying clients. Continue reading →

The new term of the Supreme Court begins next Monday, and as usually happens, lawyers and academics will gaze and gush over their pontifications, because it is the Supreme Court, a branch of government unto itself and, if not infallible, definitely final.

But there isn’t much discussion, amidst the gushing and fawning, of the fact that the Supreme Court is doing one exceptionally poor job of things.  As Jeff Gamso graphically shows, they’ve grown lazy.

Now some numbers.

• 142
• 143
• 159
• 143
• 91
• 79
• 85
• 77
• 68

Continue reading →

Contrary to popular belief, the idea that compassion and empathy are missing from police training is hardly a new idea. And, ironically, much of the concern isn’t about police empathy toward others, but the lack of compassion and empathy shown police.  For those inclined toward emotional solutions, the idea that things will get better if we all share a big group hug seems sound.

And yet, what situation could be more universal, more susceptible to compassion and empathy, than a woman being rushed to the hospital to give birth?

The cops who stopped the car, guns drawn, ready to kill, fell a bit short on the empathy meter. Continue reading →

Resident advisers reacted well, to no one’s surprise.

The room erupted in appreciative finger snapping (the new clapping).

Clapping, I’m told, is potentially traumatic, giving rise to needless anxiety.  I thought the solution was jazz hands, but apparently snapping is okay too. Who knew?  Apparently, the incoming crop of RAs at the University of Michigan did, as they sat through a lecture on their duties as “mandatory reporters.”

But in recent years, the job has become much more intense. The federal government has laid out new guidelines about universities’ responsibilities in investigating, addressing and responding to allegations of student sexual misconduct. These measures have helped open a national conversation about sex and sexual assault on campus, and the role of the university in prevention, awareness and disciplinary measures. At the same time, binge-drinking and drug-taking, which often play a role in campus sex and sexual misconduct, continue to escalate.

Incoming college students, fresh the bosom of their parents’ oversight, are about to be given the opportunity to make personal decisions, whether to drink, to take drugs, to have sex.  For many, this is a new freedom, and with new freedom comes new feelings.  Many turn to their RAs for answers, viewing them as a friend, a confidante, who can empathize with their changes in lifestyle and ensuing new emotions.  And RAs are fed the answers from college administrators. Continue reading →

Chain-snatching. When was the last time anyone bemoaned the nightmare of chain-snatching?*  It was a huge crime issue in the 1970s and early 1980s, when crime was “rampant” because of junkies needing their next fix. Of course, it seems almost quaint today, when discussion centers on killing people with bullets. Much like the 1950s obsession with World War II gravity knives in a world where guns are ubiquitous.

In a New York Times op-ed, NYU urban studies professor Michael Fortner proffers the “real” roots of the 70s drug laws, starting with the dreaded Rockefeller Drug Laws, based on the theory that if draconian penalties are applied to possession and sale of drugs, people will stop using and selling them. The theory seemed reasonable. It failed miserably, unless you were looking for a job as a screw, in which case it was a huge success.

Fortner dredges up a modern view of history as a justification for the antidote to the Black Lives Matter movement. Continue reading →

As a freshman at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, I was required to take Labor History. My professor, Roger Keeran (who was also my advisor) was a bit of an anarcho-syndicalist and a huge fan of the Wobblies.  It cost him tenure.

I liked Prof. Keeran a lot, though I disagreed with him about pretty much everything. Except the music. The IWW had the best music of any labor movement. I still have a cassette tape of Wobbly songs he made for the class.  But his politics was off the charts, and served to turn many of my fellow frosh into passionate pro-union advocates.

When I was there, the only source of news was the Cornell Daily Sun. A few years after I graduated, the Cornell Review was founded, with some undergrad named Ann Coulter as its editor. Despite this, it offered an alternate voice, and still does. It’s introduction to Cornell’s new president, Elizabeth Garrett, made me think that Roger might want to reapply for his old job.

“We must heed the call to be radical and progressive.”

Continue reading →

I like Des Moines as much as the next New Yorker. Maybe even more, given than I’ve had the pleasure of barbecue at Flying Mango. But knowing that its senator, Chuck Grassley, is doing everything possible to make sure that mandatory minimums aren’t altered by the Smarter Sentencing Act, rubs me the wrong way.  And as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Grassley’s love of prosecutors and hatred of reform is a major stumbling block.

At op-ed in the Des Moines Register by two former federal prosecutors, J. Douglas McCullough and Eric Evenson, the former now serving as a North Carolina Court of Appeals judge, pitches Grassley’s position to his constituents.  It runs through the usual litany of how valuable mandatory minimums are to prosecutors as the means of coercing cooperation and pleas without being put to the crucible of trial to prove guilt.

There is no doubt that prosecutors adore mandatory minimums. It makes their job far easier, and since they believe that what they’re doing is right, that every person they prosecute it guilty, there can be no downside to “getting” the people they decide to get. As is the usual case, the government builds systems that don’t allow for the possibility that the government could be wrong.

That this is offered for the benefit of backing Grassley seems clear by this bone tossed his way: Continue reading →

While it’s clear to those who labor under the limitations of law that colleges and universities adoption of the “guidance” of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’ “dear colleague” letters is not a legal mandate, but rather cowardly acquiescence, a video, via FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff at Instapundit, of Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) questioning Deputy Education Assistant Secretary Amy McIntosh drives the point home as clearly as possible.

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.* Continue reading →

After reading all seventeen thousand words of Ken White’s “few comments” on the United Nation’s Broadband Commission Report on “Cyber Violence Against Girls and Women,” I posed a question that could be alternatively viewed as socratic or snarky:

Help me out so that I can better understand the post. Can you define online harassment and violence. If they’re the evils to be cured, it would be very useful to know what conduct would give rise to a violation.

Ken replied that while the report failed to offer definitions, it was inconsequential until they “proposed specific laws against undefined violence,” the report being long on dubious rhetoric but otherwise largely noise, much of it sounding like weeping.

It’s a fair perspective, but the report indulges in a problem that has plagued us in the past, as words were disconnected from meaning, and found their way into common usage by mere rhetorical connections designed to convey some vague sense of wrongfulness.  Cyber violence?  The words paired together suggest something awful, yet mean essentially nothing. Continue reading →