A Group Complaint about Law, Liberty, and Leisure
When I was about 11 a few other socially inept morally spavined twerps and I recorded fake radio shows on my primitive cassette tape machine. It was mostly fart jokes, inarticulate inside-baseball ridicule of people we didn't like, and snort-laughing. I was born too soon. Apparently these days you can make thousands of dollars a[Read More…]
By Marc Randazza When then-presidential candidate Trump uttered the words, “Get’em out of here,” at one of his rallies, Trump’s supporters assaulted three anti-Trump protestors. The protestors now want to hold Trump liable for the assault, based on his speech alone. While I do not approve of Trump’s words, I am honor-bound to defend his[Read More…]
My debate with Elie Mystal on hate speech laws from earlier this year got turned into a More Perfect podcast episode. Fun.
Good news. Yesterday, the California Supreme Court approved revisions to the California Rules of Professional Conduct governing the ethical duties of prosecutors in California. The Revised Rule 5-110 includes the obligation to disclose exculpatory evidence (so-called Brady evidence, after Brady v. Maryland): (D) Make timely disclosure to the defense of all evidence or information known[Read More…]
Popehat is pleased to offer a third guest post by Sarah McLaughlin. Sarah works for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (though the opinions expressed here are her own) and is interested in free speech and civil liberties. You can follow her on Twitter at @sarahemclaugh. Her previous posts on blasphemy and speech issues[Read More…]
This morning the United States District Court for the District of Columbia unsealed a criminal proceeding against George Papadopoulos, who acted as a foreign policy adviser to the President's 2016 campaign. We can tell some interesting things from these documents. You have questions, I have answers. Wait! The case was sealed? How does that happen?[Read More…]
Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller has secured a substantial indictment against former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and his colleague Richard Gates. The indictment is many places online including here. So the federal grand jury looked at all of the evidence against Manafort and selected these charges against him and Gates? No. As I've explained[Read More…]
It's time for the Road to Popehat, that feature in which we check out the traffic logs, see what searches brought you here, and contemplate whether a North Korean warhead's continental EMP pulse would really be such a bad idea. In today's edition, you have legal questions. Writing an effective letter to a prosecutor Sit[Read More…]
Mike Masnick at Techdirt reported it first: the United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Texas issued a federal grand jury subpoena to Twitter, seeking the identifying information for five Twitter accounts, including @popehat. Here is the subpoena. I'm 98.5% confident that this related to the federal prosecution of one Justin Shafer, who[Read More…]
Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
