A Huge Game Changer! NY Joins CA and Eliminates "Severe or Pervasive" Standard in Workplace Sexual Harassment Cases, Marking Next Level of #MeToo Movement
On June 19, 2019, New York State’s legislators passed a law that also gets rid of the draconian “severe or pervasive” standard and utilizes the more sensible “single incident” approach as described above; and NY lawmakers also made secret settlements illegal, just like California. This is truly wonderful news! No more inappropriate touching, sexist commentary, or pornographic videos at work! Certainly such a standard is long overdue, and employers and workplace creeps had better heed the call of a new day.
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Write Your Representative to Speak Out for Police Reform and BLM Protestors
We all need to use our political powers to support police reform and stand up for the Black Lives Matter movement. In addition to voting in every election and giving your business to companies that reflect your values, you should also regularly voice your concerns directly to your political representatives. You can find the name of your federal, state, and local representatives via the Common Cause online database tool.
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DeVos Title IX Rules Strengthen Due Process Rights in Schools
Imagine a society where you can be accused of committing a wrong; where you are never permitted the right to counsel or the opportunity to confront your accuser; where you are never permitted the opportunity to fully investigate the evidence against you; where in a matter of days your entire case is processed in a kangaroo court of biased officials at the whim of popular politics rather than faithful to the facts; and when you are invariably found guilty, you are swiftly deprived of life, liberty, and/or property. It is exactly this fate that thousands of students have faced in our nation’s schools when accused of a sex offense, be it an unwelcome sexual comment to a classmate, discrimination, harassment, stalking, assault, or rape.
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Police Brutality's Cure Lies in National Policing Standards
Yes: there are laws against police brutality and abuse of power. There are local commissions run by independent citizens, political appointees, and/or police supervisors responsible to investigate all such complaints. Local prosecutors are required to bring criminal charges against police whenever appropriate. Local personal injury lawyers do help a small percentage of victims to bring lawsuits against police and their departments for such violations. But we know that all this is still not nearly enough to solve the problem.
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Know Your Rights to Prevent Police Brutality and Civil Rights Violations
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in court. You have the right to talk to a lawyer for advice before we ask you any questions. You have the right to have a lawyer with you during questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be appointed for you before any questioning if you wish. If you decide to answer questions now without a lawyer present, you have the right to stop answering at any time.”
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The Storm of Domestic Violence: Divorce, Child Custody, Support, and Community Property
While the #MeToo movement has brought substantial attention in the USA to issues on sexual assault and domestic violence, such abuse continues to be a huge problem for women and men alike — men form nearly half of all domestic violence victims. Domestic violence of course can be terrorizing, life-altering, and even deadly, often involving repeated episodes of financial manipulation, verbal abuse, sexual assault and/or chronic sexual deprivation, and general emotional manipulation and subjugation, along with physical abuse ranging from pushing and biting to choking, punching, kicking, stabbing, and worse.
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20 Logical Fallacies, or How Not to Debate!
Imagine a situation, for example, where a woman comes up to you as you’re standing on the street talking on your smartphone. She steals your phone out of your hand and walks away with it. You yell, “thief!” She then turns around and scolds you for defaming her good name, yelling at all onlookers for help to defend herself from you! And there you find yourself arguing with her about her stealing your phone while she blatantly denies it and asserts that you must apologize for slandering her with the word “thief”. Next thing you know, even her lawyer shows up to defend her! This is a classic “what the hell” moment, right?
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The 2019 College Admissions Scandal, Affirmative Action, and the Politics of Education
The US education system is under attack from many sides. Public schools are underfunded, leaving students and teachers to quixotically try to make up the difference in school supplies and other pedagogic resources through bake sales and online charity funding sites. Charter schools, though they provide a substantially better education for their select students, essentially form an elite, quasi-privatized subsystem that diverts scant public funds from public schools. Tracking, which is the process of segregating students into cohorts with which they stay throughout their public school careers based on their intellectual, academic, and/or test-taking abilities (think “honors track”, “gifted and talented classes”, “special education classes”, “remedial education”, and other subsections of our public school system), further deprives the great majority of students of the high quality education that is gifted upon elite students.
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On the Rights of the Natural Person: The Unhealthy State of the Human Animal, the Environment, and Regulation.
Nature is more than an economic resource. It is a temple of spiritual nourishment. Ideally, if you are far enough from the city and deep in a natural landscape, you will find solace from city noises and lights, from cars, trucks, and hopefully even planes. You will be able to hear the wind, the quiet shuffle of the leaves, or a squirrel’s claws against the wooden branches of a tree. Better still, you will be able to hear nothing at all: “the sound of silence.” And at night, you’ll see the moon like you’ve never seen it before, and you’ll see the stars: so many stars! You’ll be able to breathe clean air, and it will feel sweet and healing to your lungs - like you are feeding yourself with each breath. The water will be so cool and clear, and with a bit of filtration, it will taste so alive and delicious, rather than the stuff we have pouring from our taps and even purchased in fancy bottles. In the woods, up in the mountains, by the beach, and on the rivers, there are gorgeous opportunities to experience so many profoundly simple and necessary activities.
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Manslaughter-by-Phone: The Tragedy of Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy
This week, Michelle Carter was imprisoned in Massachusetts for a jarring version of the crime of involuntary manslaughter. This case has an astounding twist: she was found guilty of manslaughter for sending text messages and having phone conversations to urge her 18 year-old long-distance boyfriend, Conrad Roy, to kill himself, something he’d allegedly been wanting and planning to do for a long time and finally did. Carter was 17 at the time of Mr. Roy’s suicide. Even when Mr. Roy was having second thoughts about killing himself, Ms. Carter urged him to carry forward and finish the job. He did. The Massachusetts high court decided that Ms. Carter, by her text messages and phone conversations, overwhelmed Mr. Roy’s fragile willpower and thus directly caused his death, nevermind the fact that she was nowhere near the location of his suicide at the time they were texting and talking with each other.
