Law & Law Enforcement

Bleeding Heart Test: Who Feels Sorry For These “Good Illegal Immigrants”? (I Don’t.)

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

The New York Post has a tale that is guaranteed to make “Think of the Children!” fans and “They just want a better life!” defenders of illegal immigration swim in a lake of tears like shrunken Alice in “Alice in Wonderland.”

Ximena Arias-Cristobal, 19, was a Dalton State Community College ( in Dalton, Georgia) student driving without a driver’s license when she failed to obey to a “no turn on red” sign. After police pulled her vehicle over, she claimed to have an “international driver’s license” (Nice try, kid!). One thing led to another, and eventually it was determined that she was not a citizen, having been brought here illegally by her Mexican parents when she was four, that they were here illegally too and had been for 15 years.

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On the Allied Injury Group’s “Your Favorite Attorney” TV Ad

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ethics Observations:

1. Yecchh! It is both icky and unethical, indeed technically (under the Rules of Professional Conduct) so, and generally.

2. In case you couldn’t figure it out (I had to check myself), the spokesperson calling himself “Your Favorite Attorney” is an actor, indeed a stand-up comic named Shaun Jones. All of the jurisdictions prohibit lawyer advertising in any form that is misleading or that includes false information. A sole practitioner can’t call her firm “X & Associates,” for example, if she’s the only lawyer in the firm. Putting a non-lawyer in front of a camera and calling having him call himself an attorney is an undeniable violation, and an intentional one.

3. Another technical point: although I suppose it is (slightly) possible that the stand-up comic has a law license, he can’t call himself an attorney unless he has clients. Jones also says that if the client doesn’t make money, “I” don’t make money. That is deceit. The firm will argue that the actor is only saying that if the firm doesn’t win its cases, the actor won’t get paid. But his statement is intended to refer to contingent fees for attorneys, and he isn’t one.

Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Oh Yeah, THIS Will Work Out Well: Minnesota Rules That Women Going Bare-Breasted in Public Isn’t Illegal”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Here is Sarah B.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Oh Yeah, THIS Will Work Out Well: Minnesota Rules That Women Going Bare-Breasted in Public Isn’t Illegal.” There isn’t a thing I could say as an introduction that would improve on it….

***

For most of history, the idea of modesty had nothing to do with the idea that the human body or sex was evil.  The idea was that the penis and vagina, as well as the female breasts (the focus of which is the feeding of babies) were indeed focused on reproduction, life giving, holy, and thus reserved from public consumption.  Avoiding public showmanship of the reserved and holy has been a common theme throughout most cultures, religions, and peoples throughout history.  We have a time, place, and occasion for every action in our lives.  Why do we not urinate/defecate in public?  I don’t want to see you do so, and frankly, nor do I want to see your sexual characteristics.

Though this is not a phrase thought well of on this site, we do need to think of children.  There is measurable harm that occurs to children who are exposed to the sexual before puberty.  Modesty, such as not going around bare breasted, is a protection for the children.  We don’t expose sexual characteristics to protect children’s innocence.  Sure, kids know they have these parts, but for the most part, what is not in sight is not emphasized.  We focus on teaching kids about their private parts and how to avoid excess attention focused on them for their safety.  We don’t want more teen pregnancies, child sexual abuse (which includes inappropriate exposure), or normalizing sexual attraction to minors, especially in the form of pederasty, which focuses on the fully developed sexual characteristics, like breasts, that the judges seem to be suggesting we should allow to be in full display. 

Continue reading →

Oh Yeah, THIS Will Work Out Well: Minnesota Rules That Women Going Bare-Breasted in Public Isn’t Illegal

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

You know: Minnesota.

Leaping down a particularly slippery slope, the The Minnesota Supreme Court last week overturned the conviction of Eloisa R. Plancarte for indecent exposure after she bared her breasts in a parking lot in 2021. Olmsted County prosecutors charged her with a misdemeanor after police responded to a complaint about a woman walking around topless. Judge Joseph Chase found Plancarte, 28, guilty of indecent exposure and the Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld Plancarte’s conviction in 2024. Now the woke Supreme Court in the Land of Lakes has reversed the conviction.

