For years now, Starbucks has been the office of choice for the ultra-hip tech lawyer who can’t afford a place of his own.  But as Philly Police Officer Joe Leighthardt explained on Facebook, police want their own access to the Temple of Frappucino, telling the story of a bro-cop whose needs went, ahem, unfulfilled.

 I walk into the Starbucks at 13th and Chestnut in full uniform and ask the young blonde liberal behind the counter if I could use their public bathroom for which you need a key code and she states, in a loud voice so all the other customers can hear that the bathroom is for paying customers only. I then ask in a very polite manner if I could please use it. She then states in the same loud manner and a smirk “Are you a paying customer?” It was at this point that I realized what she was doing. As I walked out with my hand up and while she continued loudly to tell me about the bathroom down the street, I was even more astonished that the many customers and other employees said nothing and seemed indifferent. This is the world cops live in anymore. It’s hip for this generation to berate and totally disrespect cops in front of the public and praise cop killers as the heroes of they’re (sic) time. I never post things but I hope my fellow brothers and sisters in blue see this and know that we have each other… and not to patronize that Starbucks.

Damn them “young blonde liberals” and their lack of urinempathy.  Did she really expect a police officer to buy a coffee? Does she know nothing of tradition? Continue reading →

A few years ago, I had a chat with the dean of my alma mater, New York Law School, after it announced it was hooking up with a slimy internet outlet selling minicourses in unethical legal marketing by defrocked lawyers.  Then Dean Richard Mataser admitted to me that he actually had no clue whom his school had gotten in bed with.

The problem, he explained, is that NYLS isn’t Harvard Law School, and never would be.  That was not exactly an epiphany. So, he went on, it needed some hook to make itself relevant, and it was hanging its future on being the school that embraced the internet. Did I get it?

Sure, I told the dean, but if that was where it wanted to focus, it had to, you know, have a clue about the internet. He didn’t. It didn’t. He was going to look into it. And then he retired.

As an alumnus, they send me emails from time to time hourly extolling their scholarly efforts, and incoming was one of their major efforts, a make-a-name-for-yourself symposium: Continue reading →

When did “hetero” become a dirty prefix?  It means “different,” as does “diversity.” And yet, one soars on college campuses while the other is an epithet. The point arose in a twit yesterday, when a crim pro professor “chewed out” a student for suggesting that over-indictment was a problem.  Never, the professor replied.

It harkened back to thoughts of non-lawyer lawprof Mary Anne Franks teaching criminal law at Miami law school, giving rise to the inevitable question of how someone so mired in her own politics could teach students, when she was incapable of surmounting her own intellectual dishonesty.  What could she possibly tell students if she was shameless enough to write law review articles that were flagrant nonsense?

Nowhere is diversity more celebrated, and hetero more despised, than on the grassy quads of higher education.  To call it an echo chamber is too obvious; it’s not merely that the intellectual “elites” believe in progressive values, but they go well beyond intolerant when it comes to any other political views.  The offshoot is that the young, impressionable minds of mush placed in their care have been rendered incapable of hearing, no less thinking, of any other views.

Some scholars have decided to stop hiding behind rocks to avoid the sting of their colleagues’ slings and arrows, and to step into the sunlight at a new blog called Heterodox Academy. Jonathan Haidt explains: Continue reading →

Two high profile screw ups have brought a great deal of heat on two heads of late, and both have chosen to fight back.  One, New York Police Benevolent Association president, Pat Lynch, chose the path of attacking the attackers. The other, Colorado Congressman Jared Polis, tried the path of human error, spun to his advantage.

Lynch sent out an open letter to “arm-chair judges,” pulling out the usual tropes used by cops to justify why no one but a cop can criticize a cop. He responds to the criticism of Officer James Frascatore for leaping to violence to take out tennis great James Blake.

If you have never struggled with someone who is resisting arrest or who pulled a gun or knife on you when you approached them for breaking a law, then you are not qualified to judge the actions of police officers putting themselves in harm’s way for the public good.

It’s a variation on the quasi-biblical defense, John 8:7, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” We, non-cops, don’t understand. We’ve never stared death in the eyes like cops do.  It’s not only an effective retort, but one that most judges have accepted to absolve police of their poor choices in crafting exceptions for what would be murders if performed by anyone else. Continue reading →

There is a battle being waged in Congress over a law called the Safe Campus Act, which is intended to restore a measure of due process to campus sexual assault and rape adjudications. It would blunt the efforts of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to turn its mandate under Title IX into an overarching requirement to eliminate all vestiges of a sexually hostile environment on campus.

Organizations like FIRE are all for it.  College rape victim advocacy groups are vehemently against it. What hasn’t gotten much attention is how a law, enacted in response to women being denied the opportunity to engage in college sports, morphed into a quasi-criminal rape law.

