Category: News Feeds

On Wednesday, a lawsuit was filed against the New York County Lawyers Association by a former employee alleging she was subjected to discrimination once she became pregnant. Heidi Leibowitz was a fee dispute program administrator for the bar association who was hired in 2005, but she says she experienced discriminatory behavior — including being taunted by coworkers, being unable to freely use the restroom, and being given additional strenuous tasks — when she became pregnant in 2013.

As reported by Law.com, the complaint alleges during her first pregnancy Leibowitz was asked to move boxes, a task that she wasn’t previously assigned, was only given 15 minutes to pump in a bathroom when she returned to work, and her superiors made derogatory comments about her pregnancy:

The first time she became pregnant, Leibowitz alleged, she was assigned arduous tasks that she wasn’t assigned before, such as retrieving boxes from a basement. After giving birth, she said, she could initially only pump breast milk in the bathroom and was only given 15 minutes to do so. After complaining, she was given access to a conference room, but it was rarely available for use, she said.

“Both defendants’ managing director and director repeatedly [asked] plaintiff whether she planned on having any more kids and ‘how many babies do you people have!,’ among numerous other snide and degrading remarks,” her suit claims.

The complaint alleges the poor treatment continued during Leibowitz’s second pregnancy when she was also allegedly told to stop taking so many bathroom breaks despite repeatedly needing to throw up during that time.
Plaintiff’s attorney, Christopher Van De Water of the Van De Water Law Firm, provided this comment about the litigation, “Discrimination in the present culture shouldn’t be tolerated under any circumstances, especially in the context of a woman’s pregnancy.” NYCLA has not yet commented on the matter.

---

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Hey, SCOTUS says it’s OK so it must be OK. Via Greg Doucette comes another WTF decision[PDF] — one that gives North Carolina cops the green light to engage in retaliatory arrests over protected speech.

It’s not like there’s no case law to work with. The Eighth Circuit Appeals Court denied immunity to an officer who arrested someone for shouting “Fuck you!” at him as they drove by. Other federal courts have come to the same conclusion: flipping the bird/dropping f-bombs in the direction of police officers is protected speech and cannot form the basis for traffic stops or arrests.

In the state court of appeals, North Carolina judges have come to pretty much the same conclusion our nation’s top court did: so long as an officer can imagine a crime has been committed, they’re allowed to detain and arrest people who have offended them with their words and/or hand gestures.

And what a glorious hand gesture it must have been. Even the court’s dry recounting of the event manages to paint a vivid picture of the event that kicked off this debacle.

The trooper was assisting a stalled motorist on the side of U.S. Highway 52 in Albemarle County. While assisting the motorist, the trooper noticed a group of passing vehicles, including an SUV. The trooper observed Defendant stick his arm out of the passenger window of the SUV and make a hand-waving gesture in the trooper’s general direction. The trooper then observed Defendant change the gesture to an up-and-down pumping motion with his middle finger extended. The trooper was unsure at whom Defendant was gesturing. In any event, the trooper returned to his patrol car, pursued the SUV, and pulled the SUV over.

If the trooper initiated a pursuit over a hand gesture, chances are the trooper felt very strongly the Defendant was hand gesturing at him. After some back-and-forth and background checks, the trooper decided to arrest the passenger of the vehicle for resisting, delaying and/or obstructing a public officer during a traffic stop. That’s what the court records say. In reality, it was a “contempt of cop” arrest predicated by a contemptuous — but protected — hand gesture.

The court doesn’t even discuss the fact that the trooper’s stated reason for the arrest — the passenger’s refusal to provide ID to the trooper — isn’t even a criminal act. Vehicle passengers in North Carolina are under no obligation to provide ID during traffic stops.

[I]f you are operating a motor vehicle and are stopped by a police officer, you are required to produce your driver’s name/license/identification upon request. North Carolina General Statutes 20-90. Failure to do so is punished as a Class 2 misdemeanor, which carries a maximum penalty of up to 60 days in jail. Additionally, in some cases, if you do not produce identification, you may be charged with resisting an officer, which is a Class 2 misdemeanor, which carries a maximum penalty of up to 60 days in jail. This law applies to drivers of vehicles. It does not apply to passengers. Unless other circumstances exist, officers typically cannot require a passenger to produce identification during a traffic stop.

It doesn’t appear there were any “other circumstances” during this retaliatory stop.

