The name partner of what Biglaw firm, founded in 1961, graduated from Yale Law School in 1941 alongside classmates, and future Supreme Court justices, Byron White and Potter Stewart?
Hint: The firm has made its name focusing on representation of technology companies and venture capitalists.
See the answer on the next page.
Representative Ilhan Omar (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
A distinct feature of this current presidency is an embrace of one of Vladimir Putin’s favorite known political tactics called whataboutism. For Putin and this president, whataboutism can be described as responding to any criticism by pointing out that somebody else, sometimes decades ago such as when Bill Clinton was president, did something bad too once. Unfortunately for the country, this president of the United States has engaged in a lot of racist statements and associations that no whatabout should ever be able to obfuscate.
Birtherism was/is a disgusting, racist concept that no one, and not a shred of evidence, suggested this president should champion. No whatabout morally alters the fact that this president purposefully misrepresented the nature of what was rather obviously headlined and carried out as a white supremacist rally. Neither should anyone else’s bad deed matter to the fact that this president referred to the obvious white supremacists attending the rally as being “very fine people.” More recently, but no less obviously, the president’s textbook racism was on display yet again in the form of telling four members of Congress, all of whom are American citizens — though I am not quite sure that even matters at this point — to “go back” to where they came from.
As Adam Serwer, staff writer at the Atlantic, correctly pointed out at the time the “go back” statements were made, the importance of condemning the president’s racism does not require any personal affection towards the particular members of Congress the president was referring to. That is because condemning the president’s racist tropes should be about “defending the idea that America should be a country for all its people [emphasis mine]” not just someone in particular. For my part however, I purposefully took the time to differentiate the president from at least one of the members of Congress he used racist tropes against: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
To be clear, I did accuse both the president and Representative Omar of making racist tropes in the past. Nevertheless, I made the decision to distinguish Omar from the president by accurately stating that only “Congresswoman Omar has apologized for or admitted ignorance to such ‘tropes,’ and thereafter consistently publicly denounced the racism attributed to the trope.” In just the last week however, it has become clear that the recent actions and associations of Congresswoman Omar need to be addressed independently from the actions of anyone else, including this president.
Last week, it was revealed that not only did Congresswoman Omar and a fellow member of Congress, Rashinda Tlaib, fail to take part in a large bipartisan delegation to Israel (a largely innocuous decision by itself), the two members of Congress decided instead “to go on an independent trip to Israel sponsored by vicious anti-Semites.” By any acceptable measure, the fact that two members of Congress refused a Congressional trip in favor of the company of an anti-Semitic group represents a crying scandal in American politics. Moreover, when it comes to Congresswoman Omar especially, the fact that she has used anti-Semitic tropes in the past coupled now with associations to clear anti-Semitic organizations means that past apologies and claims of ignorance have begun to carry little to no weight. Given that its members of Congress are partnering with organizations that celebrate suicide bombers and sharing arguably racist tropes certainly authored by bigots, the Democratic Party leadership must be viewed under some kind of obligation to address this scandal.
But as New York Times columnist Bari Weiss right points out, complicating everything is the fact that the president has made racist remarks directly against Congresswoman Omar. It therefore likely remains a question whether the left, specifically the Democratic Party leadership, will confront the obvious scandal relating to Congressmembers Omar and Tlaib or instead choose to obfuscate the issue by using the president’s racism as a whatabout.
What is more troubling is that the need to confront anti-Semitism is not just a problem for the American left. Across the Atlantic in Great Britain, prominent liberals have for years been struggling to address institutionalized anti-Semitism within the Labour Party. There is simply no justifiable explanation to explain why the state of Israel should ever be condemned in a single year at the U.N. more than the regimes of Syria, North Korea, Iran, and South Sudan combined. Neither does it make any logical sense that Israel is the subject of a nationwide boycott movement here in the United States while objectively worse places (and places that have greater economic ties to the United States), such as China and Saudi Arabia get a pass.
