Friday linkfest

1. Top ten calamities for which global warming was blamed. (via HotAir)

2. Get your Koran on your cell phone, courtesy of . . . an Israeli company?

3. Yankees offer bleacher seats for 25 cents for exhibition openers. Scalpers begin drooling immediately.

4. The only thing better than a huge foul-smelling flower is its Latin name. (via Ace)

5. Indicted lawyer was "the Houdini of impersonation and false documents." Bonus: I met the guy back in the early 1980s but haven't seen him since then.

Click here to read more . . .

Monday linkfest

What, another linkfest? Yes, another linkfest.

1. Major scoop: Supreme Court justices might be influenced by their clerks.

2. Baltimore efficiency: "Members of Baltimore's Board of Fire Commissioners will receive their final paychecks at the end of this month, after a recent discovery by the city's Finance Department that the members have not been eligible for a city stipend since 1996."

3. New doll: "I made a stinky."

4. Try it with a photo of Wolf Blitzer.

5. Talk about pollination!

6. Rockville in the news: If you get a speed camera ticket, you might be the victim of a prank; "students duplicate the license plates by printing plate numbers on glossy photo paper, using fonts from certain websites that 'mimic' those on Maryland license plates. They tape the duplicate plate over the existing plate on the back of their car and purposefully speed through a speed camera, the parent said. The victim then receives a citation in the mail days later."

(4 and 5 via The Corner, 6 via Ace)


UPDATE: 7. The Weekly Standard's parody imitates Pillage Idiot. ("**** them!")

Click here to read more . . .

The high price of (passing) gas

If flatulence can make it all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, then, surely, it can make its way to the local courts in Charleston, West Virginia. (via HotAir)

When police were trying to get fingerprints, police say [Jose] Cruz moved closer to the officer and passed gas on him. The investigating officer remarked in the criminal complaint that the odor was very strong.

Cruz is now charged with battery on a police officer, as well as DUI and obstruction.

The moral of the story seems to be: "Don't pass gas on a police officer who's booking you for DUI."

Take a look of the photo. It doesn't look anything like the baseball player, Jose Cruz, Jr., and I'm positive it wasn't. That is, I'm not endorsing the subversive theory that it was; as Andrew Sullivan would say, I'm just airing it. And it has a strong odor.

Now that that labored joke is finished, my lawyers advise me to repeat that it really wasn't the ballplayer.

If you follow the link to the original news story, you'll find a video. The local TV station interviewed a bunch of locals about flatulence and whether it should be a crime. The key phrase was "law and odor." That's their joke, not mine.

You'll also find a copy of the criminal complaint sworn out against Mr. Cruz. Here is the relevant allegation:

PTLM. PARSONS WAS IN A CHAIR APPROX 4-5 FEET AWAY FROM THE FINGERPRINTING STATION. THE DEFENDANT SCOOTED THE 4 FEET TO PTLM PARSONS, AWAY FROM OFFICER COOK, AND LIFTED HIS LEG AND PASSED GAS LOUDLY ON PTLM. PARSONS. THE DEFENDANT THEN FANNED THE AIR WITH HIS HAND IN FRONT OF HIS REAR ONTO PTLM. PAR[S]ONS[.] THE GAS WAS VERY ODOROUS AND CREATED A CONTACT OF AN INSULTING OR PROVOKING NATURE WITH PTLM. PARSONS.

I'm not authorized to practice law in West Virginia, but I have to wonder whether contact from gas can be a battery without a physical touching. If it could, you would think Cruz could have been charged if he had stayed four feet way when he passed gas, rather than doing so next to the officer. Gas, after all, diffuses throughout its container (here, the room).

I also wonder whether this could be an illegal search and seizure, unless you accept the "plain smell" exception to the search warrant requirement. (Note for any lawyers reading this: It's a joke, son.)

Finally, according to the video I mentioned, local lawyers think this case stinks. That's my joke, not theirs. So we'll just have to see.

Or smell.

Click here to read more . . .

Dress code

I went to law school some years ago. When I was there, professors typically wore dark suits, or at least a shirt and tie. One prof had made waves a few years earlier by insisting on wearing jeans, because he was cool beyond words.