The trooper approached the SUV and observed Defendant and his wife, who was in the driver’s seat, take out their cell phones to record the traffic stop. The trooper knocked on Defendant’s window, whereupon Defendant partially rolled it down. The trooper asked Defendant and his wife for their identification. Defendant and his wife, however, asked the trooper why they had been stopped and stated that the trooper had no right to stop them. Eventually, Defendant’s wife gave the trooper her license, but Defendant refused to comply.

The trooper requested that Defendant step out of the vehicle, and Defendant eventually stepped out onto the side of the road. The trooper then handcuffed Defendant and placed him into his patrol car. While in the patrol car, Defendant gave the officer his name. The trooper ran warrants checks and obtained no results for Defendant nor his wife. The trooper then issued Defendant a citation for resisting, delaying, and obstructing an officer and allowed Defendant and his wife to leave.

All of this is fine with the state appeals court, which overlooks the lack of a criminal act in favor of giving the state’s law enforcement an easier way to punish people for offending them. Reasonable suspicion — at least in this court’s hands — has nothing to do with reasonableness. If the word “reasonable” is supposed to be pronounced “idiotic,” then the following paragraph makes a lot more sense.

Here, without having to determine whether Defendant’s conduct of extending his middle finger, in itself, constituted a crime, we conclude that the trooper had reasonable suspicion to initiate the stop of Defendant. The trooper saw Defendant make rude, distracting gestures while traveling on a highway in a moving vehicle in the vicinity of other moving vehicles. A reasonable, objective officer having viewed Defendant’s behavior could believe that a crime had been or was in the process of being committed. For instance, the crime of disorderly conduct in North Carolina is committed where a person “makes or uses any . . . gesture . . . intended and plainly likely to provoke violent retaliation and thereby cause a breach of the peace.” N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-288.4(a)(2) (2017). Defendant’s actions, both his waving and middle finger taken together, aimed at an unknown target could alert an objective officer to an impending breach of the peace.

This is quite a judicial stretch. Anyone extending a middle finger at anyone/anything within eye-shot of a cop could be on the verge of “disturbing the peace” and should probably be arrested… before the peace is actually disturbed?

When the standard for “reasonable suspicion” is “literally anything,” litigants have almost zero chance of prevailing when suing over retaliatory arrests. At least the Supreme Court demanded the higher standard of “probable cause,” which isn’t quite as flexible as “reasonable suspicion.”

The court made this determination despite the state offering up an even stupider legal rationale to excuse this bullshit arrest. The court doesn’t like it, but the state isn’t the one appealing so its meritless argument ultimately has no effect on the outcome. But here it is, along with the court’s response:

We note that the State made no argument on appeal that the trooper’s stop was justified by the presence of “reasonable suspicion.” Specifically, in its brief and during oral argument, the State essentially contends only that the trooper’s traffic stop was justified under the “community caretaking” exception, which allows an officer to initiate a stop even without the presence of reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct. State v. Sawyers, ___ N.C. App. ___, ___,786 S.E.2d 753, 758 (2016). But it is hard for us to fathom why the trooper would have believed that Defendant and his wife were in need of care at the point that Defendant refused to provide his identification. Indeed, the middle finger is, universally, not a sign of distress. And even if there was some basis to make the initial stop based on some concern for Defendant’s or his wife’s safety, any such concern rapidly dissipated when the officer observed their filming and protesting the stop as he approached the SUV, well before he asked Defendant for his identification.

That’s stupid, but the court’s findings in this case aren’t that much smarter. There is a dissenting opinion, for what it’s worth. Judge Arrowood says there’s nothing reasonable about the court’s take on “reasonable suspicion.” Nothing about a drive-by bird flip adds up to a potential disturbing of the peace.

In the case sub judice, the adult defendant was in a moving car at midday, and there was no danger of a gathering crowd creating a public disturbance. There is also no testimony or indication that anyone other than the trooper, the person to whom the obscene gesture was directed, saw it. There was also no indication that the vehicle was creating any danger to other motorists on the road.

[…]

I do not believe that this action was sufficient to justify the trooper in becoming alert “to a potential, future breach of the peace,” because he did not see any evidence of aggressive driving or other interactions between the vehicles on the road that would suggest road rage. If that was truly his concern he could have followed the vehicle further to see if there was evidence of some road rage toward other vehicles. He did not do so, nor did he testify that he saw any improper driving. He chose not to take any actions to determine if road rage was occurring. Instead, he initiated an improper search and seizure to engage in an improper fishing expedition to find a crime with which to charge the defendant who had directed an obscene gesture to him moments earlier.