It is past the time where the attempt to obfuscate immoral transgressions by using someone else’s bad behavior gets labeled as the childish tactic that it is. We can do better than this. The president’s statements in support of and association with white supremacy and the anti-Semitism on the left need to be condemned independently of one another whenever they occur. Unfortunately the American right, other than a few virtuous exceptions, have refused to break with their dear leader, despite years of furthering racist beliefs such as birtherism. With the primaries still ahead, the American left is presented with an important choice not to engage in the same whatabout obfuscation in the future.
Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.
(Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
A last will and testament has been filed in the U.S. Virgin Islands for disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died last week as a result of an apparent suicide. The last will and testament was executed in the Metropolitan Corrections Center in New York, New York, two days prior to his passing. The proximity of the last will and testament signing to his death has some suggesting that he feared his death at the hands of others, or that he was planning a suicide. Either scenario reveals that in his final days, incarcerated, a priority for him was getting his affairs in order and consulting with his own legal counsel.
One may think that estate planning is not an inmate’s preeminent legal concern, especially an inmate with as serious charges as Epstein’s. Jail and prison, however, are dangerous places, especially for high-profile inmates. Given the gravity of the alleged crimes and Epstein’s well-known history, many feel that he was a target and death, including suicide, was not out of the realm of possibility. As such, updating legal documents like a last will and testament seem appropriate for someone in as precarious position as Epstein.
Inmates have assets and they have children. If one is going to prison for any amount of time, it would behoove her to make a last will to provide for her children in the event she passes away in prison and especially if there is no other parent. Moreover, a power of attorney and health care proxy should be executed. Although at this time it appears that Epstein was not propelled to write a last will because of children, the disposition of his enormous assets was seemingly of concern. Given his wealth, measured in the court probate petition as $577 million, direction was necessary. The estate reportedly includes $56 million in cash, $112 million in equities, $200 million in hedge funds and private equity, and $18.5 million in “aviation assets, automobiles, and boats.”
Epstein named his longtime lawyers Darren K. Indyke and Richard D. Kahn as executors. The executors have a set commission of $250,000 for their services. Medical entrepreneur Boris Nikolic, an advisor to Bill Gates, was reportedly surprised to hear of his appointment as successor executor.
The last will and testament is a “pour over” will which bequeaths the estate to a trust named “The 1953 Trust.” In that trust, which is not public, the specific beneficiaries are listed. The filing is in the probate court in St. Thomas, the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the last will states that Epstein was a resident. This certainly provides more privacy by making it more difficult for individuals to obtain the estate file.
Without a valid last will and testament, Epstein’s brother, Mark Epstein, would be his next of kin and under the laws of intestacy, his heir. As the heir, he has the standing to object to the last will and testament based on the testator’s capacity, undue influence, lack of execution, or fraud.
Wills executed shortly prior to death are scrutinized by probate courts as to the testator’s frame of mind, capacity, and any suspicious activity. Given Epstein’s death so soon after the signing, in addition to his prior suicide attempt, the court will review the circumstances surrounding the signing carefully.
Epstein’s accusers have already commenced civil proceedings against the Estate. As the last will has been filed with the probate court, the number of cases are likely to grow. The executors will need to review any claims against the Estate and they will seek to pay or contest them.
A question that will surely arise for Epstein’s executors is the existence of any additional heirs and any claims to paternity that they set forth. The existence of any children for Epstein would change the course and direction of the administration of his Estate. Suicide, death bed will, will execution, heirs, probate and non probate assets, trusts, kinship, claims against the estate: in the few days that Epstein has been deceased, his estate is already providing the public with a robust primer on trusts and estates.
Cori A. Robinson is a solo practitioner having founded Cori A. Robinson PLLC, a New York and New Jersey law firm, in 2017. For more than a decade Cori has focused her law practice on trusts and estates and elder law including estate and Medicaid planning, probate and administration, estate litigation, and guardianships. She can be reached at cori@robinsonestatelaw.com.
