Third Circuit to consider whether “sexting” violates child porn laws

By J. DeVoy

In the first case of its kind to make it to a Federal Circuit Court, Law.com reports that justices were “skeptical” as to whether sexting broke Federal child pornography laws.  While sexting entails variety of things, this case deals specifically with images minors take of themselves with phones and distribute to others.

The facts of this case, however, seem mild and may not result in settled precedent.

“If you had probable cause here, you’d have a different case, but all you’ve got is a picture of somebody partially naked and two years later it turns up on somebody’s cell phone at school,” Stapleton said.

Donohue said the school’s investigation showed that the plaintiff and 20 other girls had transmitted such images to their classmates, and that “the boys, as they are wont to do, were trading the pictures among themselves.

Might there be some gender motive here?  I imagine the situation would be different if this case was about evil boys showing their naughty parts to angelic, pure-as-snow tween girls.

Ambro wasn’t satisfied and asked: “Should we allow the state to force children, by threatening them with prosecution, to attend education programs expounding a particular government official’s views of what it means to be a girl in today’s society?”

More didactic gender politics.  The 3d Cir. should hold this isn’t child porn to save younger generations from this kind of rhetoric.  This is to say nothing of the way a child pornography conviction would ruin their lives — nobody really thinks that condemning horny but otherwise productive kids to lives as registered sex offenders is a good thing… do they?  Parents can buy their children phones without cameras or not activate services that allow the sharing of images if there’s so much concern over the problem.  It even seems that exchanging photos would be preferable to actual sex, in light of rising STD rates among teens.

Issue-spotting Metalocalypse

By J. DeVoy

-Property destruction

-Criminal drug use

-Naming and ownership rights

-Restraining orders

-Trademark and domain registration

-Freeze-outs

-Merchandising and licensing rights

Why did we try so hard in the ABA Blawg 100 competition?

By J. DeVoy

This is the award we should have been vying for.  Elegant in its simplicity and actually funny, Bhetti‘s commendation has singled out In Mala Fide and OneSTDV (a personal favorite) for kudos, but not The Legal Satyricon.  What. The. Fuck.  I imagine Bardamu is sitting in some swivel chair from Target as he reads this, clumsily dancing and singing along like Eric Cartman does to so many popular songs.

If awards could be so obscure and hilarious, there would have been no need to escalate with John Turley over the ABA competition.  Alas, lawyers are boring and uncreative, so it’s no surprise that a Med student pwned us hard.

Then again, with the ubiquity of online trophy ordering for any damn thing, The Legal Satyricon can make its own awards, to the point of devaluing the very idea of trophies.  With the demise of formal recognition, a new regime of praise can be ushered in — perhaps Satyricon plaudits, a commodity that can only rise in value.  Whatever the case, watch your back, Ferdinand.  Haters gonna hate.

Know what gets me really hot? 10,000 tons of molten steel and jet fuel…and soccer

By J. DeVoy

Meet Roxxxy, or specifically her personality “Mature Martha.”  By day she’s a good girl working at Tower 1 — yes, that Tower 1, formerly of the World Trade Center.  Prepare to see the most disturbing video to grace this blog in months:

The bizarre commentary is not without explanation:

Douglas Hines says that he developed Roxxxy robot lifesized girlfriend after losing a friend in the 9-11 terrorist attack.

Okay, fine, this is a tribute to his friend.  People have all sorts of strange ways they want to be remembered.  But, for those of you who can’t watch the video, here are the highlights (along with the post title).

You could even say I am experienced.  I have seven years of experience as a Cantor Fitzgerald bond trader.

You have a nice wiener.

Soccer balls full of jet fuel.

Disturbing September 11th dialogue aside, this is a fascinating development.  I’ve previously written about the coming dawn of sex robots and, though still a rough start, the progress evinced by Roxxxy is impressive.  No word yet on a price point, but even as crude as this model is, I can imagine many men dropping five figures to snap up a Roxxxy and forego the tedium of dating solipsistic and damaged American women.

Personally, I want the technology to come farther along before I completely forego flesh-and-blood women, marriage, and a chance at argyle-clad mini-me’s whom I can train to mindlessly parrot Friedrich Hayek at pre-school.  My only substantive criticisms of Roxxxy are easily curable.  First, that’s a horrible haircut.  It’s like an uglified version of Ugly Betty’s hair, which obviously is ugly to begin with.  Exhibit A:

Second, that is a really boxy, mannish face.  Because it’s a doll, the defense of high testosterone exposure won’t work.  Even if that was the theory being bandied about for Roxxxy’s squarish features, it would be betrayed by her small nose, which would be unlikely in the face of (no pun intended) exposure to high levels of testosterone.  Still, that facial structure isn’t that uncommon.  I feel like I’ve seen it somewhere before, someplace very unpleasant.  But where…?