It seems to be different on law faculties these days. I say this based on this blog post at "The Shark" (apparently a blog at Hastings Law School) about an article that a law professor is publishing in a law review, in which he advocates a dress code among the law faculty:

Prof. Jensen (left) accuses denim-clad professors of "trying—unsuccessfully—to look as young as students" and suggests that academics are the "worst-dressed middle-class occupation group in America." Apparently, if professors send a "signal of seriousness, of civility" by wearing a tie or tweed pants or maybe even a robe of some kind "students will pick it up."

Students are a hopeless group themselves, according to Jensen. He indicates that although he can't turn back the clock to a time when students did a better job of covering themselves up, he wishes he could.

Regarding student attire, The Shark's item quotes a student commenting at another law blog:

Whale-tail is no more distracting than attractive classmates in general, both of which are less distracting than web-surfing. Decorum is one thing, but one might as well take it further and get rid of laptops and attractive classmates.

Like The Shark, I had no idea what whale tail meant, so I looked it up. If you don't know, please don't Google it, and if you do, please don't click on "I'm Feeling Lucky."

Anyway, the last thing I want to think about right now is student attire. What I want to think about is student freebies.

Yes, freebies. According to this article in the Business section of the New York Times, colleges are beginning to give out free iPhones or internet-connected iPods to students. I kid you not.

Taking a step that professors may view as a bit counterproductive, some universities are doling out Apple iPhones and Internet-capable iPods to students.

The always-on Internet devices raise some novel possibilities, like tracking where students congregate. With far less controversy, colleges could send messages about canceled classes, delayed buses, campus crises or just the cafeteria menu.

While schools emphasize its usefulness — online research in class and instant polling of students, for example — a big part of the attraction is, undoubtedly, that the iPhone is cool and a hit with students. Basking in the aura of a cutting-edge product could just help a university foster a cutting-edge reputation.

Let me translate this for you. The money you're sending to your kid's college is being used to give the kid electronic equipment you didn't think was worth buying for him yourself.

If you read the article, you'll see various educational activities that these give-aways supposedly facilitate. But the real reason for giving the equipment away is marketing. You have to compete with other colleges to attract students -- and the tuition money that accompanies them.

I guess I'm pleased, curmudgeon that I am, that there are at least a couple of skeptics on the faculty:

The rush to distribute the devices worries some professors, who say that students are less likely to participate in class if they are multitasking. “I’m not someone who’s anti-technology, but I’m always worried that technology becomes an end in and of itself, and it replaces teaching or it replaces analysis,” said Ellen G. Millender, associate professor of classics at Reed College in Portland, Ore. (She added that she hoped to buy an iPhone for herself once prices fall.)

Robert S. Summers, who has taught at Cornell Law School for about 40 years, announced this week — in a detailed, footnoted memorandum — that he would ban laptop computers from his class on contract law.

“I would ban that too if I knew the students were using it in class,” Professor Summers said of the iPhone, after the device and its capabilities were explained to him. “What we want to encourage in these students is active intellectual experience, in which they develop the wide range of complex reasoning abilities required of the good lawyers.”

So here's my compromise: Ban the electronic equipment but spare the attractive classmates.

Click here to read more . . .

Law and humor at Harvard Law School

You may have heard of the Law and Economics school. I gather there's now a Law and Humor school, too.

A lawyer in my office recently sent around this link to a speech given by Harvard Law School professor Daryl Levinson upon being presented with an award for teaching. The speech was given in June, so don't start complaining to me that "it's old" or whatever. I know. It's old.

Professor Levinson, who teaches constitutional law, speaks about the ten ideas that "explain virtually all of law." If you went to law school at a name-brand institution, where it's a sin of the first order to teach anything practical, you may well recognize some or all of these ideas.

When I was in law school, the professors we enjoyed were generally the performers. Levinson has a little of the performer in him, but he actually seems fairly shy. The drawback to that is that while he has a few amusing lines, he sometimes trips over himself in the delivery -- probably what I would do myself if I were trying to give the same speech.