Go to enough legal technology conferences and you’ll begin to realize that companies will time announcements of new developments and releases of their software to coincide with the event. It doesn’t take a marketing genius to figure that out.
This week, we spent time in the exhibit hall at ILTACON talking to leading companies in the legal technology space to flesh out new developments they are announcing during the conference. Below, in no particular order, is our report.
CloudNine is Advancing eDiscovery Software and Partnerships
Looking to add new and support existing customers, CloudNine is also expanding their footprint. At ILTACON, CloudNine unveils new features and upgrades to their eDiscovery suite of products. Last year, CloudNine acquired Law Pre-Discovery and Concordance from Lexis and they have been working to integrate them into their platform. Explore 7.2 is now faster and more scalable for large projects after adding multi-core, multi-threaded processing capabilities, and it connects more seamlessly with LAW.
CloudNine is also unveiling a new Office 365 connector later this year that extracts data from Office 365 and automatically loads it into Explore. Doug Austin, VP of Products and Services at CloudNine, says the improvements made to Law and Concordance have “demonstrated to our customers that CloudNine is committed to enhancing these products and implementing the functionality and performance improvements that our customers have wanted for a long time. In addition to those improvements, CloudNine’s focus is to maximize the deployment flexibility of our product suite to support any implementation model and adaptability to support the customized workflow needs of our customers.”
RelativityOne Continues SaaS Market Growth
Less a new development than a continuing one, Relativity, the leading on-premise eDiscovery platform, announces continued growth of its SaaS-based RelativityOne product. With now more than 50 customers and over 1,500 unique organizations using the platform, customers are taking advantage of the added performance, scalability, and security of RelativityOne.
Relativity is also releasing RelativityOne Collect, their newly developed collection tool. It is Relativity-built and designed to provide customers options for collecting ESI from Office 365 in the Microsoft Azure environment. Right now, it is only available to RelativityOne customers. “We’ve been spending a lot of time making RelativityOne stronger and stronger — better performance, new enhancements, greater global reach — so it’s been really exciting seeing so many customers growing their businesses on the platform,” said Shawn Gaines, VP of marketing at Relativity. “Empowering end users and their partners to easily collect in the cloud is only part of that story, and there’s much more to come.”
iCONECT Integrates with Sentio
On the heels of their announcement last week of a strategic funding initiative intended to grow its market presence, iCONECT is now integrating Sentio’s continuous active learning technology to power the expansion of its existing analytics features. Sentio is already being used worldwide by other large companies, and iCONECT is building workflows that will enhance the use of machine learning in document review and analysis. Development has been ongoing in Q1 and Q2 this year with new releases coming over the near term. CEO Ian Campbell says that the Sentio technology “will power both our new continuous active learning workflow as well as manual review oversight workflow.” For users, this will improve the user experience and make machine learning more intuitive. “Our job as an industry leader is to constantly analyze and look over the horizon, identify innovative ways to address issues, and create simple solutions to assist clients interact with their data,” said Campbell.
Other Developments
Oasis Discovery unveiled a detailed case study that identifies and addresses precisely some of the questions that firms and corporate organizations are faced with when deciding whether to insource or outsource eDiscovery operations software. Oasis CEO Brandon Law says that “the case study represents a roadmap for firms looking to take eDiscovery operations to the next level.” The case study, he says, “would be valuable to any decision maker attempting to decipher the market for legal technology.” Read the case study here.
Reynen Court announced this week the release of the beta version of their SaaS-based subscription service designed to help firms run and manage software subscriptions, infrastructure, and services for new and existing technologies. Stay tuned to Above the Law for more information on this.
LogikCull announces some of the most disruptive pricing ever seen in the industry. CEO Andy Wilson told us that he used a significant portion of a recent funding round to conduct a pricing study. He tripled the size of the engineering team and spent a year on R&D to fulfill the mission of making eDiscovery available to masses, instantly and affordably. The result: $250 per month fixed fee pricing, no user or storage fees, and no data limits. Wilson also told us about a new feature in the LogikCull platform that categorizes audio and video files. Coming soon: Project templates and single sign-on for enterprise customers.
