There is no one as passionate as a mother in defense of her child, and indeed, when that child has suffered the indignities of the legal system in one of its many permutations, the need to do something can be overwhelming.  Often, this passion serves as a driving force for change, for good.  But passion is just part of the equation.

Emails arrive announcing new organizations dedicated to good causes all the time.  Often, they’re a bit disconcerting, like when the Marshall Project went public with its goal of being the savior of criminal justice because no one had been doing or writing a damn thing until it showed up.  It’s not merely insulting to those toiling in the fields long before the saviors arrive, but it reflected the arrogance of one niche (journalists) presuming to know better than those who actually did the very work they could only see from afar.

The other day, another new organization appeared on the scene, with a press release that came as a bit of a shock.  It was Families Advocating for Campus Equality (FACE).

Fargo, ND – Families Advocating for Campus Equality (FACE), a newly formed not-for-profit organization dedicated to ensuring fairness and due process for all parties involved in allegations of sexual misconduct on college campuses, was officially launched today, it was announced by Sherry Warner Seefeld, president and one of the organization’s co-founders. Continue reading →

Lawprof Brian Clarke raised another dirty little law school secret problem at the Faculty Lounge that implicated an issue that non-academics have long pondered: what’s so horrible about real world experience?  He questioned why significant practice experience was not valued in tenure track professors:

I was unpleasantly surprised by the prevailing wisdom regarding practice experience when I went to the meat market in 2010.  Back then the conventional wisdom seemed to be as follows:  Ideal:  zero to 3 years of practice; Acceptable: 3-5 years of practice; Potentially Disqualiying: more than 5 years of practice up to 10 years of practice; Disqualifying: more than 10 years of practice.

This is not an absolute rule, there always being an exception (like Suffolk Law’s Jeff Lipshaw, who practiced 26 years), but it’s certainly the general rule.  They’ve even got derogatory expressions to characterize it, “retiring to teach” being a description to suggest that old guys want to ease out of the hard work in the trenches to the cushy job in the Ivory Tower to spend their last years making big bucks while telling war stories to kids.

This issue has taken on added relevance over the last year or more given the changes taking place in legal education and in the larger legal economy.  (See, for example, this post from PrawfsBlawg, and this one and this one from Conglomerate, this one and this one from ProfessorBainbridge, and, of course, a vast number of message board comments [including some on the foregoing posts]).  There is a greater focus on the need for experiential education for all law students (due to ABA mandates and otherwise) and on the aspiration that law schools produce something close to “practice ready” lawyers.

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In the future, everyone will be a cop for 15 minutes.

— Apologies to Andy Warhol

And if you don’t fulfill your duty, the government will indict you.  United Parcel Service decided it was a better business move to pay off the government, at a price tag of $40 million.  Federal Express refused. The government has now indicted FedEx for its refusal to capitulate.  Via Mike Masnick at Techdirt:

Apparently, FedEx was unwilling to fall on its sword and cough up a similar amount to the US government, so the DEA and DOJ have announced they’ve gotten a grand jury to indict the company for delivering drugs associated with internet pharmacies. You can read the full indictment, which tries to spin a variety of stories into evidence that somehow FedEx “knew” what was in those packages.

Maybe it did. Maybe it didn’t. So what?  FedEx is in the business of delivering packages. There is no crime in that.  It is not in the business of assessing the lawfulness of the contents of the packages it delivers.  And this is what pissed the government off. Continue reading →

There was no good reason to discuss the false rape claims of Crystal Magnum against three young men on the Duke Lacrosse team, or the outrageous conduct of prosecutor Mike Nifong.  No matter what I might say, Brooklyn College history professor K.C. Johnson would have already said it, and said it better.  His blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, was the mother lode.

Johnson announced that he is done, which makes it a particularly good time to note both the service he has provided all of us, and the impetus for his blog in the first place.  As will become apparent, it is both a critical problem and, sadly, a problem that has continued to grow and pervade all walks of academic life.

When I first started writing about the lacrosse case, . . . I did so in reaction to the Group of 88 statement. Then (and now) I considered the statement an indefensible betrayal by professors of their own school’s students, an action that contradicted many of the basic values on which American higher education rests.

The Group of 88 statement was Continue reading →

From Carlos Miller at Photography is not a crime:

New York City police officers killed a man Thursday after he had broken up a fight between two other men, insisting on placing him in a chokehold and slamming his head to the pavement, piling on top of him as he gasped for air and as he continually told the cops he couldn’t breathe.