Too bad it’s just a dissent. The majority should have arrived at the same conclusion, rather than give officers another way to abuse the citizens they serve.

NYPD, Prosecutors Illegally Using Expunged Criminal Records To Perform Investigations, Ask For Longer Sentences
Ring Is Teaching Cops How To Obtain Doorbell Camera Footage Without A Warrant
North Carolina Court Says Retaliatory Arrests Over Protected Speech Are Cool And Legal
Another Day, Another Company Leaving Sensitive User Data Exposed Publicly On The Amazon Cloud

* Have we not yet talked about Andrew McCabe? I guess we have people who don’t get how news works. [NPR]

* This isn’t about the law it’s just about racism. [Esquire]

* Everybody’s got friends we’re not proud of. [American Lawyer]

* Grandma’s got this on lockdown. [Law360]

* We got a Perry Mason series coming? [Daily Breeze]

* Waiting on Agents of SHIELD to fix discrepancies. [CBR]

Prisca Mupfumira is facing seven corruption charges linked to $94 million missing from the country’s pension fund.

She was “removed … from the office of cabinet minister and minister of government with immediate effect”, the statement said, without giving further details.

Mupfumira was arrested by the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission in July, becoming the first sitting minister of the ruling Zanu-PF party to be jailed for graft under Mnangagwa’s new administration.

Mupfumira was sacked as social welfare minister by ex-president Robert Mugabe weeks before a military-led coup that toppled the long-time ruler in November 2017.

After the putsch she was re-appointed with a new portfolio .

Mnangagwa has identified endemic corruption as a major contributor to the country’s economic woes and vowed to root it out.

Post published in: Business

The latest adjustment will see on-net calls per minute cost 48 cents (Zimbabwean dollars), up from 17 cents.

The Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (Potraz) justified the upward tariff adjustment as a way to keep operators viable amid increasing costs of doing business.

The last tariff adjustment was in April 2019, following what Potraz called “the introduction of market determined interbank exchange rates as well as cost movements during the year 2018 and fuel price increases in January 2019”.

In a circular announcing the tariff hike, Potraz Director General, Gift Machengete, said the operating environment has since changed for operators due to inflationary pressures bedevilling the economy.

Year-on-year inflation for the month of June reached a 10-year high of 175.66%.

“Accordingly, the Authority has found it necessary review tariff thresholds for telecommunication services,” said Machengete.

Post published in: Business

Prisca Mupfumira is the first cabinet minister to be charged by the newly formed anti-graft agency, which says it is on a drive to bring to account senior government officials suspected of corruption.

Mupfumira has been in detention awaiting trial since a court appearance on July 26 on charges over money from the state pension fund after questioning by the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission.

Mupfumira has denied the charges.

In a letter, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, chief secretary to the president and cabinet Misheck Sibanda said Mnangagwa had removed the minister from office “with immediate effect for conduct inappropriate for a government minister.”

Sibanda could not be reached for further comment.

A ministry of information official who declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media confirmed Mupfumira’s sacking.

Transparency International says Zimbabwe loses $1 billion to corruption every year.

Post published in: Business

The International Cricket Council (ICC) suspended Zimbabwe in July over a failure to keep the sport free from government interference, putting the country’s participation in multi-nation events in doubt.

“We have been informed by the concerned officials that there is no bar on Zimbabwe playing in bilateral matches. They are only suspended from ICC events. This is why we included them in the series,” BCB spokesperson Jalal Yunus told AFP.

Afghanistan are the third team in the tournament scheduled to be held from September 13 to 24.

Bangladesh were originally scheduled to play a bilateral series against Afghanistan in September, but officials said Zimbabwe had been included in the series following a request from the strife-torn country.

The tri-series will be preceded by Afghanistan’s maiden Test match against Bangladesh in Chittagong from September 5-9.