You can click on the link at the bottom of this page to listen or try this direct link (Real Player required). I'd skip the first few minutes, with the student introduction and Levinson's thank yous, which go well beyond gratitude and modesty into full-blown barfitation.

If you don't feel like listening to the whole talk, consider the following highlight, found at about 11:40 in the video:

Idea number 6: legal institutions and what they're good for. We learn over and over again that legislatures are good at democracy; courts are good at impartial application of the rule of law; and agencies are good at technocratic expertise. As the Harvard legal process tradition teaches us, once we know what each institution is good for, our job is simply to match up the right institutional decisionmaker to the relevant decisionmaking task, which we can do using neutral and objective reasoning. In practice, this means: First we figure out which one of the possible decisionmaking institutions is run by the Democrats. [Laughter.] That's the one we want. [Laughter and applause.] Or don't want. I want to keep it as fair and balanced as your classes here no doubt were.

I suppose you could read this as a subtle dig at the political monolith at Harvard, but more likely, it's just an acknowledgment of shared group values. That seems to be the interpretation favored by the audience, in any event, judging from the applause. Either way, it's amusing, and I choose to apply the former interpretation.

Click here to read more . . .

That man must be carded

Professor Steven Calabresi writes that Obama doesn't meet the constitutional age requirement, because 35 years of age in 1789 has to be adjusted for inflation, so to speak.

Barack Obama is too young to be president. Yes I know he is 46 and the Constitution sets the presidential age qualification at 35 or higher, but Obama has said that we ought not to interpret the Constitution woodenly and formalistically. Perhaps we should look deeper at the presidential age limit. If we do, we will find that Obama really is too young to be president.

Many on the legal left these days advocate purposive, pragmatic interpretation of the Constitution. The idea is you look behind the text to see what function it played for the framers and you then translate the text so it will play that same function for us today. What does this mean for the presidential age qualification?

In 1789, the average life expectancy of a newborn was about 40 years, compared with about 78 today. A lot of this was because of infant mortality, but in 1789, even the average life expectancy of every man who reached age 18 was only about 47. This suggests that at best a 35-year-old age limit in 1789 might have functioned then about the way a 55- or 60-year-old age qualification would function today. On this account Obama may be old enough to drive and buy a glass of white wine, but he has a way to go before he can run for president.

He's obviously poking fun at the judges who argue in favor of a pragmatic interpretation of the Constitution that doesn't feel bound by the original meaning of the text.

I got this link through the Volokh Conspiracy, where commenters are ripping Calabresi for his effrontery. To be fair, some of them say they see the point but think it just isn't funny.

So I pose this question to you: (a) clever and amusing satire; (b) point noted but not funny; or (c) insulting crap from a McCain hack?

Click here to read more . . .

Best of Pillage Idiot - V

Mrs. Attila and I are off celebrating our upcoming 25th anniversary. Here are some blasts from the past. I hope you'll enjoy them a second time.

I certainly hope that President McCain will appoint justices like John Roberts and Samuel Alito, so I can do some more photo comics like these:

Anatomy of a nomination

Alito talks about Roe

Click here to read more . . .

Nino, First Blood Part II

I thought it would be amusing after Thursday's decision in the Heller case.

You can do this in one of two ways. One, make it a serious photoshop. Two, if your photoshop skills are as pathetic as mine, do it as an obvious mock-up of the original poster. I couldn't do the brown tone or the shading on his face or match the fonts precisely. So, with appropriate apologies, here's the poster for Nino, First Blood Part II.


Click to enlarge.

UPDATE (7/9): In order to have a Maryland angle for this post, I'm going to link the amicus brief submitted by New York, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico in support of the petitioners.

Click here to read more . . .

Monday mini-linkfest

1. Isn't this always true about men? "Doubts Raised Over Whether Md. Inmate Will be Committed" (Well, that was the headline when I first linked the story, anyway.)

2. Next time you're lost in the Alps and need to be rescued, try attaching your bra to a logging cable line. Especially if it's a size 36 DD. [UPDATE: Regrettably, the bra size has been debunked. Via Ace.]

3. Remember the Obama campaign office with the Che flag? Turns out that the woman who mans that post has been prohibited from talking about it.

