On Veterans Day, we told you about Avery, a Suffolk Law professor with a real bug up his ass when it comes to care packages for troops serving overseas. Not long after our story, Suffolk released a wacky statement in which they tried to seem supportive of everybody and everything.
I told them at the time that wouldn’t work.
Now, an adjunct law professor currently in Kabul has cut ties with Suffolk because of Avery, and Suffolk is now in the uncomfortable position of de facto supporting Avery’s comments against a pissed-off military.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg can have his way with the Occupy Wall Street protesters. According to the Associated Press, Justice Michael Stallman of New York Supreme Court just shot down the Temporary Restraining Order sought by the protesters against Mayor Bloomberg.
November 15th, 2011, there was a riot in the streets, tell me where were you? While you were at home watching your T.V., I was participating in some anarchy.
Well, there wasn’t really a riot in the streets. And I wasn’t really participating in it so much as taking the 5 train to work today. But I did bump into some would-be Occupy Wall Street protesters looking to join the movement after the main group was evicted from Zuccotti Park under the cover of darkness early this morning. The people on the train asked for my legal advice.
I laughed — then told them I could do them one better. Let’s see if we can’t crowdsource a legal recourse for the Occupy protesters now that big bad Bloomberg has put his jackboot on the movement….
If I were in charge of Suffolk University, I’d have just said, “Yeah, Professor Avery can be a dick sometimes, whatever,” and moved on. I mean, it’s an entire university; I think most people assume that the views of one man don’t necessarily reflect the view of the entire university.
But the powers at be at Suffolk couldn’t leave it at that. Both the dean of the law school and the president of the university had to weigh in and defend, well, everything.
I’m sure all the military guys know what happens when one defends everything….
So it’s Wednesday and I’m watching the second night of the excellent Vietnam in HD series on the History channel while my Iroquois are locked in a quagmire against the Greeks in my game of Civilization V. They’ve got a veteran on and he nearly breaks down talking about how much it hurt him to be despised when he came home from the war. I thought to myself that at least one good thing that came out of Vietnam was that our country learned to distinguish between the political leaders who order wars and the fighting men and women who execute the policy. It’s a point that the very same veteran ended up echoing on the last night of the series.
Meanwhile, also on Wednesday, a law professor was writing a screed objecting to a solicitation to send care packages to troops deployed in Afghanistan.
Let me say that again: the professor was pissed off that students were asked if they could send care packages to soldiers serving abroad.
The crowd was not as extreme as the massive banner suggests.
There was more excitement in Oakland yesterday, as several thousand people enacted a citywide “general strike” and marched across town and “took over” the Port of Oakland. No one is exactly sure what those quoted phrases were supposed to mean, specifically, even though crowd estimates ranged from 3,000 to 40,000.
But one thing was for sure: the Occupy Oakland crowd wanted to make a ruckus. They wanted to disrupt the city’s business as usual. And they did. Lots of businesses closed for the day, including one of my favorite coffee shops. Embattled Oakland Mayor Jean Quan recommended city employees take the day off (excluding police, who did not appreciate the snub).
At least one Oakland law firm tried to keep its motor running, although building management locked the building down like a private tiger collection.
Let’s take a look at the official memo, courtesy of an anonymous tipster….
I’ve said from the beginning that while the goals of the Occupy Wall Street crowd were not wrong, their tactics have been lacking. The denizens of “Wall Street” (at least not in its geographic form) didn’t cause the collapse of the American economy; they’re just trying to figure out how to profit from it. There’s been an entire legal structure erected to protect the banking industry; wagging your fingers at them isn’t going to do a whole hell of a lot.
And it’s not like “the banks” or whoever can’t fight back. Occupiers might be angry at Wall Street or corporate America or whoever, but it’s “the law” that will be in charge of actually crushing their little movement. The people in Oakland already saw what the police can do. And the police are just the storm troopers of the military-industrial complex. City ordinances, curfews, and unsympathetic judges: these are the people and things that can turn Occupy Wall Street into Alderaan.
But maybe the protesters are starting to understand the true power of the dark side. And maybe they’ll have some new hope if they get some fully trained lawyers on their side (as opposed to non-lawyer volunteers)….
On the other hand, It might be cool to have a pirate teacher.
The only things worse than obnoxious teenagers are the parents of obnoxious teenagers who still act like obnoxious teenagers themselves.
It is not hard to imagine an angsty teenager, angry at her school, hitting the ‘net and writing cruel words about a school employee on her blog. It’s also not hard to imagine word getting back to the school, and some unpleasant consequences for the student.
What just doesn’t compute is how that scenario translates to a four-year legal saga culminating in an appeal to the United States Supreme Court. And the lawsuit is spearheaded by the teen’s parents.
At least one mother-daughter team believes a 17-year-old’s right to call her teacher a douche bag online is of utmost First Amendment importance. Apparently the Supreme Court does not…
A wheelchair-bound Oaklander in the tear gas fog. That's hardcore.
It has been a strange couple of days. I woke up on Tuesday at 5:30 a.m. to finish some writing. It was still dark, but I heard several helicopters buzzing near my house. I checked Twitter and discovered several hundred police officers were clearing out the Occupy Oakland tent city a few miles away.
Well, I wasn’t expecting the morning’s eviction to turn into a national media s**t storm. By Tuesday evening, somewhere around 500 people were marching through downtown Oakland. Police told them to go home, but they didn’t. People started throwing things at police. Police launched tear gas. By the time things wound down at around 1 a.m. on Wednesday, police had fired several rounds of tear gas and beanbags at protesters, and there were various semi-confirmed reports of rubber bullets, flash grenades, and even a sound cannon.
Why do you care? Well, it turns out these protesters are not just deadbeats and drug addicts. There were several lawyers in the crowd, too. We spoke with a few of them, starting with Shahid Buttar. He is a Stanford Law School grad and the Executive Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. He spent Tuesday afternoon lecturing on privacy in a UC Berkeley journalism class, then spent the night getting tear gassed in downtown Oakland….
* The AT&T/T-Mobile antitrust suit is so big that not even Big Government law can handle it. The DOJ is bringing in even bigger guns with a partner from Biglaw firm Munger Tolles. [Bloomberg]
* Obama has nominated former Kozinski clerk, Paul Watford, to the Ninth Circuit. Way to go, because he’s kind of cute. Isn’t that what everyone looks for in a federal judge? [San Francisco Chronicle]
* Is Paul Ceglia’s Facebook lawsuit completely doomed? His own lawyer, Jeffrey Lake, wants to defriend him. This will be the fourth firm to dump Ceglia as a client. [Wall Street Journal]
* Blind item: which Hollywood actress is suing IMDb for $1M for revealing her true age? And we say “true age” because everyone knows that Botox knocks a few years off your face. [Reuters]
* Lindsay Lohan is due in court today for a progress report hearing, and prosecutors want to throw her in jail. Hope she’s been brushing up on her acting skills. [New York Daily News]
* Cry me a river? A Florida lawyer will be arguing before the state Supreme Court this winter over his First Amendment right to blast Justin Timberlake from his car stereo. [NBC Miami]
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The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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Dear Suffolk University Law School Administrators: Your Michael Avery problem is not going away (and not just because he has tenure). 