Fixtures:

August 30: Afghanistan arrive in Bangladesh

September 1-2: Two-day practice match between Afghanistan XI and BCB XI in Chittagong

September 5-9: First and only Test between Bangladesh and Afghanistan in Chittagong

September 8: Zimbabwe arrive in Bangladesh

September 11: T20 practice match between Zimbabwe XI and BCB XI in Fatullah

September 13: Bangladesh v Zimbabwe tri-nation T20I in Dhaka

September 14: Afghanistan v Zimbabwe tri-nation T20I in Dhaka

September 15: Bangladesh v Afghanistan tri-nation T20I in Dhaka

September 18: Bangladesh v Zimbabwe tri-nation T20I in Chittagong

September 20: Afghanistan v Zimbabwe tri-nation T20I in Chittagong

September 21: Bangladesh v Afghanistan tri-nation T20I in Chittagong

September 24: Final of tri-nation T20I in Dhaka

Post published in: Cricket

There’s a school of thought that law school — especially at the T14 level — isn’t really about making good lawyers as much as it’s about giving a golden ticket of approval to people who will succeed in any endeavor. It’s certainly an expensive ticket, but that’s why it’s golden! This may sound like a cynical view of the role of the legal academy as a professional school, but the phrase “practice ready” is mostly a joke for a reason.

Some schools — and by this I mean the whole school culture rather than some affirmative decision on the part of the administration — even unintentionally lean into this reality and publicize the fact that their graduates wash out of the profession and then become big successes in other fields. Think, for a moment, about how insane that is. No architecture school is getting excited about articles that go, “let us tell you about one of our best and brightest who completed our extensive, industry-leading coursework and wouldn’t you know it couldn’t tell from that experience that he hated buildings so now he’s a stand-up comic!” It’s a stunning indictment of how poorly law school actually teaches “legal practice.” It’s also, at best, a plaintive statement that, “hey, this might suck but you can land on your feet.” Hardly a ringing endorsement.

Harvard Law School graduate Nisha Vora went to work for Sullivan & Cromwell and then tackled a public interest job before deciding to blog about vegan food. Obviously, there’s no shame in leaving private practice for blogging, but there’s also a reason NYU focuses more attention on my classmate who was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the United States than, “the guy who wrote a really intricate ‘your mom’ joke about Greenberg Traurig.”

But the Harvard Gazette has a feature on Vora who just released her new cookbook, The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook (affiliate link):

“I wanted to create a vegan Instant Pot cookbook that would be not only the bible of Instant Pot cooking, but also a beautiful book of photos inspiring you, a cookbook you share with family and friends,” Vora said.

While vegan isn’t my thing, this is a great gift for anyone in your life who either already is vegan or is just trying to eat more vegetables.

However, more importantly, it underscores once again that T14 grads are going to be successes no matter where they end up. The only question is if there’s some way for cookbook authors to find their calling before shelling out all that tuition money.

Planting herself in the right career [Harvard Gazette]

---

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

I have three competing theories about the House Democrats’ appetite for impeachment, and which one I subscribe to seems to depend on which side of the bed I wake up on in the morning. Like, from 30,000 feet, it’s clear that their plan is “stupid.” But as I drill down, it becomes more difficult to see what exactly motivates their ineffective meanderings. It’s like “dark energy.” We theorize that it’s there, because we can’t explain the movement of the cosmos without it. But we can’t see it, do not understand its nature, don’t know where it comes from, and hypothetically it doesn’t exist at all but we’re too stupid to know what’s really going on.

Here are my theories:

• Democrats, the real ones, want to do impeachment, and believe the only way is through these not-actually-impeachment hearings. The Trump administration blocks their attempts at gathering evidence, and the Democrats, ignorantly but earnestly, believe that the slow march through the federal courts will eventually get them the testimony they need to move public opinion and DINOs towards impeachment.
• Democrats do not want to do impeachment, know that the Trump administration will block them at every turn, and know that the court process does not move quickly enough to break Trump’s logjam. They want to look like they’re doing something, without actually doing anything, and the federal courts are the perfect patsy in their long-con of their base voters.
• Democrats exist in a state of perma-shock that Trump exists and Republicans don’t care that he exists. Every new act of obstruction and non-compliance honestly catches them by surprise. They’re unable to mentally process the reality of their situation, like a man slowly choking to death from smoke inhalation who doesn’t run because his smoke alarm hasn’t gone off. Unless Robert Mueller or Joe Biden or Mitch McConnell saves them, they’re all gonna die.

I think Democrats want me to believe they’re hopelessly ignorant, but trying, when the reality is that they can’t possibly be that stupid, which will lead to the result that we all die in a fire.

House Judiciary’s latest stratagem to compel Don McGahn to testify is a Rorschach test for how you personally believe the Democrats are screwing this up.

To set the stage: Former White House Counsel Don McGahn was an eyewitness to Donald Trump’s many, many attempts to obstruct justice. He essentially testified to all of it, under oath, to former special counsel Robert Mueller. He didn’t say “the president obstructed justice” (hold that thought) because he’s not a mouth-breathing idiot like most of the president’s employees. But he told Mueller, who eventually told the country, all of the evidence needed to make an obstruction case against Donald Trump.

