Via Eugene Volokh at WaPo/VC, a post whose title demands repeating:

Your mother, officer, was a hamster, and your bicycle smells of elderberries

Come on, you have to love the Monty Python reference. It’s perfect here.  Eugene’s reference is to an Arizona law prohibiting, inter alia, the taunting of specific “vulnerable” parties.

A. A person commits harassment [a misdemeanor] if, with intent to harass or with knowledge that the person is harassing another person, the person: …

7. TAUNTS OR MALICIOUSLY THROWS AN OBJECT AT OR IN THE DIRECTION OF A VULNERABLE USER OF A PUBLIC WAY AS DEFINED IN SECTION 28‑913…. Continue reading →

In addition to a proposal to allow law students to take the bar a semester early if they promise to do pro bono their final semester, New York Court of Appeals Judge Jonathan Lippman raised another, tangentially related, issue that has long been on the agenda of the criminal defense bar: Expungement.

The bad news. His answer to expungement is “no.”  The not-quite-as-bad news:

“The stigma of a criminal record continues long after a sentence has been served,” Judge Lippman said. “Under this new policy,” he added, “individuals who have led a law-abiding lifestyle will not permanently be burdened by a single misdemeanor conviction, giving them a second chance.” Continue reading →

Few things cause fear and loathing in academia more than the words, “sexual assault.” The definition of rape and sexual assault has undergone a monster shift in the past generation, with the explanation of “rape culture” to justify its near-total divorce from anything remotely resembling doctrinal adherence.  Rape happens whenever a woman says it happens, and if you disagree, you are a misogynist and a rape apologist.

James Taranto challenged the feminist orthodoxy in his Wall Street Journal column, and was immediately attacked for doing so.  No doubt he expected as much.  After offering the requisite anecdotes, Taranto taps a New York Times article by Michael Winerip which ultimately makes the point the genre of rape and sexual assault stemming from a drunk boy and drunk girl could be avoided if others intervened before things went too far.

It’s a “sensible” point, given the fluctuating definition of rape which includes post hoc regret. Continue reading →

When I was a young man, a friend who assured me he was a Talmudic scholar started dating a shiksa (שיקסע, a non-Jewish girl in Yiddish).  This was curious, so I asked him to explain why a person who professed to be as religious as he, would go out with a shiksa.  He explained that the Talmud says “shiksas are for practice.”

Jonathan Lippman, Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, has been at the forefront of trying imaginative ideas to address two vexing problems.  On the one side is the “access to justice” (A2J) problem, that there is a huge under- and unserved community in need of legal assistance but unable to afford it. On the other, there are law students coming out of school with huge debt and little hope of finding employment.

One idea that has made its way into practice is the 50 hour pro bono rule, that anyone seeking admission to the New York bar will be required to have fulfilled this requirement. Its novelty was that it took unadmitted, inexperienced lawyers who needed jobs, money and experience, and gave them a bit of experience without a job or money. Continue reading →

As happens sometimes, the outcome of the raid failed to meet expectations. As Radley Balko explains,

Last December 19th, nine of the 10 members of the Burleson County Sheriff’s Department staged a raid on the rural home of Henry Magee. An informant had told Deputy Adam Sowders that Magee was running a major marijuana grow. They’d find 12-14 plants, all over six fee tall, the informant said. Magee also had, according to the informant, a vicious dog and several guns, one of which had been stolen from the Burleson County Sheriff’s Department.

The threat to humanity of a dozen pot plants was more than the sheriff’s department could bear, and so raid they must. After all, an informant said so, and that’s good enough when the lives of children are at stake.  Unless, of course, it turns out that the informant was, well, misinforming. Continue reading →

In case you missed it, The New York Times announced that we’re saved. Its former editor cum columnist Bill Keller is leaving dead wood behind to fix the criminal justice system.

Bill Keller, a columnist at The New York Times and its former executive editor, will leave the paper to become editor in chief of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit journalism start-up focused on the American criminal justice system.

“It’s a chance to build something from scratch, which I’ve never done before,” Mr. Keller said, “and to use all the tools that digital technology offers journalists in terms of ways to investigate and to present on a subject that really matters personally.” Continue reading →

At What About Clients?, Dan Hull has long been pounding away at the concept that lawyers need to make their services easier to use.

Client service.  In our view, that huge gap between the promise and the reality has rendered the term “client service” nearly meaningless.  Even for those who deeply care about the crusade of delivering “it”, this simple idea generates much loathing and guilt.  It’s a mantra we repeat to ourselves, to our employees,  and to our customers.  We believe that if we say “it” enough, “it” will come.  Service providers really do institute–but rarely work at and enforce–regime after regime of CS.  The reason:  CS is much harder than it looks.  You weave your skills into a buyer’s “experience” of them, and deliver them together as One Thing.  CS is a hard-acquired habit.  It never was easy.  Never supposed to be easy.  So… Continue reading →

Engineers and clerks love systems. They’re repetitive, conceptually sound and facilitate the movement of huge numbers of widgets, be they ball bearings or human beings, from the beginning to the end of the system. When the occasional bad widget comes out the end, it can be chalked up to an expected failure rate.

When the bad widget turns out to be a human being, the consequences can be devastating and nearly impossible to undo.  Systems, it turns out, are designed to move widgets only in one direction, and are not designed to take into account their own fallibility. Systems don’t like to admit to failure, and fight efforts to correct their mistakes.

The findings and conclusions of Northern District of California Judge William Haskell Alsup in the case of Stanford Ph.D student Rahinah Ibrahim has issued, having been duly redacted by that other branch of government who is in charge of none of its secrets are revealed. Continue reading →

Like most maxims, it sounds better in Latin: Inter arma enim silent leges.  Its message, however, is not merely important, but provides a deep insight into the dynamic of jurisprudence.  At Volokh/WaPo, Ilya Somin writes about Nino Scalia’s extrajudicial observations:

In a recent speech in Hawaii, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made some interesting predictions about two of the Supreme Court’s most notorious decisions: Kelo v. City of New London (2005), which ruled that government can condemn private property and give it to other private owners to promote “economic development,”  and Korematsu v. United States (1944), which upheld the internment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II.

With regard to the controversial Kelo decision, Nino offered his view that it “will not survive.” Continue reading →

Among the weird things that happen in the blawgosphere is the sudden, unexpected appearance of a comment long after a post appeared.  More than a year ago, I posted about a Ft. Lauderdale lawyer named Gary Ostrow, who you may recall from his “press release,” announced his intention “to take on all celebrity criminal cases in the state of Florida, effective immediately.”

Okay, stop your snickering. That’s old news.  There’s new news. Just calm down.

It’s hard to know for sure why Gary stumbled upon my old post. Perhaps he was doing a vanity Google search of his name, or maybe he was checking on whether it was worthwhile to send another check to Bangalore’s finest to promote his brand, but there it was. Continue reading →