4. And speaking of Che and Obama, I realize this has been around the 'sphere, but here's the office of the Ohio judge who overturned the state's death-penalty procedures.

5. We'll soon see, perhaps as early as Wednesday, whether this prediction is right. SCOTUSblog figures out that the Supreme Court's gun-control decision soon to be released in the Heller case is going to be written by Justice Scalia. The blog has a good track record. In April, it correctly predicted that Justice Kennedy would write the opinion in Boumediene, the Guantanamo case.

Click here to read more . . .

Justice Kennedy runs a radio commercial

Police sirens are heard in the background. Shouts of "Freeze! Hands on top of the car! Spread your legs!"

Voiceover: Have your rights be denied to you?

Sounds of Muslim call to prayer at Guantanamo.

Voiceover: Have people tried to tell you that you have no rights at all?

Voiceover: If you think they have, call Justice Anthony Kennedy, the protector of your rights, at 1-800-KEN-NEDY.

Justice Kennedy: Hi, I'm Justice Tony Kennedy. Has something like this ever happened to you?

Father: (in an angry voice) Do you know what time it is? It's 1:30. I told you you had to be home by midnight. This is the third time this month you've missed your curfew, so I'm taking away the car keys for two weeks.

Teenaged girl: (crying) Daddy! That's so totally unfair. I hate you!

Justice Kennedy: This scene could have unfolded in a completely different way.

Teenaged girl: (crying) Daddy! That's so totally unfair. And I have Justice Kennedy on the phone to protect my rights. Here, talk to him.

Father: Justice Kennedy, you have no business interfering in this family matter. Since the time of the Magna Carta, there's never been a single precedent in which the federal courts have intervened to tell a father whether or not he can take the car keys away from his child.

Justice Kennedy: History, shmistory, it doesn't matter. We're the Supreme Court, and it is emphatically our province to say what the law is, whether that law is the Constitution . . . a federal statute . . . the law of supply and demand . . . or the second law of thermodynamics.

The strains of "My country, 'tis of thee" are heard in the background softly, gradually becoming louder as Justice Kennedy continues.

Justice Kennedy: And everywhere you go where someone's rights are being denied, I'll be there to protect them. Because if I didn't protect your daughter's rights, the rights of teenagers everywhere would be at risk. And if I couldn't protect teenagers' rights, the President would probably transfer the detainees from Guantanamo to the homes of ordinary Americans in the hope that I couldn't protect them there. And as long as my name is Justice Anthony Kennedy, THAT . . . WILL . . . NOT . . . STAND.

Voiceover: If you think your rights have been denied, call Justice Kennedy at 1-800-KEN-NEDY. That's 1-800-KEN-NEDY, to get justice. He's waiting for your call to protect your rights.

Teenaged girl: Call Justice Kennedy. He's awe-some!

Click here to read more . . .

Proceeding where Kucinich fears to tread?

Is there anyone besides Dennis Kucinich who's still interested in impeachment at this late date in the second Bush term? I doubt it. Besides, prosecution in the courts is the new rage.

Normally, in our country, a prosecution is conducted by the government in a criminal case. I suppose one can say that one "prosecutes" a civil action by pursuing it toward completion. There is, after all, a concept known as "failure to prosecute" as a result of which a civil case that's not being pursued is dismissed.

But somehow, I don't think that's what the criminally insane people at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover had in mind when they announced they were holding a conference to plan the "prosecution" of the President, Vice President, and other current and former administration officials:

A conference to plan the prosecution of President Bush and other high administration officials for war crimes will be held September 13-14 at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

"This is not intended to be a mere discussion of violations of law that have occurred," said convener Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the school. "It is, rather, intended to be a planning conference at which plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth."

"We must try to hold Bush administration leaders accountable in courts of justice," Velvel said. "And we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war-criminals in the 1940s."

The blog Above the Law wonders: "Hangings? C'mon, Dean Velvel -- shouldn't a liberal like yourself view that as violating the Eighth Amendment?" And Legal Blog Watch says: "Three citizens of Andover -- the town where MSL is situated -- were among those hanged for witchcraft as part of the 17th century Salem witch trials. These days, however, the town is a chichi Boston bedroom community known as home to equally chichi Phillips Academy. No doubt, any proposal to erect a gallows on the MSL campus might not make it past the local planning board."