Writing for the majority, Justice Karl Procaccini wrote that Plancarte had not engaged “in any type of overt public sexual activity….the State has not met its burden of proving that Plancarte’s exposure was lewd, because none of the evidence in the record suggests that her conduct was of a sexual nature.” In her concurring opinion, Justice Sarah Hennesy wrote that criminalizing the exposure of female, but not male breasts “fails to recognize the more nuanced physical realities of human bodies.”

Whatever that means…

“Would a transgender man be prohibited from exposing his chest?” Hennesy continued. “What about a transgender woman who has had top surgery? Where do the chests of intersex and nonbinary persons fit within this dichotomy? And how do we treat the exposed chest of a breast cancer survivor who has had a mastectomy? Interpreting this statutory scheme as differentiating between male and female breasts is not sufficiently clear and definite to warn Minnesotans of what conduct is punishable.”

Great. Clearly, in Minnesota the conduct of a man walking around with his naughty bits hanging out would also be deemed non-sexual. There is nothing improper about reasonable laws upholding and enforcing societal standards of decency, decorum, respect, civility and modesty. Would the result have been different if a male motorist had been distracted by the bare-breasted pedestrian and run down a child in a crosswalk? That this didn’t occur is only moral luck.

Using the Ethics Incompleteness Principle examples of transgender conduct to eviscerate the law involved is intellectually dishonest: those cases would be difficult, but would also be recognized as narrowly applicable. If Sydney Sweeney’s conduct in walking bare-breasted in a parking lot would be legitimately seen as sexual—and it would—then a law prohibiting such conduct by women generally is reasonable. The pursuit of happiness is not without borders in a civilized society that wants to stay that way.

_______________

Pointer: Jutgory

The Latest Evidence That However Much Contempt You Have For Harvard, It’s Not Enough….

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The conservative Washington Free Beacon launched a thorough investigation into the ways Harvard University has deliberately sought ways to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling that affirmative action policies at colleges and universities are illegal and unconstitutional. (You didn’t expect the Axis media to do that, did you?) Last week, the project resulted in a damning report of how the Harvard Law Review engaged in—is engaging in—outright racial discrimination in selecting staff, authors and articles:

The law review states on its website that it considers race only in the context of an applicant’s personal statement. But according to dozens of documents obtained by the Free Beacon—including lists of every new policy adopted by the law review since 2021—race plays a far larger role in the selection of both editors and articles than the journal has publicly acknowledged.

Just over half of journal members, for example, are admitted solely based on academic performance. The rest are chosen by a “holistic review committee” that has made the inclusion of “underrepresented groups”—defined to include race, gender identity, and sexual orientation—its “first priority,” according to resolution passed in 2021.

The law review has also incorporated race into nearly every stage of its article selection process, which as a matter of policy considers “both substantive and DEI factors.” Editors routinely kill or advance pieces based in part on the race of the author, according to eight different memos reviewed by the Free Beacon, with one editor even referring to an author’s race as a “negative” when recommending that his article be cut from consideration.

“This author is not from an underrepresented background,” the editor wrote in the “negatives” section of a 2024 memo. The piece, which concerned criminal procedure and police reform, did not make it into the issue.

Such policies have had a major effect on the demographics of published scholars. Since 2018, according to data compiled by the journal, only one white author, Harvard’s Michael Klarman, has been chosen to write the foreword to the law review’s Supreme Court issue, arguably the most prestigious honor in legal academia. The rest—with the exception of Jamal Greene, who is black—have been minority women.

Nice. What does the race of an author have to do with the quality of legal analysis, which is what law review articles are supposed to be? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Continue reading →

Non-Citizen Speech Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Reason” (of course) has an article up headlined “Immigrants and Radicals Have the Same Free Speech Rights as Everyone Else.” That may be correct, but it’s not at all certain, and I’m not sure it’s ethically necessary either. (Shame on “Reason” for following the Left’s deliberate conflating of immigrants with illegal immigrants.)

Marco Rubio and the Trump Administration are asserting that foreign students, other aliens here legally but temporarily and illegal immigrants do not have the same rights of free speech as American citizens. This week, a federal judge in Massachusetts allowed a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s deportation proceedings involving non-citizen anti-Israel college protesters and activists to go forward on the grounds that the government is targeting protected speech and therefore chilling the free speech rights of foreign university students and faculty. American Association of University Professors v. Rubio was brought by the American Association of University Professors, that organization’s Harvard and New York University chapters, and the Middle East Studies Association alleging the “chilling” of non-citizen members’ activities by federal policy.  The plaintiffs allege that members of their organization “have, variously, taken down social media posts and previously published writing and scholarship, stopped assigning material about Palestine in class, withdrawn from a conference presentation, ceased traveling abroad for conferences, ceased engaging in political protest and assembly in which they previously participated, ceased teaching a course they previously taught, and foregone opportunities to write and speak at public events,” because they fear deportation.

