People died because of this. Fanatics were outraged because of the content of its expression, and killed them. Many are outraged at the violence, but too fearful of publishing it lest some fanatic be outraged and do the same to them.

They say they want free expression, but they refuse to take any personal risk for it.  Let Charlie Hebdo take the risk. Let the people at Charlie Hebdo die.  They will weep over their deaths, but they won’t show the courage to stand up against the murders.  Who?

As for the present day, CNN, NYT, AP, NBC, ABC, the BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, and the CBC, will *not* be running Charlie-Hebdo cartoons.

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In the past, I’ve been critical of the New York Times for tip-toeing around significant issues for fear of upsetting someone with its microaggressiveness.  Yes, I’m only kidding about the microagressiveness part. While a bastion of progressiveness, the Gray Lady has proven remarkably circumspect in its refusal to call out wrongdoing in clear, plain language. This time, not so much.

Call this what it is: a reckless, coordinated escalation of a war between the police unions and Mr. de Blasio and a hijacking of law-enforcement policy by those who do not set law-enforcement policy. This deplorable gesture is bound to increase tension in a city already rattled over the killing by the police of an unarmed man, Eric Garner, last summer, the executions of two officers in Brooklyn last month, and the shootings on Monday of two plainclothes officers in the Bronx.

The madness has to stop. The problem is not that a two-week suspension of “broken windows” policing is going to unleash chaos in the city. The problem is that cops who refuse to do their jobs and revel in showing contempt to their civilian leaders are damaging the social order all by themselves.

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After the Weev trial, I talked to Tor Ekeland.  Rarely did someone want so badly to be a criminal defense lawyer, a trial lawyer, but realized that he was up to his eyeballs in shit while being at step one in preparedness.  Tor had the will, but not the way. Not yet, anyway.  But he was one of those few who would get there, no matter what.

Weev, who has a future as poster boy for internet psychosis if trolling doesn’t pay off, picked his lawyer because of his name, Tor, even before he met him.  Ironically, Ekeland came by it honestly, his parents being Norwegian, but whatever.  Weev summed up his lawyer well:

As for Tor Ekeland, Auernheimer offers his highest praise. Tor, he says, “is a very competent legal scholar and theorist [and] also a relentless motherfucker that takes no bullshit and can hold his own in a street fight.”

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There will be no shortage of commentary today about some yokel councilman from Frederick County, Maryland.  Already, the witticisms are flowing, like “he who must not be named,” and Powerline has already created an award in his name to go with the Green Weenie award.

Yup. This would be Kirby Delauter, whose official bio is endearingly small town:

Kirby Delauter
Council Member – District 5

Kirby Delauter is the son of Russell and Marlene Delauter. He resides in Thurmont, Maryland, with his wife Tina. They have four children: Maureen, a graduate of High Point University in Highpoint, NC, lives in Thurmont with her husband Blaine Schildt; William, a graduate of Virginia Tech; Emily, a student at Salisbury University in the nursing program, and Sam a student at Catoctin High School. Continue reading →

TRIGGER WARNING: Graphic unpleasant judicial imagery ahead.

Why do judicial chambers have bathrooms?  Because judges use them.

One of my first comments when I discovered Judge Kopf’s blog, Hercules and the Umpire, was that the judge could be “awkward.”  It’s not that Judge Kopf was saying anything that others don’t say, but that he was Judge Kopf.  As lawprof Rick Hasen points out at every possible opportunity, plain talk by a judge is “inappropriate.” It is undignified.

In response, Judge Kopf has taken the position that Hasen needs to grow up. Judges are people.  The position of judge is an office. They use bathrooms. Just like lawprofs.  Just like lawyers.  Just like everyone. Continue reading →

The putative purpose of the §1983 suit before the Eastern District of Missouri in Grand Juror Doe v. McCulloch is to gain the ability to speak freely despite the law that prohibits a grand juror from doing so.  In the usual case, grand jury secrecy makes sense. But this isn’t the usual case.

