Lobowolf

I was actually referring in general to the three years they were paid to critique my analysis. While I am still in contact with some of them, I don't impose upon them to opine on my internet debates. Sorry for the confusion. Yes, in fact it does. Almost verbatim. It actually says the decision (not to certify the test) DID (not would) affect everyone equally. Which is like saying the decision to throw out the board where one side goes for -1400 in a partscore affects everyone equally, because they all have to play a replacement hand. The statement would have more merit if the decision not to certify the test was made before the results were known, e.g. if, for instance, the split between the written and verbal aspects of the test was objected to earlier. Here, however, it's not even a judgment call -- the decision not to certify the test was made BECAUSE it didn't affect everyone equally, regardless of race. It was made to benefit minority applicants in a zero-sum game (finite number of positions available). That doesn't imply that it was the wrong decision. You're allowed to make choices that result in disparate impacts. As I believe you noted in one of your posts, for example, a test that resulted in a disparate impact could be certified and relied upon if it was job-related, and if there weren't a viable test that would result in a less discriminatory impact. Additionally, the defendants had the defense that they were attempting to comply with federal law. The decision did not rely on the excerpt I quoted. The plaintiffs did not claim disparate impact, in the first place, and in the second place, that discussion was secondary to the fact that they did not have a legally protectable interest in the job, as doing well on the test (even scoring the highest on the test) was not a guarantee of being chosen for the position. The case was flipped on its head from the typical claim in this case, which would have arisen if the test HAD been certified. The disparate impact on the minority applicants would have been a given, the defendants would claim (from the text of the decision, with a fair amount of supporting evidence) that it was a performance related test (i.e. there was a business necessity for using the test to determine to whom to give the jobs), and the discussion would have revolved around whether there was a less discriminatory alternative available. But to support the decision, you don't have to support every soundbyte offered to bolster it. Obviously, the decision not to certify the test didn't affect everyone equally, and it was never intended to. It was intended to do the opposite.

Great stuff Josh, and not because I totally agree. Josh and Phil - thanks for making me feel less old. Agree 110%. It seems like the 2♥ nowadays means something, "In case you didn't see it the first time, or don't believe me, I have a takeout double" (i.e. an opening hand and support for the unbid suits -- including hearts). If the adjunct is that I have to play at the 3-level with 16 or 17 opposite a forced response, then in this respect, for my money, thanks but no thanks on the "modern trend."

I think the "Douchebag Case" (Doninger v. Niehoff) is more interesting.

I'm not a lawyer and I expect that Ken or Mike are in a much better position to comment on this than me. However, I don't think that "disparate impact" works they way that you assume: From what I can tell, disparate impact only applies to a protected class. "Those who did well" aren't a protected class, therefore the rest of your argument is (pretty much) specious You probably should avoid throwing around expression like "nonsense" when you're making mistakes this elementary I didn't claim (or imply) that my comment was dispositive of the case (the plaintiffs asserted disparate treatment, not disparate impact; the quoted passage was dicta); rather, I was criticizing some of the language used to support it. The plain statement that the decision "affected everyone equally" is nonsense, and specious. It's like a board being misaligned in one room. At one table, a pair plays 2S making 2 on normal bidding and defense, and at the other table, a pair goes for 1400 against a part-score. But the board gets thrown out, because the same team was N-S in both rooms. Throwing out the board didn't "affect everyone equally" - it was a great break for the team that did poorly. That doesn't mean it was the wrong decision. It means exactly what it says - It didn't "affect everyone equally." At its most basic level, its not "affecting everyone equally" is most obviously connected to how well people did. However, also equally obviously, "how well people did" is correlated to race. I didn't say, or imply, that for legal purposes the relevant class was "those who did well." Also obvious is that the decision to not certify the results benefited minority applicants. As it was intended to do. As was the reason for the lawsuit. The relevant classification for legal purposes is race. *A* relevant classification for parsing the quoted language is "those who did well" and "those who did not do well." Those groups were not equally affected, and thus "all applicants" were not equally affected. Thanks for the freelance critique of my "elementary mistakes" (though I'm not sure you should be "throwing around" such critiques). I'm not a law professor; however, some pretty good ones were quite satisfied with my analyses.

Their hands were certainly tied with respect to the presumptive finding of an adverse impact. Other components of the case had more room for judgment.