As the week progresses, we will gather additional intelligence from the legal technology community at ILTACON and report it here.
Mike Quartararo
Mike Quartararo is the managing director of eDPM Advisory Services, a consulting firm providing e-discovery, project management and legal technology advisory and training services to the legal industry. He is also the author of the 2016 book Project Management in Electronic Discovery. Mike has many years of experience delivering e-discovery, project management, and legal technology solutions to law firms and Fortune 500 corporations across the globe and is widely considered an expert on project management, e-discovery and legal matter management. You can reach him via email at mquartararo@edpmadvisory.com. Follow him on Twitter @edpmadvisory.
Huawei HQ in Shenzhen, ChinaWASHINGTON: The Commerce Department has expanded its ban on imports from Chinese tech behemoth Huawei by adding 46 affiliate companies in 25 countries — including in a number of US allies — to the black list; while also extending the deadline for consumers to comply with the ban from Aug. 19 to Nov. 18.
“One cannot sanction a large company like Huawei without extending that policy to its subsidiaries and close affiliates. It will have a moderate impact on allied countries, but more specific impact on those affiliate companies exporting to the US,” says Nicholas Eftimiades, a former senior US senior intelligence officer. “The policy is very surgical in its approach.”
The move comes six weeks after President Donald Trump suggested that he intended to lift the ban on US sales to Huawei after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the margins of the G-20 summit in Osaka — although he did not indicate that he would lift the block on US buying of technologies from Huawei. Huawei, which has the largest worldwide capacity for production of 5-G wireless network hardware and software, is believed by the US Intelligence Community to be a de facto arm of Chinese intelligence.
Prohibiting US firms from buying products from yet more Huawei-related firms incorporated outside the US may further exacerbate the ongoing tensions between Washington and a number of allied nations who do not view trade with Chinese firms as a major security threat. Italy, for instance, has been considering a bid — that includes an offer of $3.2 billion in investments in the economically strapped nation — by Huawei and fellow Chinese corporation ZTE (also subject to the US ban) to provide the country with a 5G network and related equipment.
The new ruling, published today, expands the number of Huawei-related companies on the DoC’s Entity List from the initial 69 listed in May to 115, with the additional affiliate firms located in Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, People’s Republic of China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Mexico, New Zealand, Panama, Portugal, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand and the United Kingdom.
The Entity List is the provision under US Export Administration Regulations (EAR) that “identifies entities for which there is reasonable cause to believe, based on specific and articulable facts, that have been involved, are involved, or pose a significant risk of being or becoming involved in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States,” the DoC ruling explains.
At the same time, the ruling extends the Temporary General License (TGL) that allows US firms limited “engagements in transactions involving the export, reexport, and transfer of items” to the black-listed firms until November “to afford consumers across America the necessary time to transition away from Huawei equipment, given the persistent national security and foreign policy threat,” according to an accompanying rule by the DoC Bureau of Industry and Security.
Eftimiades said that as US firms were already on notice of the planned action, “there is enough time to find alternate suppliers.” But, he said, “The question is, at what cost? Rural communications companies are more dependent on inexpensive hardware providers. The hope is that with increased production the market will be able to fill the gap left by Huawei products at a reasonable cost.”
Law schools are good at a lot of things, but it’s no secret that preparing new attorneys for the realities of day-to-day legal practice usually isn’t one of them. Think of the very first time you were told to help with trial prep or review a closing set — chances are you had no idea what that even meant. Every year, a new crop of associates enters the workforce with little to no practical work skills, through no fault of their own.
Law firms traditionally haven’t fared much better in the formal training department. The legal industry has long relied on formulaic, hour-long CLE lectures that leave lawyers unengaged and are usually more about earning credits than actually learning anything. Meanwhile, the rest of the business world has turned to digital learning to find new ways of making training more effective.