Where in the world is Marc Randazza?

By J. DeVoy

Delivering medicine to starving children in pestilence-riddled lands.  Ending modern-day economic apartheid that harms groups like coffee growers and the Zapatistas of southern Mexico.  Saving the environment.  These are all things Marc Randazza doesn’t do when he travels.

I received news of Marco “Polo” Randazza’s travels this afternoon when a falcon came to my open window with a crumpled piece of papyrus grasped tightly in its claw.  It promptly died as I unfolded the note it was carrying.  It turns out that our fearless editor is in Costa Rica, the land of dinosaurs.

It was trains planes and automobiles to get where i am. Two fuckin’ days, a night in San Jose, a single-engine cessna to a jungle landing strip, then an hour down a dirt road to east bumfuckistan.  And it’s fucking beautiful.

At last, the mystery was revealed.  But a larger question arose – what was he doing there?  Like the Necronomicon, the letter was written in what could only be human blood.  Hopefully, for his sake, it was that of his slain “ass hat” opponents.  It seems that the trip hadn’t been without incident, either:

The plane’s collison warning system was screaming for 10 minutes as we flew through some mountain pass.

VRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMM!!!!

All that potential for a reenactment of Alive, too.

Since I received the message, he must be alright, or at least been alright.  As for why he’s in Costa Rica, my money’s on starting a military junta — he didn’t call us lacky bloggers the “Satyriconistas” for nothing.  Whatever the case, I hope the natives are hot.

In grand Inspector Gadget fashion, the message self-destructed after reading.

The man-hating crowd’s blood lust strikes again

By J. DeVoy

I have no issue with feminists.  In this classic case of taking it too far, however, certain women have descended upon bloggers I frequently read and link to here — Ferdinand Bardamu and Roissy — and are harassing them for promoting “anti-woman” views.  This is correlated with Roissy’s (brief, thankfully) cessation of writing and closely timed with Bardamu taking a step back from daily blogging.  Hopefully it isn’t causative, though it seems unrelated to Bardamu’s slowdown.  Worse, this probably isn’t the first time something in this vein has happened, but I’m noticing it only because it affects blogs I liked.

This attack seems to have two prongs.  First, a jilted commenter from Roissy’s blog has started a campaign to out him; the efficacy of these efforts is unknown.  Because outing anonymous or psuedononymous people is uncool, these materials won’t be directly linked to here, but intrepid readers can easily find them from other web sites referenced in this piece.  Second, and with greater reach, Denise A. Romano, M.A., Ed.M., has been harassing other bloggers with the old vanguard of illogical attacks, shame.  I will not be half surprised if she finds her way to this blog’s comment section, though I hope she does not.  I question whether other Ed.M. holders who read this blog share Romano’s views and appreciate her methods, but I digress.

At the heart of this debate is “game,” the attraction-building strategy I previously discussed and predicted would be subject to attempted suppression because it’s not politically correct.  Game comes in two broad varieties, namely for men and for women.  At its core, it’s based on evolutionary psychology principles that allow its user to present himself or herself in the most desirable possible light.  It will not, however, change the substance of the user.

Romano and other activists contend that game is a misrepresentation that harms women.  First, how does this harm women?  Sociopaths who use these techniques aren’t hurting women because of game – they’re hurting women because they’re sociopaths.  Game is a tool like a hammer, or a screwdriver, or an alligator, and can be used for good or evil.  Second, game itself doesn’t entail misrepresentation.  I doubt Romano would criticize a woman for trying to make her partner feel like a priority to her and attempting to cook well for him as a relationship-seeking strategy, despite the fact that she may be busy or indisposed to cooking.  A man shouldn’t be penalized for employing strategies with proven effectiveness to make himself more desirable to women so long as he’s not expressly lying about material facts such as his marital status, any STDs he many have, or so on.  Romano’s argument essentially considers all styles of personal presentation a lie, which is beyond asinine.

Tolerance means you shut up.

The second layer of this action, beyond protesting game itself, is the punishment of people who provide information about it.  This should be a realm of intense interest for lawyers, law students and anyone else in a demanding field that consumes all of their time and attention, sucking the marrow out of your personality.  Success in life and particularly with women boils down to being cool and interesting.  Generally speaking, lawyers and law students are not cool and certainly not interesting.  As engrossing as we may think it is to debate the scope of the commerce clause and toothlessness of Fed. R. Civ. P. 11, NOBODY CARES.  It’s not a personal failing or defect — just life.