Continue reading →

Michigan Magistrate Judge Ray Kent, Fuddy-Duddy of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Who’s being unethical here? Obviously the judge thought it was the lawyer, and judges win these arguments. Still…

Federal magistrate judge Ray Kent was so offended by a law firm’s dragon logo appearing on each page of a plaintiff’s complaint that he struck the lawsuit filed by attorney Jacob Perrone on behalf of an inmate accusing jail officials in Clinton County, Michigan of being “deliberately indifferent” to her when she started vomiting. Perrone’s firm is called Dragon Lawyers, a perfectly acceptable name now that all but one state permits firms to have trade names rather than the traditional firm titles featuring the names of founders and partners. As you can see, the firm’s logo was embedded in the document….

…but faintly: I don’t see anything to flip out over, but flip the magistrate did. In his order Judge Kent noted that “each page of plaintiff’s complaint appears on an e-filing which is dominated by a large multicolored cartoon dragon dressed in a suit, presumably because she is represented by the law firm of ‘Dragon Lawyers PC © Award Winning Lawyers. Use of this dragon cartoon logo is not only distracting, it is juvenile and impertinent,” Judge Kent wrote. “The Court is not a cartoon.”

And thus it was that Judge Kent gave Perrone’s client until May 5 to refile her lawsuit “without the cartoon dragon.” He also ordered her not to file “any other documents with the cartoon dragon or other inappropriate content.”

Various commentators, including the estimable Eugene Volokh, seem to think this example of a judge abusing his authority and throwing a fit over a law firm’s logo is funny. I don’t think it’s funny. True, Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(f)(1) allows a court to “strike from a pleading an insufficient defense or any redundant, immaterial, impertinent, or scandalous matter.” But how is the dragon logo for a firm named “Dragon” impertinent or scandalous? Calling the logo “redundant” is a stretch just because it was on every page: so what?

The issue isn’t worth fighting about, so the lawyer apologized; if he wanted to fight, I think he would have a solid First Amendment argument. I guess we should be grateful that the judge didn’t help an illegal immigrant avoid ICE by sneaking out the back door.

At least as far as we know…

NYT Stockholm Syndrome Pundit David Brooks Finally Wrote Something Astute and Fair Regarding Trump, So Naturally My Trump-Deranged Friend Condemns Him For It

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Imagine the late James Earl Jones’ resonant bass intoning, “THIS is Trump Derangement!” and you have the perfect backdrop for my depressing story.

A retired lawyer of great accomplishments and gravitas has recently erupted into repeated anti-Trump/anti-Republican rants on Facebook. I consider him a good freind and generally a wise one—and he’s a passionate baseball fan!—so it pains me to read this sad evidence of mental and ethical deterioration. His most recent screed began with a declaration that he now detests David Brooks. As the Ethics Alarms Brooks dossier vividly shows, there are plenty of reasons to detest Brooks, an obnoxious and arrogant conservative in his Daily Standard days, and now a sell-out who accepted the dishonest role as a token non-progressive propagandist on the New York Times opinion page and quickly “cut the cloth of his conscience to fit the fashion of the Times,” (to quote Lillian Hellman at the McCarthy hearings, except that when she said it, she used a small “t.”)

[Yikes! I just looked over my own collection of Brooks posts, and he’s even worse than I remembered. In October of 2023, for example, I nailed him for writing that President Biden was still sharp and capable though it was obvious then, a year before Biden’s debate babble-fest, that Joe was demented.]