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Disarm and Destroy: School Policies Prohibiting Attorney Representation in Administrative Proceedings - and How to Fight Back!
An attorney can do much for a student or other individual facing a school in an administrative grievance, investigation, hearing, or appeal, be it reviewing the facts and properly advising the individual, drafting correspondence or other documents in the dispute, negotiating with the school, representing the individual at hearings, filing complaints with governmental bodies, or preparing the foundations for litigation against the school in the court system. Schools know this, and that’s why they scurrilously try to prohibit attorney representation for individuals - be they students, teachers, or staff - in such disputes. It’s far easier for schools to remain unopposed, to intimidate you, and to take your money and time and leave you holding your head on the curb after it’s all over.
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New York's "Blindfold Law" is the Devil's Bargain and Should be Repealed Now
In the meantime, it remains up to aggressive criminal defense attorneys such as myself to continue to push for the Constitutional rights of our clients against stonewalling efforts of prosecutors who diabolically seek to delay the revealing of exculpatory and other crucial evidence, and more so, to offer our clients who are facing the deprivation of their freedoms and very lives not some limp guiding hand through the devil’s bargain of plea deal negotiations but rather an earnest and intense defense focused on investigating the allegations and evidence and utilizing the facts and the law to ensure that justice, not mere rote work, is accomplished.
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Apples and Peppers: Allowing End Users as well as Developers to Sue Apple for App Prices Violates Valid Precedent
There's no evidence of any explicit or even any implied conspiracy between app developers and Apple to price fix. It stretches reason to think that every app developer has somehow entered into an implied conspiracy with Apple to raise the price of the app by Apple’s 30% commission! App prices are based on competitive principles. Consider the plethora of $1.99 apps. Without Apples’s 30% commission, those would be priced at $1.39, you think? Nope.
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The Corruption Report: US Political Corruption at the Local, State & Federal Levels
It is our civic duty to know what our government is doing. For many unfortunate people in our nation, such reading material is a too familiar synopsis of what hell they have personally experienced at the hands of biased, bullying, and corrupt government officials at all levels of government. Knowledge is power. With action at the voting booth, we can begin to make a difference. Speak out. Resist. We all deserve a true democracy – nothing less.
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The Facebook Hearing, the ‘Tech Company’ Misnomer, and the Luddite Gap in Congress
It’s ridiculous to suggest that Facebook should independently monitor every third party’s advertisement on its site to make sure that the advertiser and the ad are legitimate, authentic, and safe for general consumption; but frankly between its “flag” feature where users can report problematic ads or behavior on the platform, its Artificial Intelligence surveillance, and its team of 10,000+ ad auditors (which Zuckerberg stated in the Senate that he’s increasing to 20,000 soon), Facebook is doing exactly that. So what more could we reasonably ask? On top of that, it’s Facebook users who are choosing to share so much private information about themselves with the public on their Facebook profiles!
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Of Empires and Colonies: Oliver Stone’s “Untold History of the United States”
Having just finished watching on Netflix the 12-part documentary by Oliver Stone, “Untold History of the United States” (2012), I find myself amazed. At risk of coming off as conceited, I am amazed at myself and at my many history teachers: for how did I, having studied Western history at the highest quality grade schools, university, graduate schools, and law school, having been an exceptional and curious student, and having continued to study such topics as history and politics well past my academic years, not know so much of the essential information gifted us in this documentary (and its companion 700-page book) by famed film-maker Mr. Stone and co-author Peter Kuznick, an American University historian?
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Will Farmers or 3rd Party Repair Shops Sue John Deere for Allegedly Contractually Prohibiting Unlicensed Tractor Repairs?
In the last couple years, tractor manufacturer John Deere (formally Deere and Co.) has allegedly been limiting the ability of purchasers of its tractors to independently work on these tractors or from having any third party parts & repair providers work on said tractors unless they are licensed by John Deere to do so.
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Anti-Father Gender Bias in Child Custody Court: A Saga of Parental Alienation, Child Abuse & CoParenting Failures.
While there are unending examples of gender bias in our culture, the impact of such bias in the Family Courts is most damaging to children. The resulting Parental Alienation Syndrome has been found to be tantamount to child abuse.
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Argo's Iranophobia and the Destabilization of Iran for Oil Profits and Regional Domination
US history is finally clear on the fact that the CIA paid mercenary Iranians to cause riots and protest the leadership of Iran in 1953 when the USA subversively overthrew Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and replaced him with the monarchy of the Shah in order to promote the USA’s own oil interests in the region. Of course, the US administration in 1953 internally justified its own shameful actions as promoting democracy in Iran, whatever that means.
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Je ne suis pas Charlie: Hate Speech amidst “Freedom” Rhetoric
In short, the USA and all the world’s nations stand to benefit from intelligently drafting and fairly enforcing laws that restrict and punish hate speech whilst upholding free speech to ensure that political, social, and artistic creativity flourish and racism and illegal discrimination are eradicated from the public domain. Laws rationally banning public hate speech can be drafted and should be drafted, for nobody can doubt the power and efficacy of the pen. Surely we can all learn this lesson from the martyred artists of Charlie Hebdo, may they rest in peace.
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