Since at least the sexual revolution, men have pondered why women “only like jerks and assholes”; most recently, the term “douchebag” has been reflexively attached to men who do better than average with women.  My friends in similar educational and life situations have made identical observations, as women acquaintances who were college graduates would furiously rationalize their decisions to date lesser men.  ”Lesser” isn’t some petty and idiosyncratic distinction of attending a crapp(y/ier) school, having bad grades or being poorly traveled, but entails clear demarcators of failure such as having children he didn’t support, a criminal record with at least one felony conviction, repeated and flagrant infidelity, and even physical abuse.  From there, two groups emerged within my acquaintances: Those who chose to do something about it, and bitter losers who thought they would win in the end if they never changed and attributed their failings to the fecklessness of women.

Among the former camp, Roissy was a must-read, as he almost specifically reached out to too-driven educated people who spent all their time in high school, college and beyond racking up resume lines without learning how to date, navigate the sexual marketplace, and get out of their own heads.  Truly, the advice there was instructive for people who thought their accomplishments in life would be sufficient to find a desirable and loyal companion, rather than part of a package of factors — sometimes a troublingly small one.  Learning how to use attraction-building techniques while capitalizing on the prestige of a decent education and upward social mobility it demonstrates — or demonstrated, considering the current economy — gave options to men who previously found relationships of varying enjoyability through personal acquaintances and serendipity.  These skills were also used without falling into the stereotypical category of effete, medallion-wearing “pickup artists” mocked in the media.  Anecdotally, these techniques are even more effective on intelligent women who have the intellectual horsepower to revel in harmless teasing and the challenge of a man who doesn’t reflexively accede to their demands.  Indeed, a woman’s receptiveness to these tactics may be a good proxy for intelligence, making this skill even more important upon leaving the bubble of higher education.

To the extent maintaining civilization is a common concern, this kind of information should be disseminated more freely to men; indeed it should be mandatory at good universities so that our most promising minds aren’t given the run-around by women looking for more than a handout.  Granted, this isn’t representative of all women, but women with options, like men with options, explore them; there are far fewer women with no options than men in that situation.  The engineers, accountants, actuaries, dentists and lawyers this country relies on have no reason to settle for the opposite gender’s table scraps, but many don’t know how to do better.  Now they’re being attacked on both fronts, branded as liars and misogynists for using effective techniques to meet desirable women, while the purveyors of such information are subject to life-ruining character assassination attempts by angry strangers.

Admittedly, this is a lot of information and its consequences seem trivial.  Blogs shutter and people stop writing all the time, often for personal reasons.  The issue is that only a small memorial will result, with no conclusive action taken.  I don’t know what that decisive action would entail, though, beyond educating men about the inherent gender biases in law, especially the family court system, and the importance of resisting intimidation.  I once had faith in the lofty rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr., plagiarism aside, that the arc of the universe would right these wrongs and bring justice to all.  With age I’ve realized that’s crap.  All too often the individual right to be heard is determined by those with the most popular support.  To their credit, men who care about their gender and its fate have been marshaling evidence and intellectual firepower to support their views on the issues facing them.  Unfortunately, it may be time for them simply to scream louder.

Another great proposal for thought-policing law students

By J. DeVoy

With one semester left to go in law school, I’d compare my experience in legal education to being a member of a barbaric tribe of hunters and gatherers.  As a group, there are too many of us for existing economic opportunities, even in good times, yet we cannot simply cut out the undesirables.  For those at the top of the grades/prestige hierarchy, an embarrassment of riches — being wined and dined in faraway cities during interviews and the dog-and-pony show known as summer associateship — is ours theirs.  For everyone else there is little, if anything.  Occasionally, one of the undesirables, someone with low prestige or poor grades, is able to move into one of the few apex positions at the top of the tribe and even transcend it.  Through good lawyering, luck, or connections, he performs the modern equivalent of hitting the dominant alpha lawyer in the back of the head with a really big rock and taking the deceased’s harem, children and physical possessions all for himself.