Finally, someone is changing the game. Following the lead of the corporate world, the folks at Hotshot are bringing digital learning to the legal industry, and the results are a resounding success.
Hotshot focuses on the hard-core legal and business skills that associates need to succeed, and presents them in a way that results in actual learning (and is engaging and enjoyable in the process). Try Hotshot, and you’ll never look at your boring CLE lectures the same way again.
Hotshot focuses on delivering short, interactive digital learning exercises as opposed to hour-long, one-sided lectures from talking heads. Log into your Hotshot dashboard and you’ll see content broken down into six main topic areas (with more to come) that focus on legal, business, and tech skills: Accounting & Finance, Civil Litigation Basics, Excel & Data Analysis, M&A Basics, Securities Offerings, and Venture Financing.
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The six topics and their relevant subtopics are listed down the left panel, with their corresponding courses appearing in the middle (currently 132 of them). Click into an individual course, and you’ll see the various topics that make up the course broken down into short animated videos, presenting the basics in easily digestible chunks.
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Each individual video is under three minutes long, and entire courses generally take less than 15 minutes if you were to watch the entire thing in one sitting. In addition to the videos, you’ll find interactive quizzes where you can test yourself without having your results reported to anyone, as well as comprehensive course outlines that present a handy summary of everything (just like in your law school days), complete with time stamps so you can easily go back to the relevant portion of the video if you want to review something again.
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The system is intuitive and easy to use, and designed for lawyers to be able to hit the ground running — you don’t need any training to learn how to use this training. The courses present the crucial concepts that lawyers need to understand a concrete way that explains not just the basics, but also how they apply in actual legal practice. Simply put, Hotshot is the easiest, most effective way to quickly get up to speed on the things lawyers need to know in day-to-day practice.
Hotshot lends itself to effective learning in a variety of scenarios. For the junior associate or anyone being thrust into a new area of practice, Hotshot is ideal for just-in-time learning — quickly get up to speed on basic topics exactly when you need to. Were you just handed your first closing or assigned to your first securities litigation? Now there’s no need to panic, because Hotshot has you covered.
Firms are also capitalizing on Hotshot to institute flipped-classroom learning rather than traditional training lectures. In flipped-classroom learning, attorneys are assigned the videos first, meaning they can show up to training sessions having already learned the basic information. The actual live training time can then be used to focus on practical skills, discussions, and group exercises.
Enterprise subscriptions come with practical learning exercises and hypotheticals that can be printed and used collaboratively during training sessions.
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With Hotshot, firms can make much better use of the time set aside for training. No more tedious lectures that result in minimal learning. Attorney time is valuable, and it’s much better spent focusing on practical skills that translate directly into legal practice.
Hotshot isn’t just about the law. It also is a great resource for fundamental business acumen training for lawyers. Increasingly, lawyers are being asked to handle finance matters that go far beyond the limits of their legal training. With this in mind, the folks at Hotshot have developed courses built around lawyers that provide business fundamentals with no expectation of the user having any finance background. From financial statements to valuation models to the basics of using Excel, Hotshot does a great job of covering the business-related topics that most law schools fail to address.
Driven largely by client demand and a number of early law firm clients that are major players in the VC arena, Hotshot also offers an entire section on Venture Financing. This is a blend of business and legal topics that explain the basics of the VC process and of raising money. Along with the training materials you’ll find for the other topics, the Venture Financing section also includes interviews with high-profile venture capitalists.
If you’re one of those lawyers who’s notoriously scared off by numbers, Hotshot has you covered, too. There’s an entire suite of courses just on Venture Math, where you can practice your calculations in a safe space.
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The same is true for other accounting and finance topics — Hotshot lets you play with income statements using actual Excel formulas, so you gain the confidence you need to perform calculations in your actual matters.