Title IX, 20 U.S.C. § 1681(a), provides that:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial
assistance.

Continue reading →

Fire James Frascatore?  The New York Times says so. Ken Womble says so. It’s not just for his needlessly forceful takedown of James Blake. His resort to force was well established before it hit the front page, though few knew or cared until they saw it for themselves. Some still refuse to see a problem.

Fire James Frascatore?  The Times says that Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and his sidekick, Mayor de Blasio, need to “make an example of him,” which is another way of saying they should send a message.  But communication isn’t so simple. The message transmitted isn’t necessarily the message received.

To the rank and file police officer, Frascatore will be a scapegoat, and his firing will be taken as a lack of support for their self-perceived risk in doing a job that the City wants done, but lacks the courage to admit.  While the numbers fail to support a “war on cops,” the war they perceive isn’t just a body count, but a lack of respect and appreciation. They believe it’s their due. Continue reading →

Since the day when a 300 baud modem connected to the world wide web instead of Gopher, the question has been posed whether the internet makes people stupider. And at Techdirt, Karl Bode asks it yet again.

Google is making us stupid. Smartphones have ruined the art of conversation. Video games make you violent. There’s simply no limitation to the number of people quick to assume that technology is to blame for long-standing human foibles despite generations of historical evidence to the contrary. There is, however, usually a very sharp limit to the science actually supporting these positions. At the forefront of this yeah I bet that’s probably true movement has long sat Susan Greenfield, whose expertise in the field of “justify-my-Luddite-beliefs-at-all-costs” has gained endless media attention. 

Nice, Karl. Make fun of Baroness Susan Greenfield (hi, cousin Susan) for being a Luddite. Only kidding. The closest my branch of the Greenfield family ever came to peerage was cleaning their floors. But I digress.

Of course, Karl is right, that the internet doesn’t make anybody anything. It’s merely the tool by which we are handed the opportunity to make ourselves stupider.  As with all tools, it can be used for good or evil, and the internet-gods have left the choice in the mouse in our hands. Continue reading →

At This Week, Ryan Cooper gets all snarky as he grabs at the low-hanging fruit of the sexting case against a couple of 17-year-olds, Cormega Copening and his girlfriend, Brianna Benson.

New ground has recently been broken in the incarceration of American teens, however. Several children have been charged as adults for possessing child pornography — of themselves. Apparently, moral panic over sexting means we must entrap our children in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic sandpit before turning them into hardened criminals.

Well, not exactly “recently,” as this involves phenomena that have been happening for years already.  Sexting has been a source of terrible problems for youth since its start, but that doesn’t seem to trouble Cooper too much.  He recognizes the system’s “brutal treatment of minors,” but no one is suggesting that Copening get life without parole for sexting.

[R]iddle me this: How can you simultaneously be a minor being victimized by a sex criminal (yourself), and an adult violating an innocent victim (also yourself)?

Continue reading →

In a great post at Bloomberg View, Megan McArdle reminds us that rude talk and offensive slights have always been with us, but our culture over time has given rise to different ways of addressing it.  Today, they’re called “microaggressions.”

We used to call this “rudeness,” “slights” or “ignorant remarks.” Mostly, people ignored them. The elevation of microaggressions into a social phenomenon with a specific name and increasingly public redress marks a dramatic social change, and two sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, have a fascinating paper exploring what this shift looks like, and what it means. (Jonathan Haidt has provided a very useful CliffsNotes version.)

Cutting to the chase, we’re now in victim culture.

Microagressions mark a transition to a third sort of culture: a victim culture, in which people are once again encouraged to take notice of slights.

Victim status is rewarded, and thus incentivized. Good stuff. Read it. But that’s not why I was moved to write about McArdle’s post.

The debate over microaggressions often seems to focus on whether they are real. This is silly. Of course they’ve always been real; only the label is new.

Continue reading →

At PrawfsBlawg, Miami lawprof Tamara Rice Lave has now made three attempts to show that the nouvelle criterion for campus sex, affirmative consent, shifts the burden of proof from accuser to accused.  To say that it’s been a difficult battle is an understatement.

The crux of her argument is that there is an implicit presumption built into affirmative consent that sex was nonconsensual, and to overcome that presumption, the accused is compelled to testify or produce evidence.  If he remains silent in the face of evidence of sex, he loses.

First, this discussion matters because the infiltration of affirmative consent into the world outside of campus sex is happening, as demonstrated by the American Law Institute’s efforts to change the model penal code to redefine rape and sexual assault using affirmative consent.  If you think this is just some cockamamie nonsense developed for campus feminists, you’re going to be blindsided when criminal sex offenses are modified to incorporate the new standard. It’s coming. At least, the effort to do so will be coming. Continue reading →