Interesting case. I think that one of the most significant parts of the decision is this passage: "Nor do they* have a viable claim of disparate impact because the decision to disregard the test results affected all applicants equally, regardless of race – all applicants will have to participate in a new test or selection procedure." "they" = plaintiffs. This is nonsense. The decision to disregard the test results didn't affect "all applicants equally." It positively affected those who didn't do well, and it negative affected those who did well. The interesting bridge connection is that it's a real-world case of restricted choice - If the decision was made without knowledge of the results, then it could be argued reasonably that the decision to disregard affected the applicants "regardless of race," but when the decision to disregard is made specifically BECAUSE of the racially disparate results, then of course it doesn't affect them "equally, regardless of race," and the decision was specifically intended NOT to.

If anything makes her detractors look bad, btw, it's emphasizing how "60% of her decisions are reversed." That whole line of discussion is moronic. She writes hundreds of decisions that either don't get appealed, or don't get heard by the Supreme Court. "60%," looking at only the FIVE decisions that were actually heard by the Supreme Court, is completely meaningless.

Of course they would. Similarly, Thomas and Alito receive(d) criticism from the usual suspects on the opposite side of the aisle.

I don't think anyone's criticism of her is going to hurt the Republican party. I agree with Helene that there are certainly more ridiculous things said in the name of partisanship, on a daily basis. As for "racist," who knows? One isolated sentence taken independent of context. I guess the first question would be: What does "would hope" mean? That she wants it to be true, or that she believes it to be true? Also, my understanding is that she was speaking to La Raza members, or at a La Raza gathering, so there's probably some preaching to the choir going on. "I would hope that a wise person of my race and gender would usually do better than someone not of my race and gender" doesn't sound remotely like "We should all be aware of our biases" to me. It's interesting that her comment is both race and gender related, but the discussion is focusing on whether she's racist, not sexist.

Wealth much more typically helps people avoid justice, not get it. The vast majority of criminal defendants did what they're believed to have done.

What I am saying is the above is absolutely inaccurate - that because Hamas is on the terrorism list the only question presented to the jury was whether or not this group intentionally gave money to Hamas. The jury did not find them guilty of sponsoring terrorism - they were found guilty of purposefully giving money to Hamas. In other words, terrorism support or non-support was irrelevant to the decision. This is from the original post: I am a reasonable person. If someone can make a valid argument against a position I hold I certainly will listen and evaluate and on occasion change my mind. What tires me is blind loyalty, blind trust, sloganeering, and spin. When it occurs I have to call it out for what it is: laziness. That's why I have gone round and round with this issue. You cannot justify bad law by simply claiming "the jury agreed", when the verdict had no bearing on the claims you are making. It would be like saying that the L.A. police is bigoted and framed the defendant, then pointing to the O.J. Simpson verdict and saying, "see, the jury agreed". It wasn't clear to me from the original post that the defendants knew that the organizations were controlled by Hamas. So the argument would be over whether they knew that "Acme Middle East Relief" was a terrorist organization, or a Hamas subsidiary, or whatever. But again, the real questions (IMO) are whether A) Hamas is legitimately designated as a terrorist organization; and :D Whether is should be illegal to support terrorist organizations. If the answer to both of those questions is yes, there's no spinning a bad law here. If you give them 12 million dollars, you're supporting a terrorist organization. "Gee, I thought they were just going to build schools and hospitals" is a defense for children and law students.

If I were to bid some number of Spades, 4 seems obvious. However, its far from clear whether I want to bid some number of spades. Don't be tempted by the 9 of clubs. It's a red herring.

Yes, the mental state requirement can be satisfied by an awareness that the money is going to Hamas. That makes perfect sense to me; I think if you're going to take the other side, the only real shot is whether the organization properly belongs on the list of terrorist organizations. If an organization has two branches, say, bomb-making and school-building, the fact of the matter is that donations to one fund both. If you use a Lottery to fund education, in real-life, what happens is, money previously budgeted to education gets re-allocated to whatever the officials want to allocate it to, know that they know that Xe ducation funding level will be met by the Lottery. Similarly, if you're in the business of either bomb-making or school-building, and you spend your money on both, and tens of millions of dollars comes into your school program, then in the next budget meeting, you have a lot of money freed up to make bombs. So, I guess you could argue whether there should be a law against funding terrorist organizations. And I guess you could argue whether Hamas should be labeled a terrorist organization. But I think that if you accept the status quo answers to both of those questions, the defense, "Gee, I just wanted to build schools and hospitals" is either naive or intellectually dishonest. Of course, we have no idea what evidence was introduced, but on a gut reaction level, I find it pretty implausible. So if you're playing along at home kids, and you can't decide which charitable organization to pledge your relief dollars to, remember...don't pick the one(s) run by Hamas. Material support laws are interesting (like the case of the taxi driver taking an Al Qaeda guy to the airport to make his getaway). I had to draft one for a criminal law final.