Hotshot is constantly growing and adding to their content based on client demand, including requests from both firms and companies that lawyers be educated on the industries of their clients. Over time, you’ll see more industry overviews, starting in the financial services sector.
In terms of pricing, Hotshot is transparent as can be. They incorporate simple pricing calculators based on the number of lawyers and topics a firm or law school wants to cover, and also offer single licenses for solo lawyers or law students who want to learn but don’t have an organization footing the bill.
Hotshot has revolutionized the legal training landscape, one short video at a time. When you need the practical skills that will get you through day-to-day practice, you need Hotshot.
The U.S. Supreme Court (by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia – CC-BY-SA 3.0)
It’s one thing to study constitutional law and the Supreme Court in the abstract in a classroom, and it’s another to then actually be working on actual Supreme Court briefs and cases. It was really the capstone experience of my legal education.
— Scott Keller, an alumnus of the University of Texas School of Law’s Supreme Court Clinic, commenting on how the experience impacted his career. Keller, who formerly served as solicitor general of Texas, is now the chair of the Supreme Court and constitutional law practice at Baker Botts. Alumni from other top Supreme Court clinics have gone on to do wonderful things with their careers, from heading appellate practices in private firms to working as assistants to the U.S. solicitor general where they argue cases before the high court on behalf of the government.
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.
(image via Getty)
I understand that Joe Biden’s magic whiteness has a grip on older black voters. Black folks know exactly how dangerous Donald Trump is, AND exactly how racist America is. Biden’s support among older black voters is their indictment of white folks.
But if these older voters could just see that ANY Democrat is likely to defeat the unpopular, corrupt, unstable narcissist in the White House, then maybe they would bother to vote for who they want to win, as opposed to who Joe Biden’s wife says people should hold their noses and vote for.
If you care about criminal justice reform, if you care about how the cops hunt and murder young black people, if you care about the fact that an NYPD officer choked a man to death in broad daylight and it took them five years to merely fire him, then you should care that Joe Biden’s criminal justice reform proposal is weak and basic. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (as well as Cory Booker and Julian Castro) have come out with proposals that are detailed and strong. If you care about blunting the street-level enforcement of white supremacy as practiced by this nation’s police officers, then you should really vote for someone who is willing to address the problem.
I’m going to talk about the Warren plan and the Sanders plan as if they are the same plan. I know this pisses off some in the media who just want to see Sanders and Warren fight for their amusement. But their plans are broadly similar. Even though some people are trying to make hay out of the fact that Warren calls for the “repeal” of the 1994 Crime Bill, while Bernie Sanders voted for it, those people miss the point. Both Warren and Sanders oppose the results of the bill, while Joe Biden, the bill’s author, offers little to ameliorate the bill’s disastrous effects.
The Sanders/Warren plan includes all of the obvious reforms any modern Democrat needs to support: legalizing marijuana at the federal level, ending cash bail, ending private prisons, yada yada. These reforms should be viewed as the price of admission in a Democratic administration, and really they are things Democrats should have been advocating for back when they actually had political power.
But, as a person raising two black boys, “cash bail” is not really my primary concern about justice reform. I can afford bail; I’m primarily concerned that my children survive their encounter with police long enough to make it to a bail hearing. Here’s the paragraph that can enhance the survivability outcomes of black youth, from Sanders’s version:
Establish national standards for use of force by police that emphasize de-escalation.
Require and fund police officer training on implicit bias (to include biases based on race, gender, sexual orientation and identity, religion, ethnicity and class), cultural competency, de-escalation, crisis intervention, adolescent development, and how to interact with people with mental and physical disabilities. We will ensure that training is conducted in a meaningful way with strict independent oversight and enforceable guidelines.