Juxtaposed with this chaos is the highly regimented legal profession and equally stringent requirements for entry.  As zero-sum as the law student’s realm is, where grades and jobs are finite, a forced superstructure of collegiality creates needless pleasantries and orthodoxy among law students.  People censor themselves for fear of retaliation by professors or future colleagues.  As lax as some would contend the bar is, it does keep out people who would tarnish its reputation.  For instance, avowed white supremacists are precluded from entry.  Similarly, those with nearly half a million dollars in educational debt and no means to repay it are also banned.  But now a new barrier to entry is being proposed.

Danielle Citron, a frequent subject of this blog and erstwhile proponent of stamping out speech she thinks is yucky, was recently on a panel that considered whether jeering people online or making “outrageous” race- or gender-specific comments should be subject to stricter scrutiny upon character & fitness review.  Eugene Volokh offers a probing analysis of the issues this proposal raises.  Two points in particular stand out.  First, this would defeat the rigorous inquiry of ideas and facts that legal education encourages, even if it leads people to take positions Citron and others might find “outrageous.”  I’d shudder to think what this nebulous standard might entail, since reality can lead to some very uncomfortable truths about race and gender.  For instance, black children from rich families are outscored on the SAT by poor whites, a trend that has not improved since the test moved to having three scored components.  Surely some find this outrageous, but the data are clear, and solutions to eliminate discrimination — if there is any, another subject for research — cannot be proposed unless someone brings this information to light.  Forcing someone to risk his or her professional career because of the difficulty in confronting this information is unseemly and contrary to the notion of open, rigorous discussion within the university context.  Without deep, probing examination of tough problems, mediocre solutions arise.  The failure of SAT-optional admissions is one example of this principle, as that process has become the backdoor of dumb rich kids into good schools that the most cynical of us always knew it would be.

Second, as Volokh notes, these kinds of panels — not limited to the AALS, but in general — are a great source of pie-in-the-sky psychobabble, but never produce anything tangible.  Citron herself has been bandying about the idea of requiring the disclosure of prior IP addresses to character and fitness examiners for years, yet it is no closer to being a requirement in any single state than it was at its watershed moment in 2007, the filing of Doe v. [a few dozen AutoAdmit posters].  Until a real proposal or model rule is promulgated, it’s easy and even rational to discount these kinds of panels as Lake Wobegon exercises by people who bemoan the plight of the little people before returning to the warm trappings of tenure and a tower of ivory.  It’s simple: Production counts.  Until such a panel creates something that can be implemented by state bars, they will be looked at with a jaundiced eye.  Meanwhile, people who follow such matters will wonder why the AALS isn’t devoting its resources to wresting sole law school accreditation authority away from the obviously incompetent ABA and shutting down some schools, especially the dubious for-profit ones.

Finally, I feel that it looks I’ve been too harsh on Danielle Citron.  Despite not blogging for long, I have dedicated a substantial amount of writing to her and her proposals.  Though disagreeing with many of these positions, I have respect for professor Citron and especially her prolific publishing.  As of this writing, I’ve requested to be her friend on facebook.  Hopefully she’ll accept.

Your TSA at work

Frank Lautenberg – Piece of Shit of the day

Haisong Jiang, the guy who slipped past security to kiss his girlfriend goodbye and caused a nationwide mewling coward freakout is facing minor criminal charges. (source) I guess that makes sense. You go past the boundary, there ought to be some penalty.

Of course, asshats and douchebags will never let an incident pass without scoring points with the mewling cowards crowd.

In an interview on Saturday, Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, of New Jersey, said he was hoping that the United States attorney’s office would consider bringing federal charges because the penalty Mr. Jiang is facing, “is hardly noteworthy and would not discourage people who want to break through the perimeter.”

The senator said the trouble the security breach caused far outweighed the punishment: 1,600 people stuck in the airport for six hours; flights delayed and an “incalculable” loss of money. And then for five days after the incident, New Jersey law enforcement officials searched exhaustively for the man caught on a grainy surveillance video, one which Sen. Lautenberg had released on Thursday.

Yeah, Senator Lautenberg, that’s what the federal government ought to do — devote its resources to destroying the life of a guy who ducked under a rope to kiss his girlfriend goodbye. 1,600 people were not stranded because of Mr. Jiang. Mr. Jiang didn’t cost anyone any money. The manhunt wasn’t because of any real threat — and everyone knew that at the time. The complete flip out was because of pieces of shit like Frank Lautenberg — sleazeballs who play the “coward card” to whip up America’s courage-free denizens into a law-and order crusade any time someone breaks a minor, and idiotic, rule.

Instead of devoting resources to prosecuting Mr. Jiang, we ought to pool our resources to buy 25,000 gallons of liquid feces, and force it down Frank Lautenberg’s throat. Now that would be a good use of federal funds, and it wouldn’t change the interior composition of Senator Lautenberg by one molecule.