But the folks at the MS of L at A are apparently dead serious.

The conference will take up such issues as the nature of domestic and international crimes committed; which high-level Bush officials, including Federal judges and Members of Congress, are chargeable with war crimes; which foreign and domestic tribunals can be used to prosecute them; and the setting up of an umbrella coordinating committee with representatives of legal groups concerned about the war crimes such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, ACLU, among others.

No post on such looniness would be complete without some mockery of the institution itself. I'll leave that to Above the Law, which notes:

Since the Massachusetts School of Law isn't even ABA-accredited, one would expect its alums to have an especially tough time finding legal employment. They're immediately eligible to sit for the bar exam in just two jurisdictions. For more details, see here.

Well, if they can't find employment elsewhere, maybe they can go prosecute President Bush. Do you need to be admitted to the bar for that?

I don't think so. All you need is a furlough from St. Elizabeth's.

UPDATE: Point of Law has more background on the school and its dean, Larry Velvel, while the ABA Journal has a long quotation from the man:

Velvel tears into President Bush as well, writing: “The man ultimately responsible for the torture had a unique preparation and persona for the presidency: he is a former drunk, was a serial failure in business who had to repeatedly be bailed out by daddy's friends and wanna-be-friends, was unable to speak articulately despite the finest education(s) that money and influence can buy, has a dislike of reading, so that 100-page memos have to be boiled down to one page for him, is heedless of facts and evidence, and appears not even to know the meaning of truth.”

And DUmmie FUnnies has a long laugh about it.

Click here to read more . . .

The chip on Justice O'Connor's shoulder

What happens when you're a Maverick from Arizona and you retire from public life? Well, for one thing, no one remembers anything you've done, because it all depended entirely on you personally and very little of it was memorable.

This is pretty much what happened to Sandra Day O'Connor, who retired from the Supreme Court almost three years ago, in large part to undertake the sad and difficult task of caring for her husband, suffering from Alzheimer's, an act for which I hold her in the highest regard.

It turns out -- and you would never have suspected this, really, if were hiding in a cave somewhere -- that Justice O'Connor's judicial "legacy is fading away." (via How Appealing) But here's the thing: If your legacy is fading away in three years, you probably didn't have much of a legacy to begin with. As the article points out, "O'Connor set standards driven by the facts of particular cases." I've heard people refer to this kind of judge as "a lawyer's lawyer." But the fact is, it's just as likely that this type of judge is deciding cases based on personal whim. Here's why: If you can't articulate a rule that applies to more than one case -- or if you can, but your rule is so vague that you and only you personally can apply it -- you are simply imposing your own will. Undue burden, anyone?

So what is Justice O'Connor's latest, greatest project? According to a New York Times article (via Bench Memos), "Justice O'Connor is helping develop a Web site and interactive civics curriculum for seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade students called Our Courts (http://www.ourcourts.org/)." O'Connor was speaking at a "Games for Change" conference in New York. That's "change" as in "social change," by the way, as you can tell from the organization's site. The site offers you the chance to play a game called "ICED! I Can End Deportation," described as "an online interactive 3D Role Playing Game that teaches the player about the current U.S. policies around immigration that destroy families and fundamental human rights." Even better, you can play "PeaceMaker," a game that "is inspired by real events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." The description adds: "It challenges players to succeed as a leader where others have failed: bringing peace to the Middle-East. Playing both perspectives, players could experience the joy of winning the Nobel Prize or the agony of plunging the region into disaster." Who needs a game for this? The solution is easy: all the Jews should die, right?

Getting back to Justice O'Connor's "Our Courts" civics project, her hope is "to foster a deeper understanding of American government among schoolchildren." Great, but here's the very large chip that she carries on her shoulder:

"In recent years I have become increasingly concerned about vitriolic attacks by some members of Congress and some members of state legislatures and various private interest groups on judges," she said in her speech. "We hear a great deal about judges who are activists, godless secular humanists trying to impose their will on the rest of us. I always thought an activist judge was one who got up in the morning and went to work."

