Month: February 2014

The Dylan Farrow letter got Ann Friedman thinking about men’s anxiety over false sexual assault accusations:

My friend Adam Serwer once made the astute observation that most white people “can only relate to racial discrimination in the abstract. What white people can relate to is the fear of being unjustly accused of racism.” The lesson translates to cases of sexual assault and harassment. Those of us who have been forced to personally cope with powerful men behaving badly are certain that the accusers in these situations are worth listening to. “These are not stories we tell for fun, attention or revenge,” tweeted Lena Dunham. There are many women like us working in media, but we’re outnumbered — or definitely outranked — by men who are inclined to relate to the experience of being accused.

Natalie Shure explains why young victims of sex crimes have the deck stacked against them:

[T]here is something inherently imbalanced about a child abuse case. The very secrecy that makes the truth “unknowable” is an instrument of the crime.

With no witnesses or credible legal evidence, the “he said/she said” conundrum prevails. The assailant knows this, and he can use it to his advantage. As soon as children make allegations, they enter a world filled with adult concepts—ideas they themselves don’t entirely understand. In order to even tell their stories, they have to learn a new language, putting vague, undefined feelings into unfamiliar words. The whole drama plays out in a grown-up context, which means the grown-up always has the upper hand. Neutrality never even has a chance.

Dahlia Lithwick urges the jurors of the court of public opinion to stop pretending we can arrive at any meaningful conclusions:

Recognize that dressing your personal opinions up in fancy talk of “burdens of proof” and “presumptions of innocence” helps clarify almost nothing and confuses a great deal. Mob justice often has all the trappings of an unbiased search for truth, but it’s actually just an (understandable) outpouring of rage and blame. We have statutes of limitation, not to punish complaining witnesses but because the legal system recognizes that memories and evidence are degraded over time, even as umbrage on both side burns brighter than ever.

Investigative journalism is one thing. But the Court of Public Opinion is what we used to call villagers with flaming torches. It has no rules, no arbiter, no mechanism at all for separating truth from lies. It allows everything into evidence and has no mechanism to separate facts about the case from the experiences and political leanings of the millions of us who are all acting as witnesses, judges, and jurors. So go ahead and tweet your truth or publicly shame someone who is tweeting hers, but don’t believe for an instant that this is how complicated factual disputes get resolved or that this will change hearts and minds about our woefully anti-woman, anti-victim culture.

Ann Coulter fears so:

For at least a century, there’s never been a period when a majority of immigrants weren’t Democrats. At the current accelerated rate of immigration — 1.1 million new immigrants every year — Republicans will be a fringe party in about a decade.

Michael Brendan Dougherty disputes this logic:

Although Coulter is right that immigrants have gravitated to the Democrats, the descendants of the 19th century great wave voted overwhelmingly for Nixon and Reagan. Many of them have come to view themselves as true conservatives, even if a century earlier America’s true conservatives wanted to ship their great grandparents back to Europe. … The relationship between the composition of the American people and the ideals adopted by the parties that seek to represent portions of them is complex. We cannot predict how the addition of new immigrants will pressure and cleave the Democratic coalition. But, in general, our two political parties have accumulated so much inherited power, including the power to change, that it is difficult to imagine either of them ever being mortally wounded.

Noam Scheiber makes the case:

The idea would be roughly as follows: in criminal cases, we decide what the accused should be able to spend to defend themselves against a given charge—securities fraud, grand theft, manslaughter, etc. No one can spend more, even if she has the money, and those who can’t afford the limit would receive a subsidy for the full amount beyond what they would have spent on their own (say, beyond a certain percentage of their annual salary or net worth). In civil cases, we decide what the plaintiff should be able to spend to pursue an award of a particular amount, or to pursue a particular kind of claim, and what the defendant should be able to spend in response. The same subsidies would apply.

Posner calls the idea a “massive, unworkable nightmare”:

Suppose someone is charged with manslaughter after driving her car into a pedestrian and killing him. Suppose the government-set price for a manslaughter defense is $20,000. She uses most of her money to buy an excellent lawyer but nonetheless the jury convicts. She has some money left over for an appeal but in the meantime some new evidence emerges that the victim was at fault, or the prosecutor engaged in misconduct. Should she use the money to pay a lawyer to make a motion for a new trial? Save it for sentencing? Use it for appeal? One could complicate the regulatory scheme further by giving people the power to apply for new “grants” from the government for additional legal representation as unpredictable developments occur. But this would invite still more tactical behavior by clever lawyers skilled in gaming systems like Scheiber’s.

Kilgore is similarly unimpressed:

If it gets the buzz it’s intended to attract, perhaps Scheiber’s piece could stimulate some much-needed interest in the decline of subsidized legal services for the poor, one of the less-discussed victims of austerian budget policies. Or maybe it could help boost the already promising rise of bipartisan criminal justice reform initiatives, noting that unequal legal representation is one of the reasons we have prisons stuffed with poor people who are in many cases status offenders. But unless conservatives get excited about it as the Next Big Threat, I don’t think “socialized law” has much of an immediate future.