Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

The Wrong Guy to Raid

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

News of Clark Freshman, a former UM Law colleague now teaching at UC Hastings, that appeared in the SF Weekly: Castro Pot Bust Goes Awry and a Law Professor Threatens to Sue.

If the news story is accurate, the police got a clearly invalid warrant, either through carelessness or worse (it described the house completely inaccurately). And indeed, the raid was a bust — for the police.

The SFPD and DEA found no piles of marijuana money at 243 Diamond St., one of six addresses raided simultaneously in San Francisco that morning. Instead, they found Clark Freshman, who rents the penthouse at the two-unit building. Freshman, a UC Hastings law professor and the main consultant to the television show Lie to Me, was put into handcuffs while in his bathrobe as agents searched, despite Freshman’s insistence that they had the wrong place and were breaking the law.

He’s sort of angry:

“I told them to call the judge and get their warrant updated,” he says. “They just laughed at me — I guess that’s why they’re called pigs.”

No, he’s really angry:

[Freshman] pledged to sue until “I see [the agents’] houses sold at auction and their kids’ college tuitions taken away from them. There will not be a better litigated case this century.”

I’d be spitting mad too. Not sure I’d say that about college tuitions, though. They’re sacred.

(Thanks to Michael Marshall for the story.)

Posted in Law: Criminal Law | 4 Comments

Democrats, GOP Both ‘Unrealistic’ on Budget

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Obama’s budget is cruel; the Republicans’ is even crueler. Both are failures to deal with our needs and our problems. These are budgets for rich people on the backs of the poor. They are forms of fiddling while the new Rome burns.

Watch this: Jeffrey Sachs tells the truth about the budget. It’s like a breath of fresh air.

But Sachs’s is a lonely voice in our public debate.

Posted in Econ & Money | Comments Off

Valentine’s Day Joke

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

An old joke, but still going strong:

Ben walks into a post office one day and sees a middle-aged, balding man standing at the counter methodically placing “Love” stamps on bright pink envelopes with hearts all over them. He then takes out a perfume bottle and starts spraying scent all over them.

Ben’s curiosity gets the better of him; he goes up to the balding man and asks him what he is doing. The man says, “I’m sending out 1,000 Valentine cards signed, ‘Guess who?'”

“But why?” asks Ben.

“I’m a divorce lawyer,” the man replies.

Via Frank Kaiser.

I like lawyer jokes. So sue me. No, on second thought, don’t sue me.

Posted in Completely Different | Comments Off

Grimmelman on Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

Sealand

James Grimmelman has posted a draft what may be his best paper to date, Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law. It is thoughtful, wry, informative, and entertaining.

Here is the abstract:

In 2000, a group of American entrepreneurs moved to a former World War II anti-aircraft platform in the North Sea, seven miles off the British coast, and launched HavenCo, one of the strangest start-ups in Internet history. A former pirate radio broadcaster, Roy Bates, had occupied the platform in the 1960s, moved his family aboard, and declared it to be the sovereign Principality of Sealand. HavenCo’s founders were opposed to governmental censorship and control of the Internet; by putting computer servers on Sealand, they planned to create a “data haven” for unpopular speech, safely beyond the reach of any other country. This article tells the full story of Sealand and HavenCo — and examines what they have to tell us about the nature of the rule of law in the age of the Internet.

The story itself is fascinating enough: it includes pirate radio, shotguns and .50-caliber machine guns, rampant copyright infringement, a Red Bull skateboarding special, perpetual motion machines, and the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of State. But its implications for the rule of law are even more remarkable. Previous scholars have seen HavenCo as a straightforward challenge to the rule of law: by threatening to undermine national authority, HavenCo was implacably opposed to all law. As the fuller history shows, however, this story is too simplistic. HavenCo also depended on international law to recognize and protect Sealand, and on Sealand law to protect it from Sealand itself. Where others have seen HavenCo’s failure as the triumph of traditional regulatory authorities over HavenCo, the article argues that in a very real sense, HavenCo failed not from too much law but from too little. The “law’ that was supposed to keep HavenCo safe was law only in a thin, formalistic sense, disconnected from the human institutions that make and enforce law. But without those institutions, law does not work, as HavenCo discovered.

Photo credit: Casey Hussein Bisson