Allow me to translate: Judges don't want to be criticized for their decisions, certainly not by some yahoos on the political right. In their view, or in O'Connor's view at any rate, criticism threatens the independence of the judiciary.

Now, right about now, you're probably thinking: "Didn't she and Justices Kennedy and Souter say something a lot like that in their joint opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey back in 1992?" Well, I'm glad you asked.

But when the Court does act in this way, its decision requires an equally rare precedential force to counter the inevitable efforts to overturn it and to thwart its implementation. Some of those efforts may be mere unprincipled emotional reactions; others may proceed from principles worthy of profound respect. But whatever the premises of opposition may be, only the most convincing justification under accepted standards of precedent could suffice to demonstrate that a later decision overruling the first was anything but a surrender to political pressure and an unjustified repudiation of the principle on which the Court staked its authority in the first instance. So to overrule under fire in the absence of the most compelling reason to reexamine a watershed decision would subvert the Court's legitimacy beyond any serious question.

It's easy to be a cynic, but Justice O'Connor's purpose for training kids in civics seems to be to prevent the kids from growing up to criticize the judiciary.

"The overwhelming consensus coming out of that conference [in 2006 on the state of the judiciary] was that public education is the only long-term solution to preserving an independent judiciary and, more importantly, to preserving a robust constitutional democracy," she said. "The better educated our citizens are, the better equipped they will be to preserve the system of government we have. And we have to start with the education of our nation's young people. Knowledge about our government is not handed down through the gene pool. Every generation has to learn it, and we have some work to do."

I guess it's no wonder Justice O'Connor receives such fawning press. The press, after all, has the same mindset: Criticize us, and you threaten the First Amendment.

I'm struggling a little to decide whether this attitude is the product of elitism or a simple desire for unchecked power. I'm leaning to the former, but I could be wrong.

But whatever the answer, I guess it's well past time for me to stop threatening the independence of the judiciary with this post.

Click here to read more . . .

A jury of your peers

Puzzle me this. You're standing trial for a crime, and let's work on the assumption (reasonable or unreasonable depending on who you are) that you're innocent of the charges.

Which of the following would you least object to having on your jury:

(a) Someone who sleeps through most of the trial.

(b) A member of Stormfront.

(c) Someone who's secretly made a deal to sell his story.

(d) Someone who plays Sudoku during the trial.

Call me naive, but I'd go with option (d). The way I see it is that if you're intelligent enough to handle the game, you're at least potentially able to multitask. Sleepers are obviously out of it, and neither of the other two is remotely unbiased.

This is not to say that having Sudoku players on a jury is ideal. But in the case described at the link, the jurors were playing it starting in Week 2 of a three-month trial until they were caught. How could that possibly have happened? It almost makes you wonder whether the judge, the lawyers, the witnesses, the bailiff, and the defendants themselves were all asleep.

(via How Appealing)

Click here to read more . . .

Wednesday linkfest

Some of this is old news, but I've been kind of busy and haven't had a chance to do anything with it. Hence, a linkfest.

1. I know that some people go into public service because they think they do some good. Others go into public service so they can be sued by their alma mater when they leave the government. Some are "fortunate" enough to do both. (via Instapundit)

John Yoo can be forgiven if he's having second thoughts about his career choice. A Yale Law School graduate, the Berkeley professor of law went on to serve his country at the Justice Department. Yet last week he was sued by convicted terrorist Jose Padilla and his mother, who are represented by none other than lawyers at Yale. Perhaps if Mr. Yoo had decided to pursue a life of terrorism, he too could be represented by his alma mater.

Another reason for you alumni to donate a dollar to Yale so you can tell them you'll never contribute another dollar after this.

2. You're angry with your boyfriend. Do you (a) have a "talk" with him; (b) make him sleep in the living room; (c) set his car on fire? The correct answer is (c). And then you return to your boyfriend, "telling him that he 'might want to get some marshmallows.'" (via Fark)

3. John McCain goes to a funeral home and makes the oldest joke in the book. But he says his mother is older. (via HotAir)

4. If they tried to keep away from the guy, why are they complaining? "Lawsuit says protesters kept away from Bush during N.M. visit"

5. Fill in your own joke; the commenters at HotAir certainly did: "Kokomo police say a man accidentally shot himself in the groin as he was robbing a convenience store. * * * A short time later, police found 25-year-old Derrick Kosch at a home with a gunshot wound to his right testicle and lower left leg. He was expected to have surgery at a hospital."

Click here to read more . . .

Adam Liptak, your readers want to know

I think some of us need a clarification from Adam Liptak.

Yesterday, Liptak's New York Times column examined the government's frequent success in fending off challenges to searches of laptop computers at airports and the borders. The idea is that searching your laptop is like searching your luggage.

Liptak discussed three cases in which the laptop that was searched contained kiddie p*rn.

Then, he closed his column with this odd statement:

There are all sorts of lessons in these cases. One is that the border seems be a privacy-free zone. A second is that encryption programs work. A third is that you should keep your password to yourself. And the most important, as my wife keeps telling me, is that you should leave your laptop at home.

And just what is on his laptop that makes his wife keep telling him to leave it at home? Your readers want to know, Mr. Liptak.

Click here to read more . . .

Do-it-yourself news story

Tonight, we're going to try to make a do-it-yourself news story.

1. Start out with a catchphrase for the story. Pick a short phrase that combines words that are funny and memorable together. Let's go with "flying bra." You can't get much better than that.

2. Next add a humorous premise for the story, like this: Some girl is in a car with three friends and decides to hoist her bra (we'll make it a red one, just for fun) up the car's antenna, and the wind lifts it off into the air. She claims she removed it because the family dog had chewed it earlier in the day and caused it to fray. But a witness says the girls were making gestures with their mouths and lifting their shirts at some men in the car behind.

3. Fold in an element that makes you not sure whether to laugh or feel awful: A couple of goobers in the car behind suddenly swerve to avoid hitting something that turns out to be a flying bra. They crash and are injured.

4. Bring in "the law": The girl who hoisted the bra is charged . . . with littering.

5. Tie it up with the obvious: Litigation ensues. And before long, after getting settlements from the girls in the car, the passenger in the car that crashed sues the driver, his buddy.

Voilà! Here's your headline: "Friend sues buddy over 'flying bra' crash of '06"

And, of course, you'll need a photo showing the two unfortunate guys, with the passenger-plaintiff wearing a teeshirt that reads "The 4 Stages of Tequila."

* * * * *For more background, check out these stories: A story in the Toledo Blade at the time of the incident, and a long writeup from shortly afterwards in something called Sports Car Market, which includes a photo of the crashed car.

(Via Patterico and Iowahawk)

Click here to read more . . .

Visitors of the day -- 11/13

Today, we have two visitors of the day.

I wonder what this person thought about the "Mr. Smith goes to Starbucks" post that turned up in the search.




And I've had many visitors looking for ways to get out of jury service, but this is the first time someone's tried a search from the courthouse. Must be one heck of a trial coming up.

Click here to read more . . .

What he didn't say

You may have read that in an interview with Jeffrey Rosen, published in the New York Times magazine in September, Justice Stevens explained the origins of his skepticism about the death penalty:

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago in 1941, Stevens enlisted in the Navy on Dec. 6, 1941, hours before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He later won a bronze star for his service as a cryptographer, after he helped break the code that informed American officials that Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Navy and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was about to travel to the front. Based on the code-breaking of Stevens and others, U.S. pilots, on Roosevelt’s orders, shot down Yamamoto’s plane in April 1943.

Stevens told me he was troubled by the fact that Yamamoto, a highly intelligent officer who had lived in the United States and become friends with American officers, was shot down with so little apparent deliberation or humanitarian consideration. The experience, he said, raised questions in his mind about the fairness of the death penalty. “I was on the desk, on watch, when I got word that they had shot down Yamamoto in the Solomon Islands, and I remember thinking: This is a particular individual they went out to intercept,” he said. “There is a very different notion when you’re thinking about killing an individual, as opposed to killing a soldier in the line of fire.” Stevens said that, partly as a result of his World War II experience, he has tried on the court to narrow the category of offenders who are eligible for the death penalty and to ensure that it is imposed fairly and accurately. He has been the most outspoken critic of the death penalty on the current court.