The House subpoenaed McGahn to testify in front of them, and Donald Trump said “no.” Trump has no credible legal theory on which to block McGahn’s testimony. He doesn’t even really have a discredited legal theory to block McGahn’s testimony. He hasn’t even asserted executive privilege, and he can’t because he waived executive privilege by allowing McGahn to sit down with Mueller in the first place. I want to repeat this because the mainstream sources are really bothering about this point: DONALD TRUMP HAS NO AUTHORITY TO BLOCK MCGAHN’S TESTIMONY, AT ALL. Anybody who tells you he does is either an idiot, a grifter, or likely both.

Speaking of grifters, McGahn has decided to ignore the Congressional subpoena and go with his former-boss’s NON-THEORY of obstruction of a Congressional inquiry. This should not be surprising. McGahn is a weasel who “resisted” Trump’s effort to make him an accomplice to obstruction of justice not out of some deep moral or ethical principle, but out of pure self-preservation. Don McGahn is no hero. He’s a man adept at swimming through sewers without drowning. He was only in the sewer to promote an alleged attempted rapist to the Supreme Court, and having accomplished his mission, he is hiding out at Jones Day just waiting for the stink to get out of his clothes.

Confronted with McGahn’s unwillingness to comply with a Congressional subpoena, buttressed only by Trump’s legally useless directive that he do so, yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee sued to compel McGahn’s testimony. Here’s the complaint. I’m sure that lawyers can appreciate that, when faced with a person who refuses to follow the law, getting a court order to compel him to follow the law seems like the right thing to do.

There are a couple of obvious problems with this approach, however. First is that it doesn’t really take into account the fourth dimension: time. The House sued, so now the Trump administration gets to respond. You can bet they’ll take all the time possible before so doing. Then we’ll need the court, even on an expedited time frame, to rule. Then we’ll need an appeal. Then we’ll need an appeal from that appeal to the Supreme Court. Then we’ll need to see if the Supreme Court, emboldened by five conservatives who like to do Trump’s bidding, grants cert. Tic Tok on the clock, but the party don’t stop, Democrats. While you’re waiting on the McGahn saga to play out in court, Donald Trump is still the president and you are not any closer to impeaching him for his crimes.

The second problem is that all this legal maneuvering only gets McGahn in the chair. I’m assuming the Democrats will win this fight because, again, DONALD TRUMP HAS NO AUTHORITY TO BLOCK MCGAHN’S TESTIMONY! Once he’s in that chair, all McGahn is going to say is “my conversations with the president are privileged.” Boom. END OF HEARING. You can thunder questions at him and read back passages of the Mueller report and all of that, but you can’t make the man give voice to the things he knows and has already told Robert Mueller. And you certainly can’t get him to say anything he hasn’t already told Robert Mueller.

Oh, you can sue him over his assertion of privilege (tic tok), or you can hold him in contempt of Congress (tic tok), but if you thought the Mueller testimony went “poorly” because Mueller did not act out a compelling narrative of the President’s obvious crimes, wait till you get a load of the McGahn testimony.

It would be one thing if the Democrats honestly didn’t know what McGahn was going to say. But in this case, we know what McGahn is going to say because HE’S ALREADY SAID IT. And it was recorded and written down in the Mueller report. Honestly, House Judiciary would be better off just getting David Morse to come in a READ McGahn’s testimony from the Mueller report to them, instead of wasting their time try to force McGahn to repeat himself under oath.

And so I come back to my original problem. I already know how the McGahn testimony is going to play out, and anybody even slightly paying attention does too. The Democrats are marching, uphill, both ways, into a cul-de-sac. WHY? WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS?

Do you know how the universe ends? In a “Big Rip.” The forces of dark energy increasingly expands the universe until galaxies, stars, and eventually atoms are pulled apart. If you were still alive and on a planet before the end, you’d look up into the sky and see no stars, no light, and feel no heat. It ends dark, and it ends cold.

Pondering Impeachment, House Sues Don McGahn, Ex-White House Counsel, for Testimony [New York Times]

---

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

Newsletter Signup

Subscribe and get breaking news, commentary, and opinions on law firms, lawyers, law schools, lawsuits, judges, and more.

We will never sell or share your information without your consent. See our privacy policy.