This reflects a common misconception (one that as a criminal defense attorney, Ken could address better than I, but I can outline the broad strokes). The (apparent) misconception is that the "act" (providing the money) = the "crime." Virtually always (exception coming at the end of the article), the state of mind of the defendant is not just a potentially mitigating circumstance, it's an element of the crime as well. That is to say, absent a particular state of mind, no crime may have taken place. In general, there are a few main states of mind the law recognizes (from most culpable to least culpable): *Intentionally* (I burned the house and killed you specifically because you were in it, and I wanted to kill you) *knowingly* (I burned down the house because I wanted to collect the insurance. I knew you were in it, and I wish you hadn't been, but I'm busy the rest of the week, so I had to burn it down tonight. *recklessly* (I burned down the house knowing someone might very well have been in it, but I didn't actually know. Regardless, I didn't care) *negligently* (I burned down the house, and it never occurred to me that someone might have been in it, but it would have occurred to a reasonable person). If you don't have the required mental state, you haven't committed the crime. A couple of specific examples - Burglary is (essentially) breaking into to a place with the intent of committing a felony. Let's say you and I are standing in front of adjacent buildings, and we each break a window and enter. My plan is to steal a few computers. Your plan is to get some shelter and sleep (it's raining). As soon as we enter, we each decide it's a bad idea, so we leave. Even though we've DONE the exact same thing, I've committed burglary; you haven't. Attempted murder requires a more culpable mental state than murder. You can recklessly be guilty of murder (Let's say you enter a bank to rob it, and you spin around in a 360, firing a few shots for crowd control purposes. One of them hits someone, and that person dies. You didn't try to kill someone, and you didn't know that someone would die, but you knew someone COULD die, and you didn't care. That's recklessness, and it's enough for murder. But if a bullet hits someone at random, and that person DOESN'T die, it's not attempted murder. You weren't trying to kill him. Attempted murder requires a heightened mental state of culpability. That's why if you're at a restaurant, and you take someone else's identical-in- appearance coat, you haven't committed any sort of theft. "Taking coat" doesn't = "Theft." "Taking coat" PLUS "Intending to permanently deprive owner of coat" = Theft. Getting back to the case at issue, without looking up the material support statute, it's almost certain that it has a mental state requirement...most likely that the defendant knew but didn't care that the money might fund terrorism. The exception I alluded to above is for "strict liability" crimes - there ARE some crimes where the mental state doesn't matter. And example would be statutory rape. It doesn't matter whether you checked 3 forms of I.D. and believed to an extent that wasn't even negligent that she was 18. If she wasn't, it's on you. No mental state required. Strict liability crimes, though, are few and far between. Aside from that, there's a pretty good clue that this isn't one of them - if the mental state of the defendant wasn't relevant, the argument wouldn't have been permitted to be made in front of the jury. It would be highly prejudicial to the prosecution, and completely irrelevant. So it's an extremely safe bet that "money going to Hamas" doesn't = "law has been violated." Law has been violated = "Money going to a terrorist organization" (there's a list) PLUS "Defendant wanted (or knew but didn't care that) money to go to a terrorist organization"

I think the operative phrase is "in the Director's opinion has the same meaning as or a more precise meaning." I also think that it's fairly clear that this phrase is dependent upon the agreements of the pair in question. If you're playing negative free bids, IMO, it doesn't apply to you. If you're playing BWS, the double (speaking of "it either is or it isn't") "guarantees" 4 hearts, but it might be a 3-card suit "in a pinch." I think the "in a pinch" exemption doesn't add much meaning beyond the recognition that some auctions get awkward, and you take actions that are unexpected by partner and the opponents. I think the BWS definition of the 1-level negative double is clear enough that the new 27(:) applies to pairs playing it. While it's possible that the double might be a manufactured bid on an awkward hand, it's much more likely (playing standard negative doubles) that it's narrowed down a legitimate 1♥ bid, by excluding hands with 5 or more hearts and 10 or more points (i.e., those hands that would have bid 1♥ without interference, but 2♥ over the 1♠ bid). On balance, I think that clearly makes the double, if anything, "more precise" than the 1♥ bid would be in the absence of interference.

Another point of agreement between Winston and me! I think we're up to 2 or 3 now.