I didn't read the original article, but I read about this revelation here.

In today's New York Times Magazine, Justice Stevens has a letter about this article. (I'll have to add the link later if it becomes available, because it's not right now.)

What's interesting about the letter is that Justice Stevens feels the need to correct two matters: first, "the impression that I claim credit for helping break the Japanese naval code that enabled our forces to shoot down Admiral Yamamoto," and second, the statement that he turned down an offer to teach at Yale Law School.

He says nothing about the origins of his skepticism about the death penalty. Which is another way of confirming that the story is accurate.

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Hiring by the numbers

There are very few things in the world that can make me defend the legal establishment, let alone large law firms, but I think I've found one.

According to Adam Liptak's column in the Times today, law students at Stanford have issued a grading system for firms based on what Prof. Michele Landis Dauber, who's the "adviser" for this project, delicately refers to as "diversity" -- or, in the cruder formulation of Mr. Liptak: "The students are handing out 'diversity report cards' to the big law firms, ranking them by how many female, minority and gay lawyers they have."

One firm, Herrick Feinstein, got an "F" and responded with its tail between its legs: "Herrick Feinstein said it reported that it had no openly gay lawyers 'because, at the time of the filing, we did not ask for that information.' There are, the firm said in a statement, openly gay lawyers working there, 'including one on the diversity committee.'"

Liptak quotes Vikram Amar for a sensible point:

Vikram Amar, a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, added that law firms might well be violating employment discrimination laws in the process of trying to improve their rankings.

In other words, a firm doesn't like the "C" it received, so the next year, it makes a woman partner at the expense of a better qualified man. Sex discrimination right there.

Now, to get back to my opening. It's really hard to feel sorry for any of these folks: the spoiled brats at Stanford, the large law firms, the lawyers who are (or are not) discriminated against in these firms. But this isn't what one student calls it: forcing firms "to respond to the market pressures that we’re creating." It's a form of extortion, forcing firms to engage in employment discrimination.

You'd think the students at Stanford would have a clue about that. But if the experienced lawyers at the firms don't seem to, why should the students?

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Great moments in the courtroom

Everyone once in a while, you read a story that pulls the mask off -- well, a better image would be "pulls the robe off" -- a judge. And no, I'm not thinking of that story, either.

Judges serve an important function in society. They adjudicate disputes; they stand between the citizen and the state; they wear black robes. So we tend to think of judges as serious and dignified human beings, even though we all know what Ruth Bader Ginsburg does in her spare time. (She talks about the tax code with her husband.)

Then, what do we make of this story? A judge in LaGrange, New York, a town located around 80 miles north of New York City, violated the first canon of judicial ethics: "A judge may not, even jokingly, remark that a female public defender has a 'nice butt.'" (via Fark)

I mean, you really can understand this judge's behavior, can't you? A guy sitting under a black robe all day sees numerous lawyers who have fat butts, and he can't resist mentioning a nice one. Right?

Wrong. It didn't happen that way at all. According to the AP version:

After the defendant told [Justice] Caplicki that he thought his attorney was "cute and had a nice butt" -- the judge noted the comments on the arraignment sheet and repeated them to the attorney 10 days later in a sidebar conference in the courtroom.

The judge later repeated them in open court, asking the defendant and three other male defendants if they agreed with them. He repeated them again when the attorney appeared before him the next day.

I mean, once is a compliment. Twice is creepy. Three times is stalking. And four times is a "misguided attempt at humor."

Actually, Pillage Idiot is a misguided attempt at humor. Asking the defendant and three other male defendants if they agreed the lawyer had a nice butt is nothing short of repulsive.

Justice Capicki "agreed that he should be censured," and the state's Commission on Judicial Conduct "decided Caplicki's behavior amounted to 'an aberration' and limited his punishment to a public censure."

Although the Commission has the power to defrock -- er, disrobe -- er, "strip judges of their robes," it apparently was concerned that the butt that the judge would then expose was not "nice."

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