If you are not talking about changing use of force protocols, then you are not talking to me about the things I need to feel safe in my life. Use of force is everything. Establishing federal guidelines is how you make the chokehold used by Daniel Pantaleo to murder Eric Garner a federal crime, as opposed to the unfortunate mishap that cops would have you believe. We know, we have all SEEN that the police are entirely able to capture and arrest white domestic terrorists without violence. But we’re supposed to believe that the police cannot safely arrest an unarmed black man without drawing their weapon and shooting? Warren’s plan specifically talks about ending “pursuit” protocols that allow cops to do disastrous things like shoot at moving vehicles like they’re in some kind of action movie, or shoot fleeing suspects in the back like they did to Walter Scott.
However, if you’re going to make use-of-force changes stick, you are going to have to strip police officers of their qualified immunity. Qualified immunity is what allows police to commit crimes “in the line of duty,” and face no personal, civil punishment for those actions. It needs to end. Here’s Warren’s version:
Restrict qualified immunity to hold police officers accountable. When an officer abuses the law, that’s bad for law enforcement, bad for victims, and bad for communities. Without access to justice and accountability for those abuses, we cannot make constitutional due process protections real. But today, police officers who violate someone’s constitutional rights are typically shielded from civil rights lawsuits by qualified immunity — a legal rule invented by the courts that blocks lawsuits against government officials for misconduct unless a court has previously decided that the same conduct in the same context was unconstitutional. Qualified immunity has shielded egregious police misconduct from accountability and drawn criticism from across the political spectrum. Last month, for example, a federal appeals court in Atlanta granted qualified immunity to a police officer who, while aiming at a family’s dog, shot a 10-year-old boy while the child was lying on the ground 18 inches away from the officer. Just two weeks ago, another federal court used qualified immunity to dismiss a lawsuit against a school police officer who handcuffed a sobbing seven-year-old boy for refusing to go to the principal’s office. This makes no sense. I support limiting qualified immunity for law enforcement officials who are found to have violated the Constitution, and allowing victims to sue police departments directly for negligently hiring officers despite prior misconduct.
This is key. Warren’s intention to allow people to sue police departments directly for negligent hiring practices IS HOW YOU START to break the “blue wall of silence.” The police need to be told that their protection racket for murderous and brutal cops will result in costly civil penalties. Police commissioners need to know. Mayors need to know. The saying is “one bad apple SPOILS the bunch,” not “one bad apple should be shined up and given to black people and if they don’t like it they can go choke to death.”
Of course, cops are only the street-level participants in the terror the criminal justice system authorizes towards black and brown communities. They’ve got friends in suits, and you know them as prosecutors. Warren and Sanders have something for them too. From Warren:
Rein in prosecutorial abuses. Prosecutors are enormously powerful and often not subject to scrutiny or accountability. I will support a set of reforms that would rein in the most egregious prosecutorial abuses and make the system fairer, including reducing the use of coercive plea bargaining by DOJ prosecutors at the federal level, establishing open-file discovery, and putting in place responsible standards for evidence gathering. I’ll establish a Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct to make additional recommendations for best practices and monitor adoption of those recommendations. And I’ll create an independent prosecutorial integrity unit to hold accountable prosecutors who abuse their power.
Expand access to justice for people wrongfully imprisoned. Defendants who are wrongfully imprisoned have the right to challenge their detention in court through a procedure known as habeas corpus. The Framers believed this right was so important to achieving justice that they guaranteed it specifically in the Constitution. It’s particularly important for minority defendants — Black Americans, for example, make up only 13% of the population but a plurality of wrongful convictions. In 1996, at the height of harsh federal policies that drove mass incarceration, Congress made it absurdly difficult for wrongfully imprisoned individuals to bring these cases in federal court. Since then, conservative Supreme Court Justices have built on those restrictions — making it nearly impossible for defendants to receive habeas relief even when they have actual proof of innocence. We should repeal these overly restrictive habeas rules, make it harder for courts to dismiss these claims on procedural technicalities, and make it easier to apply new rules that emerge from these cases to people who were wrongfully imprisoned before those rules came into effect.
In our system, prosecutors have entirely too much power that they wield with entirely too little accountability. Any serious criminal justice reform package needs to address this.