But my learned, once rational friend wasn’t critical of Brooks for any of his lies and hypocrisy; he now detests Brooks because of this column, in which the pundit gives President Trump credit for something. It is a trait that I have also noted: Trump has amazing energy and drive, to the point of being indomitable. Brooks begins his column this way:

Continue reading →

Wow, Look at All the Nice People and Respectable Organizations Profiting From Listerine Killing Alcoholics!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I last posted “The Amazing Mouthwash Deception: Helping Alcoholics Relapse For Profit” in March of 2024, about a week after my wife Grace died suddenly. Her death was almost certainly a direct consequence of her alcoholism, which she frequently serviced through the surreptitious consumption of alcohol-containing mouthwash, usually Listerine. I was not planning on re-posting the piece so soon afterwards, but today I discovered the weird story of how botched contract drafting in 1881 resulted in Johnson & Johnson having to pay six dollars for every 2,016 ounces of Listerine sold, (the equivalent to 144 14-oz. bottles) to Listerine’s many royalty holders. Even though the royalties have been split, sold and traded, they are still worth a lot of money because Listerine is the best selling mouthwash (and secret alcoholic beverage) in the world. You can read the whole, strange tale here , but what matters ethically is this: among the organizations making money off of this deadly stuff are…

  • Wellesley College
  • The American Bible Society
  • The Salvation Army
  • The Rockefeller Foundation
  • The Bell Telephone Company

…and the Catholic Archdiocese of New York owned a 50% stake in Listerine royalties for nearly two decades, making almost $13 million over 16 years.

Shame on all of them. As I first explained in 2010 in a post that has been read over 50,000 times (it’s still not enough), Listerine is a destructive resource for alcoholics, and that use represents an untold, but definitely large, percentage of Listerine sales. The companies that have owned Listerine have deliberately maintained the deception that it can’t be guzzled, and the deception benefits their huge market of addicts, and of course, the companies, their shareholders, and royalty owners.

In my 2016 introduction to the post, I wrote in part, “Most of all, I am revolted that what I increasingly have come to believe is an intentional, profit-motivated deception by manufacturers continues, despite their knowledge that their product is killing alcoholics and destroying families. I know proof would be difficult, but there have been successful class action lawsuits with millions in punitive damage settlements for less despicable conduct. Somewhere, there must be an employee or executive who acknowledges that the makers of mouthwash with alcohol know their product is being swallowed rather than swished, and are happy to profit from it….People are killing themselves right under our noses, and we are being thrown of by the minty smell of their breath.”

And now I know that all sorts of nice people and admirable organizations profit from their deaths.

Once again, here is “The Amazing Mouthwash Deception: Helping Alcoholics Relapse For Profit,” dedicated, as it always will be, to brilliant, beautiful, kind, loving—and dead—- Grace Bowen Marshall:

Continue reading →

The Significant Thing About The SCOTUS Oral Argument in Mahmoud v. Taylor Is That The Three Liberal Justices Were Too Biased To Recognize The Obvious…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

…Which is that there are no good reasons at all to expose elementary-school-aged children to LGTBQ literature and propaganda. This is depressing. While the Supreme Court conservative Justices have shown themselves capable of ruling against extreme right-wing agenda items when the law dictates, the Three Progressive Sisters on the Court increasingly seem incapable of anything but lockstep wokism.

During nearly two-and-a-half hours of oral arguments last week regarding the case of a group of Maryland parents who sued Montgomery County (Maryland) to be able to pull their elementary-school-aged children out of instruction that includes LGBTQ themes, a clear majority of the Justices indicated that they had the better argument. That is that the local school board’s refusal to give them an opt-out violates the family’s religious beliefs and therefore their constitutional right to freely exercise their religion.

I find it annoying that the case has to rest on Freedom of Religion at all: why shouldn’t any parents be able to decide that they don’t want their children introduced to these topics before puberty, or exposed to indoctrination on subjects that only parents should handle, within the family?

The parents in the case include Tamer Mahmoud and Enas Barakat, who are Muslim, Melissa and Chris Persak, who are Roman Catholic, and Svitlana and Jeff Roman, who are Ukrainian Orthodox and Roman Catholic. (Having some Scientologists and Evangelical Christians would have been nice…)

In 2023, the Montgomery County School Board in one of the most Democratic counties in the nation was flushed with the Democratic Party’s totalitarian vigor, and announced that it would no longer allow parents to excuse their children from instruction using LGBTQ-themed books. The parents argued in federal court that the board’s refusal to allow them to opt their children out violated their rights under the First Amendment to freely exercise their religion, since it stripped them of their ability to instruct their children on gender and sexuality and to control how and when their children are exposed to these issues. How radical of them!

Continue reading →