Simple Justice Blog, Appeals Court Buries the Body So No One Knows, tells a strange and disturbing tale of NY state justice.
It features multiple carelessness and incompetence, an unethical prosecutor, a judge unworthy of the robe, and general callousness.
In the end, justice of a sort was done, and a mistaken conviction set aside … in a way that covered many tracks.
Every law student should read this — reality isn't quite like the textbooks.
Wayne Slavin, missed his trip to South Africa because the TSA (and hired airport security) acted really badly. (And Delta Airlines wasn't much help.)
The question is, does this mean that the TSA staff are regressing to the mean for people with guns and power treating the powerless (that is, you and me)?
It's not surprising that we are seeing the emergence of occasional airport petty tyrants. The sheer scale of the operation ensures there will be some. When TSA began, however, it was notable for the unusual courtesy with which the staff treated the passengers, especially as compared to their predecessor contract screener. Was that focus on decent interaction just the police equivalent of a credit card teaser rate, or the TSA ready to crack down on its bad apples?
History offers little ground for optimism here.
[Bonus TSA follies posting.]
I've been offered a chance to go to something really interesting far, far away at someone else's expense.
And it looks like I won't be able to do it: it's happening the same long weekend as the AALS hiring conference, and I'm married to the chair of our committee. She has to be there, so I have to be here — although our kids are amazingly large to look at, they're not big enough to be left alone for a night, much less for four days in a row.
It's rare you get quite as tidy an explanation of where a fake statistic came from as this, which comes from a bit of sleuthing by Prof. Michael Geist:
The RCMP has been the single most prominent source for claims about the impact of counterfeiting in Canada since its 2005 Economic Crime Report pegged the counterfeiting cost at between $10 to 30 billion dollars annually. The $30 billion figure has assumed a life of its own with groups lobbying for tougher anti-counterfeiting measures regularly raising it as evidence of the dire need for Canadian action. U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins cited the figure in a March 2007 speech critical of Canadian law, while the Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, Canada's leading anti-counterfeiting lobby, reported in April that the “RCMP estimates that the cost to the Canadian economy from counterfeiting and piracy is in the billions.”
Yet despite the reliance on this figure – the Industry Committee referenced it in its final report – a closer examination reveals that the RCMP data is fatally flawed. Responding to an Access to Information Act request for the sources behind the $30 billion claim, Canada's national police force last week admitted that the figures were based on “open source documents found on the Internet.” In other words, the RCMP did not conduct any independent research on the scope or impact of counterfeiting in Canada, but rather merely searched for news stories on the Internet and then stood silent while lobby groups trumpeted the figure before Parliament.
A careful examination of the documents relied upon by the RCMP reveal two sources in particular that appear responsible for the $30 billion claim.
First, a March 2005 CTV news story reported unsubstantiated claims by the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, a global anti-counterfeiting lobby group made up predominantly of brand owners and law firms, that some of its members believe that 20 percent of the Canadian market is “pirate product.” That 20 percent figure – raised without the support of any evidence whatsoever – appears to have been used by IACC to peg the cost of counterfeiting in Canada at $20 billion per year.
Second, a 2005 powerpoint presentation by Jayson Myers, then the Chief Economist for the Canadian Manufacturing and Exporters, included a single bullet point that “estimated direct losses in Canada between $20 billion and $30 billion annually.” The source for this claim? According to Mr. Myers, it is simply 3 to 4 percent of the value of Canada's two-way trade.
And, as Prof. Geist explains, other oft-cited measures of the loss due to 'piracy' are equally suspect.
Ian Welsh at The Agonist has the best questions I've seen about HilaryCare 2.0.
They're at Questioning the Hillary Health Care Plan.
I will say this: I think Ezra Klein is exactly right: if we get any sort of national health care plan of any value out of the next administration, whoever is running it, a good chunk of the credit belongs to the man who forced people to talk about it in a meaningful, detailed way: John Edwards.
MoveOn seems to have got Rudy Guliani's goat. And all it took was the truth.
Recent Bluessky Posts
Jotwell Blenderlaw