As the District Attorney, Robert McCulloch, already put on a dog and pony show of self-serving faux transparency to show what a great job he did in sabatoging the indictment of P.O. Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, what’s left to hide?

But the complaint, drafted by Anthony Rothert of the ACLU of Missouri, was a smart bit of legal writing.  Regardless of the outcome of the action, the grand juror’s message was laid bare:

19. From Plaintiff’s perspective, the presentation of evidence to the grand jury investigating Wilson differed markedly and in significant ways from how evidence was presented in the hundreds of matters presented to the grand jury earlier in its term. Continue reading →

Following the disgraceful conduct of NYPD officers, in uniform and in front of national media, turning their back on Mayor Bill de Blasio for not loving them enough, Commissioner Bill Bratton tried his hand:

Police Commissioner Bill Bratton is so worried his cops will turn their backs to his boss, Mayor Bill de Blasio, at another NYPD funeral that he sent out a memo to shame them into good behavior, sources told The Post.

“A hero’s funeral is about grieving, not grievance,” began the four-paragraph plea, which is being read at precinct roll calls ahead of slain Officer Wenjian Liu’s Sunday service.

This was a curious effort, short of a command but a plea where Bratton put himself on the line. Continue reading →

Up to now, the only sort of whore accusation ever leveled at former Harvard lawprof was always paired with the word “media,” and nobody got terribly bent out of shape about it.  But the accusations leveled by Bradley Edwards and Paul Cassell (yes, that Paul Cassell) take it in a direction that few would have ever imagined.

While I’m no big fan of the Dersh, never would I have imagined something like this:

Epstein also sexually trafficked the then-minor Jane Doe, making her available for sex to politically-connected and financially-powerful people. Epstein’s purposes in “lending” Jane Doe (along with other young girls) to such powerful people were to ingratiate himself with them for business, personal, political, and financial gain, as well as to obtain potential blackmail information. Continue reading →

Anywhere else, a requirement that would allow grownups to force innocent children to remove their clothing would be cause for a swift prosecution and, likely, a long prison sentence followed by a living under a bridge.  Anywhere but a prison visiting room.

Via the Chronicle of Social Change:

For the more than 2.7 million children in the United States with an incarcerated parent, the holiday season brings a poignant mixture of torment and joy. On the one hand, it may mean a rare opportunity to visit a parent behind bars—for some, the only visit of the year. But the love and connection a visit can bring are tempered by the fear of driving past razor wire, passing through metal detectors, and being subjected to the scrutiny of uniformed guards.

This holiday season, some children may face an even more disturbing intrusion. Under new regulations recently proposed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), visitors will be subjected to canine searches in an effort to prevent the flow of contraband such as drugs and cell phones into the state’s prisons. Should the search result in a positive alert (even a false positive, which research has shown comprise as many as 80 percent of all positive identifications), the visitor in question must submit to a strip search or else forgo the visit. The regulations make no exception for children, and existing CDCR paperwork regarding unclothed searches explicitly includes accompanying minors.

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One of the foremost law blogs on the interwebz, the Volokh Conspiracy, is now behind the Washington Post paywall.  We knew it was coming, so it’s not quite a surprise, but now that it’s happened, a pall is over the blawgosphere.  If that’s not bad enough, Radley Balko, one time Agitator who went legit, will be paywalled as well, but that’s another story.

Sure, the paywall is filled with holes, and VC posts are still available by RSS feed, but that kinda misses the point.  The Volokh Conspiracy was once a blog that offered some brilliant content, followed up by the mother lode of thoughtful commentary.  The commentariot there has taken a huge nose-dive into the toilet, and the content has devolved to posts by the principles of embarrassingly limited depth or flagrant advocacy from the likes of Stewart Baker and Paul Cassell.

On twitter, Orin Kerr asked a question, and since I like Orin very much, and appreciate all I’ve learned from him, I want to respond. Continue reading →