The entire incident was caught on video from a witness who kept telling the cops that the man had not committed a crime.

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Former Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals, Sol Wachtler, offered that a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich if a prosecutor wanted it to.  That the grand jury was conceived as a buffer between the authority of the state to prosecute at will and the right of a citizen not to suffer prosecution in the absence of probable cause is long forgotten.

Grand jurors, ordinary citizens whose civic virtue extends as far as facilitating a prosecutor’s job, are hardly skeptical about accusations put before them, but rarely quite as viciously engaged in the inquisitorial role as they were when Erica Jean Dockery testified before the Harris County grand jury in 2003.  Via the Houston Chron’s Lisa Falkenberg,

They seemed convinced that Ericka Jean Dockery’s boyfriend of six months, Alfred Dewayne Brown, had murdered veteran Houston police officer Charles R. Clark during a three-man burglary of a check-cashing place, and they didn’t seem to be willing to believe Dockery’s testimony that he was at her house the morning of the murder. Continue reading →

The video of Marlene Pinnock being pummeled about the head on the side of a highway by the unidentified California Highway Patrol Officer (because confidentiality matters, sometimes) was outrageous enough.  But in contrast to the experience of anyone who has ever watched a cop show on television, the shock when they learn that the police don’t actually investigate most crimes, but rather arrest someone if they’re lucky enough to trip over them, this time an investigation will be done.  Oh yes, this time, the CHP will show its mad investigative skillz.

Except not with regard to the cop who beat Pinnock, but Pinnock, the victim of the beating, who was arrested for viciously attacking the cop’s fists with her face.

But so many questions remain unanswered, and no investigative agency worth its salt would let that happen, so the CHP obtained a search warrant for Pinnock’s medical records; Continue reading →

Dr. SJ made an appointment for me with a dermatologist.  I hesitate to use his name, as I can’t say for sure that he deserves to be maligned by the likes of me.  I didn’t want the appointment, and I avoid such appointments to the extent possible because nothing good ever comes of them. Dr. SJ sees things differently, and insisted I go.

When I arrived ten minutes early to the appointment, I did so begrudgingly.  But I was there, despite my belief that anywhere else would have been a better place to be.  I went to the receptionist, but before I could give her my name, she instructed me to put my name, reason for coming, insurance information and some others stuff that eludes me, on a piece of paper sitting atop the receptionist’s desk.

I said no.

She said I must.  I said that “must” may not be the word she intended, given that she was unarmed.  She said, “it’s our policy.” Continue reading →

That’s professionals, not prostitutes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s not what I meant. Doug Berman at Sentencing Law & Policy points to a new law review article by William & Mary lawprof Adam Gershowitz that raises a very interesting idea. It begins with an explanation:

When a fatal traffic accident happens, we expect the local police and prosecutors to handle the investigation and criminal charges. When a fatal airplane crash occurs however, we turn instead to the National Transportation Safety Board. The reason is that air crashes are complicated and the NTSB has vast expertise. Without that expertise, investigations falter.

It then gets to its point:

It is easy to point to a similar series of mistakes by local prosecutors and defense attorneys in many death-penalty cases around the country. If we are to continue utilizing capital punishment in the United States, the death-penalty system should follow air crash model, not the car crash model. Capital cases should be handled by an elite nationwide unit of prosecutors and investigators who travel to capital murder sites the way the NTSB travels to airplane and other catastrophic crashes.

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Among the handful of truly important things within the legal academy, intellectual honesty was pretty high on the list.  It was fine to disagree about something, but misstating facts (or, as lawyers are more inclined to call it, lying through your teeth), was not only frowned upon, but the kiss of death for scholarly respectability.  It appears that someone took a crayon and crossed it off the list.

When Judge Richard Kopf questioned the Supreme Court’s decision to wade into the deep end of controversy, he closed with this phrase:

As the kids say, it is time for the Court to stfu.

Colorful, even if not your cup of tea.  Naturally, he was attacked for his fresh mouth nasty fingers by the prissy, who found his use of the vernacular disturbing.  This was noted in my plea for the judge not to cease writing, which included the criticism of three law professors, Stephen Bainbridge (who bizarrely called Judge Kopf’s post “thinly veiled anti-Catholicism”), Rick Hasen (who felt that it undermined the dignity of the judiciary) and Jonathan Adler, who had no reason but didn’t want to miss the train. Continue reading →