Long Live Lukeywes1234!!!!

And how can this be? For he is the Kwisatz Haderach of teh Internets!

Luke Taylor is an 8 year old boy who had a few mildly amusing videos up on Youtube. 4chan got a real kick out of it, and hundreds of people began subscribing to Luke’s youtube channel. Then, YouTube yanked all of Lukeywes1234′s videos down, because he was not old enough to post, per YouTube’s terms and conditions.

/b/ INTERVENE.

If 4chan decides that someone is internet nobility, you obey. The Legal Satyricon hereby pledges its loyalty.

Now if only we can keep pedobear away from him.

America is the Land of the Mewling Cowards

I’ve been saying so for years. But, it seems that finally the Wall Street Journal thinks so too.

It’s a remarkable fact that a nation founded, fought for, built by, and transformed through the extraordinary courage of figures such as George Washington, Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. now often seems reduced to a pitiful whimpering giant by a handful of mostly incompetent criminals, whose main weapons consist of scary-sounding Web sites and shoe- and underwear-concealed bombs that fail to detonate.

Terrorball, in short, is made possible by a loss of the sense that cowardice is among the most disgusting and shameful of vices. I shudder to think what Washington, who as commander in chief of the Continental Army intentionally exposed himself to enemy fire to rally his poorly armed and badly outnumbered troops, would think of the spectacle of millions of Americans not merely tolerating but actually demanding that their government subject them to various indignities, in the false hope that the rituals of what has been called “security theater” will reduce the already infinitesimal risks we face from terrorism. (source)

Now go out there and do absolutely nothing about it, just like you’ve been doing since September 11, 2001.

Caturday

By J. DeVoy

Background.

The good book

Not a very smart cookie – Kardashian cookie libel suit

This is defamatory? Good luck with that.

Kim Kardashian claims that some doctor who invented the “cookie diet” used her name to endorse the product without her permission. (source). She tweets that the diet is “unhealthy” and that Dr. Siegal is “lying.” So Siegal files a defamation suit against her.

The complaint is an example of pretty bad legal strategy. The plaintiff makes allegation after allegation about how famous he is — thus conceding that he is a public figure.

This is basic defamation 101 — a public figure has a much higher burden of proof than a private plaintiff. A private plaintiff only needs to prove that the statement was a false statement of fact that tended to damage his reputation. Truth is an affirmative defense to that action that the defendant has to prove. On the other hand, a public figure has to both prove that the statement is false, and has to prove that the defendant published the falsehood with knowledge of its falsity, or with reckless disregard for the truth. Public figures who prevail in defamation suits are about as rare as fad diets that are good for you.

Meshuggenah lawsuit tossed out on its tuchus

The plaintiff in this case belonged to a cult that has a practice of placing men on a “shun list” in order to convince them to give their wives a divorce. The cult’s newspaper published the husband’s name on its “shun list,” but one of its newspaper reporters mixed up whether it was a an official shun, or just a suggested shun.

Whether or not the statement about the shunning was defamatory or not would have required the court to dig into the specific ecclesiastical rules of this particular cult. American courts don’t do that, and thus the case was dismissed. In affirming the dismissal, the New Jersey Appellate Court gave us our Constitutional poetry of the day:

In affirming the dismissal of all of plaintiff’s claims, we are not unmindful of the consequences of such dismissal. The right to maintain one’s “good name, unimpaired” has its roots in “the essential dignity and worth of every human being – a concept at the root of any decent system of ordered liberty.” Senna v. Florimont, 196 N.J. 469, 479 (2008) (internal citations and quotations omitted). Thus, any order that prevents a plaintiff from pursuing what may well be a meritorious claim for the destruction of his good name imposes a harsh consequence on a plaintiff. However, as Judge Ackerman aptly observed in Klagsbrun, “First Amendment jurisprudence has traditionally ‘called for line drawing’ by the courts to best effectuate its
rather lofty goals.” Klagsbrun, supra, 53 F. Supp. 2d at 737 (quoting Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668, 678, 104 S. Ct. 1355, 1362, 79 L. Ed. 2d 604, 613 (1984)). We are forced here to set the boundary between the secular and the ecclesiastical and, in our view, because plaintiff’s claims cannot be resolved without excessive entanglement into religious beliefs, we are left with no alternative other than the dismissal of plaintiff’s claims. (source)

aaaand another tip o’the hat to Courthouse News