It was pretty much everyone (ok, it only 2/3 - 1/3) who passed Prop. 13. From a good-sized surplus not too many years ago, if spending had been increased pegged to inflation and population growth, we'd still have a surplus in the billions. Revenues actually outpaced population growth and inflation by a fair amount, but spending has almost doubled in about a decade. We generally have and have had politicians who (combination of the following in varying degrees): 1. were stupid enough to think that the tech boom would continue uninterrupted ad infinitum; 2. were ignorant enough not to understand that budget increases not designated to terminate continue ad infinitum (i.e., it's not like buying a new car because you made a lot of money this year - it's like hiring a chauffeur...whom you have to pay NEXT year, too, even if you don't make a lot of money). 3. are completely in the pocket of some of the state's more powerful unions (largely but not exclusively state workers). Whatever the cause, it's pretty much been a bunch of little kids ordering everything off of every infomercial that says "bill me later," and when the bills came, wanting to sneak into dad's wallet or mom's purse and keep ordering more cool stuff for themselves and all their friends. It's really astounding how quickly and completely the state's finances went into the tank, particularly with the highest or almost the highest income tax, sales tax, and gas tax in the country, and looking to extend the record. Apparently, we've finally gotten to the point where the voters will only accept one answer -- SPEND LESS *****IN' MONEY! About time.

Also interestingly, after getting up to age 89, Mr. Weissberger just died about 2 months ago. Alan Truscott was in on the creation of the convention.

I want to start using it just so when opponents ask, I can matter-of-factly say "It's Weissberger."

That's because there's not a requirement to ask the meaning of an alert (although it's "desirable" to maintain an "unvarying manner" (73(D)(1)). But there IS a requirement not to take advantage of unauthorized information. Proper communication (i.e. authorized information) is derived only from the calls and plays. (73(A)). IMO, it's like a break in tempo. The question isn't whether you're allowed to hesitate (you are); it's what partner does with the information he learns when you do.

Given the veering over toward healthcare, this seems like a good place for an interesting re-post of a link to an interesting article on healthcare problems and potential fixes from an old friend of mine who has the new president's ear. Very general and superficial, but a good outline, and amusing read, and a good look and how and why workable solutions might not be as easy to spot as the current problems. http://www.slate.com/id/2169454/

I only flirted with being a math major for one semester, but I'm pretty sure the number of all terrorists and terrorist supporters in the world is finite, too.

Ahhhhh, maybe, but definitely? And to what extent? I don't believe everything I hear from the government about what happens in the Middle East, but I don't believe everything I hear from the government's most ardent detractors, either. I just don't know how many people I can see saying, "Well, I was going to be an actuary if the USA had followed the Geneva Convention(s), but since they don't, I guess I'll go into my second love, improvised explosive devices."

More specifically, the notion that we if agreed to treat Country X's citizens a certain way, they'd do the same for ours. Al Qaeda, I'm guessing, not so much. The contradictory parts of the Geneva Convention(s) I've seen posted are interesting, but why do you think your favorite parts are more valid than the parts that explicitly state that it applies to signatories and to non-signatories who abide by its terms? This sideshow is completely irrelevant as far as torture is concerned. The US should not torture because torture is wrong, and because it is counter-productive. But if you need a rule that forbids torture, the US has signed (under President Reagan) and ratified the UN convention against torture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nation...Against_Torture My previous post wasn't to rehash the torture thread, but to speak to the initial post in this one -- alternative jurisdictions for certain detainees. To the extent that Winston brings up the Geneva Convention to support the proposition that you're either a POW or a criminal arrestee, and mentions that torture was one of the reasons it was signed, it's worth looking at the nature of a "treaty." A treaty isn't something you sign BECAUSE you have a deep-rooted sense that action X is wrong. You could just stop doing action X. A treaty, by its nature, is a "We won't if you won't" document. Again, this is not to advocate torture, or to suggest that the US hasn't broken any treaties to which it's a party. This is just to point out something that is pretty obvious -- there's an inherent mutuality in a treaty. I don't think there are any active treaties signed by only one party. When it comes to Al Qaeda and the Geneva Convention, that mutuality is...suspect. Portions of the Geneva Convention (and other documents) have been posted that suggest that all detainees are covered by it. On the other hand, it also says on its face that it applies to signatories and non-signatories who abide by it, so at the very least, it's extremely inconsistent as far as the extent of its applicability. At the risk of being understood, I'll reiterate - this is with respect to enemy combatant military detention, not torture. The T-Word appears in my previous post because it appeared in the post I was responding to.

More specifically, the notion that we if agreed to treat Country X's citizens a certain way, they'd do the same for ours. Al Qaeda, I'm guessing, not so much. The contradictory parts of the Geneva Convention(s) I've seen posted are interesting, but why do you think your favorite parts are more valid than the parts that explicitly state that it applies to signatories and to non-signatories who abide by its terms?