But even if we right-size prosecutorial power, prosecutors will still make mistakes, sometimes even in good faith. Right now, our legal system favors finality. We put most of our systemic protections on the side of pre-trial process. But once a conviction (or plea) has been secured, the system does everything it can to make that verdict the end of the process.
Instead, we need a federal government and legal system committed to innocence. Your rights to process and fairness should not end with a judgment against you. We have seen too many examples where that judgment is wrong to ignore.
It all works together: Less powerful prosecutors will convict fewer innocent people and be held more accountable for the innocent people they do convict, which will make prosecutors less willing to abuse the processes that allow them to convict innocent people.
Those are the parts of their plans that are most important to me, but Warren and Sanders most likely have a solution for whichever part of the criminal justice system offends you most. They’re both talking about ending the death penalty; they’re both talking about raising the age of “adult” criminal liability; and they’re both talking about ending solitary confinement.
These are the issues that will make a difference in our criminal justice system. These are the policies that will make a difference for black and brown people who are just trying to go about their lives without being harassed and threatened by law enforcement. This are the issues that will earn my vote. Beating Trump also must mean defeating the policies of white supremacy he has put in place.
Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.
Marijuana is increasingly available legally — or through medical marijuana licenses — throughout the United States. This is not, however, the same as saying that marijuana is currently legal throughout the United States. This fine point of distinction is what tripped up Florida attorney Ian Christensen, who has been disbarred and ordered to pay $370K in damages for telling his clients they could go ahead and grow pot legally when they very, very much could not.
Florida now has a medical marijuana law, but back in 2015 when Scott and Marsha Yandell were growing cannabis in their backyard — a fact that they were advertising because their attorney, Christensen, had given them a “grow sign” to put out announcing their hobby — the state did not. You’ll absolutely believe what happens next…
A SWAT team raided the home a month later, and the Yandells were arrested on charges of possession of cannabis with intent to sell, manufacture of cannabis, possession of a place or structure for trafficking or manufacturing a controlled substance and trafficking in cannabis in excess of 25 pounds. Their landlord also sued them in excess of $25,000 for lost rent and damages to the couple’s rented home during the raid.
After their arrest, the couple dropped Christensen, hired a new attorney and pleaded guilty to three years’ probation, a $15,000 fine and 100 hours of community service.
For his part, Christensen blames his youth and inexperience for all this, which feels like a reasonable excuse for missing the nuances of some common law interpretation, but a patently unreasonable one when it comes to clearly enumerated criminal statutes.
Apparently the legal system agreed.
Lawyer who told clients marijuana use was legal ordered to pay $370,000 [Fox News]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
Bill Gross is (professionally) dead and gone, shipped off to the glue factory where one-time Triple Crown winners go when their time has passed, and all that is left is to have embarrassingly delayed insights about who one truly is. And yet, five years after his unceremonious but highly and hilariously litigious exit from PIMCO, he still haunts the place, and not only in the Bill Gross Room and the heads of those former colleagues still suffering from PTSD. For while others may aspire to his crown as Bond King, even in his own former house, none shall ever attain it. Thus is the Curse of Bill Gross upon PIMCO, a situation that his successor and would-be heir to the throne Dan Ivascyn understands, as he is a loathesome and vile Red Sox fan.
For much of the past decade, Mr. Ivascyn’s Pimco Income Fund has posted stellar returns. Its surging popularity made it the world’s largest actively managed bond fund and helped salve the wounds at Pimco left by the acrimonious 2014 departure of Mr. Ivascyn’s predecessor, Bill Gross.
So far this year, though, the fund has returned 4.68%, falling short of the fund’s benchmark index and nearly all of its peers, according to Morningstar Direct. Among 338 funds in its category, Pimco Income has underperformed 93%, Morningstar said.
The spell shall not break for at least 81 more years, when Ivacsyn is long dead, and only after those who follow him defeat a holographic Jeff Gundlach in a most improbable way.