And critics such as lawprof Tim Wu in the New Yorker aren’t ready to accept as an excuse the genuineness of Tribe’s belief in the argued-for positions [John Steele, Legal Ethics Forum] Perhaps the idea is that strong lawyers — like cartoonists? — have an obligation not to “punch down,” whether or not justice in a given case is on the side of the putatively less empowered party.
I’ve got an extensive discussion of law professors’ real-life litigation involvements in my book Schools for Misrule.
Authorities in southern California are doubtful about a private fraternal group’s claim of lawful right to wield police jurisdiction over 33 states and Mexico, even though one of its promoters happens to be a deputy director for community affairs in the office of real-life California Attorney General Kamala Harris. “A website claiming to represent their force cites connections to the Knights Templars that they say go back 3,000 years.” [Los Angeles Times] As I’ve often noted about the phenomenon I call “folk law,” just as fantasies about living in past ages never seem to involve being a serf oneself, but always being Cleopatra or a Viking raider, so fantasies about alternative orders of legal legitimacy tend toward giving you the right to arrest other people, rather than vice versa.
Counsel’s Ninth Circuit arguments on behalf of copyright troll Prenda Law did not go well, to put it mildly. Trouble was evident even before Judge Pregerson commented, regarding the clients, “They should have asserted the Fifth Amendment because they were engaged in extortion.” [Ken at Popehat; Joe Mullin, Ars Technica] More on the Prenda Law saga here.
Under newly enacted legislation, “Canada is now the first country in the world to require that for every new regulation introduced one of equivalent burden must be removed.” [Financial Post via Alex Tabarrok]
Joline Gutierrez Krueger at the Albuquerque Journal with the tale of the $16,000 in cash that “Joseph Rivers said he had saved and relatives had given him to launch his dream in Hollywood … seized during his trip out West not by thieves but by Drug Enforcement Administration agents during a stop at the Amtrak train station in Albuquerque. An incident some might argue is still theft, just with the government’s blessing.” The government hasn’t charged Rivers with anything and, under the rules of civil asset forfeiture, doesn’t have to:
“We don’t have to prove that the person is guilty,” [Albuquerque DEA agent Sean] Waite said. “It’s that the money is presumed to be guilty.”
Meanwhile, despite the U.S. Department of Justice’s promise to stop seizing bank accounts in future in cases where violations of laws against bank deposit “structuring” (keeping them under the $10,000 reporting threshold) are not connected with any underlying crime, it continues to hold on to money already in the seizure pipeline. That includes the $107,000 grabbed from Lyndon McLellan, who runs L&M Convenience Mart in rural North Carolina, according to the New York Times. “You work for something for 13, 14 years, and they take it in 13, 14 minutes.” More about the case from Jacob Sullum and Adam Bates.
A prosecutor wrote menacingly to McLellan’s lawyer about the publicity the case had been getting:
“Your client needs to resolve this or litigate it,” Mr. West wrote. “But publicity about it doesn’t help. It just ratchets up feelings in the agency.” He concluded with a settlement offer in which the government would keep half the money.
The Institute for Justice, which stood up for McLellan, has done a video:
In other forfeiture news, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the dangers of forfeiture laws (there to defend the laws: Fraternal Order of Police national president Chuck Canterbury, seen in this space just a few days ago defending police officers “bill of rights” laws) And the Maryland legislature has sent a forfeiture reform bill to the desk of Gov. Larry Hogan [Maryland Reporter]
Mike Masnick doesn’t think highly of the copyright and defamation claims filed against critic Stephanie Guttormson by Arizona resident Adam Miller, whose past promotion of healing services has included mention of “Great Beings of Light” who “come into a person’s body and transmute with light every single cell and raise the vibratory rate.” [TechDirt]
After the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., a quick, high-profile round of on-camera media interviews by Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson helped establish the public narrative that officer Darren Wilson had stopped Brown and Johnson for no better reason than walking in the street, and that a peaceable Brown had been gunned down while trying to surrender with his hands in the air. To put it mildly, several key elements in this account were not well supported by the investigations later conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice and others, and Johnson’s version of events was further put in shadow by the revelation that before the police stop he had accompanied Brown into a convenience store where Brown committed a strong-arm robbery of cigars later handed off to Johnson. At any event, Johnson has now filed a lawsuit against the town and against Wilson for being stopped and for the subsequent gunfire: Johnson wasn’t hit, but says he was endangered by the shots. [NBC News] Meanwhile, the chairman of the large law firm of Winston & Strawn will receive $1,300 an hour to represent Ferguson in the Justice Department probe. [Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal]