A comment on opinions...

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I’ve spent most of my career trying to suppress any mention of my personal opinions about political matters because I practice on the plaintiff’s side of the bar and most of that bar is populated with rabid social justice crusaders (in a frequently hypocritical sort of way, as they talk a good game but enjoy an incredibly insulated lifestyle and don’t live up to their preaching). But the Wuhan coronavirus nonsense spewed by our supposedly wise leaders in California and beyond was the last straw. I decided that I would comment on the rights-trampling insanity of locking in healthy people on the basis of highly suspect “expert” advice. Once I did that, it was easy to quit trying to hide my opinions generally.

I will say that a number of plaintiff’s attorneys were incensed that I questioned the rationality of staying home to keep everyone safe. I tried to elicit some rational commentary about when economic destruction would be a factor in the calculus and got nowhere. A good chunk of America is so polarized in the opinions held that I wonder if we will achieve a new social compact without violence. In any event, my point in writing this is to say that if you don’t like the opinions I am expressing, don’t read my stuff. Seriously. If you are that butt-hurt over me calling out the intellectual void that we call leadership in California, just stop reading what I write.

As for my write-ups on caselaw, they generally reflect an initial reaction only. Those reactions might change as I dive into an issue, so read any write-up with the understanding that I’m usually sharing first thoughts, concerns, or critiques.

But turning back to my social/political issue opinions, they are mine, I am not sorry that I have them, they are not my firm’s opinions on issues (that’s for sure), and I do not care at all if you disagree or are unhappy about them. I’m not even going to give you a fake apology and say that I’m sorry you feel that way like politicians do when they fake apologize. I’m not sorry. Zero percent. And I will not relent in the slightest to the cancel culture mob, so don’t bother.

Encountering Office clipboard crashes when you try to copy text in a Word document?

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A serious problem in Word threatened to derail work on a brief today. Once I sorted out the cause, I realized that I’ve seen an issue like this many years ago, and it is insidious. I was trying to copy text from one Word document and paste it into another one. As soon as I tried to copy the target text, Word crashed and closed. I made new copies of the documents. I updated Office. I shut down and restarted my computer. I eventually uninstalled my Office365 suite and reinstalled it. It made no difference. I searched online and found nothing. I considered disabling the Office clipboard, but you lose a lot of convenient functionality doing that.

Eventually I realized that the text I was copying included a footnote. When I selected text ending above the footnote, it worked fine. I then copied the footnote text, deleted the footnote entirely, added the footnote back in and pasted the footnote text back into the blank footnote. Copying worked as advertised from that point forward.

I have seen footnotes cause some sort of document corruption in the past. The only solution that I have found is to do as I did today, copy the footnote text, delete the footnote entirely, add a new footnote, and paste the text back into the footnote. This seems to cut out whatever corruption has crept into the document in the footnotes.

The mob comes for law professor and blogger/legal analyst William Jacobson

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William Jacobson created Legal Insurrection, a blog/web site of some significance, having covered major stories mostly of a legal nature. Jacobson is also a clinical law professor at Cornell.

While Jacobson’s blog has long been known for its fairly conservative viewpoint, he has managed to survive Cornell. Until now. With the mob feeling its oats, Jacobson was identified as having committed a thought crime. He criticized the Black Lives Matter organization. Explaining, Jacobsen wrote [with no corrections or edits]:

There is an effort underway to get me fired at Cornell Law School, where I’ve worked since November 2007, or if not fired, at least denounced publicly by the school.

Ever since I started Legal Insurrection in October 2008, it’s been an awkward relationship given the overwhelmingly liberal faculty and atmosphere. Living as a conservative on a liberal campus is like being the mouse waiting for the cat to pounce.

For over 12 years, the Cornell cat did not pounce. Though there were frequent and aggressive attempts by outsiders to get me fired, including threats and harassment, it always came from off campus.

I made great efforts to keep this website separate from my work. I did not write about Cornell that frequently, and rarely about the law school itself. Nonetheless, the website and my political views were the elephant in every room, because the website is widely read, particularly by non-liberal students.Over the years, many students approached me privately and behind closed doors to express gratitude that someone was able to speak up, because they remained politically silent out of fear of social ostracization with the related possible career damage from falsely being accused of one of the “-ists” or “-isms.”

Not until now, to the best of my knowledge, has there been an effort from inside the Cornell community to get me fired.

The impetus for the effort was two posts I wrote at Legal Insurrection regarding the history and tactics of the Black Lives Matter Movement:

Reminder: “Hands up, don’t shoot” is a fabricated narrative from the Michael Brown case (June 4, 2020)

The Bloodletting and Wilding Is Part of An Agenda To Tear Down The Country (June 3, 2020)

Those posts accurately detail the history of how the Black Lives Matters Movement started, and the agenda of the founders which is playing out in the cultural purge and rioting taking place now.

From Saturday, June 6, through Monday, June 8, over 15 emails from CLS alumni were received by the Dean of the law school, demanding that action be taken against me ranging from an institutional statement denouncing me to firing. I don’t know whether and to what extent that number has increased since Monday. The Dean properly has defended my writings as protected within my academic freedom, although he strongly disagrees with my views.

The effort appears coordinated, as some of the emails were in a template form. All of the emails as of Monday were from graduates within the past 10 years.

Only one of the emails was shared with me, with names removed, on the condition that I not post it or quote from it. I am permitted to characterize the complaint: My views are not consistent with the law school Dean’s public statement on police violence and my writings were hurtful and divisive, and the person could not understand why I am still on the faculty. [As an aside, my writings are consistent with the Dean’s statement, but that’s another matter.]

My clinical faculty colleagues, apparently in consultation with the Black Law Students Association, drafted and then published in the Cornell Sun on June 9 a letter denouncing “commentators, some of them attached to Ivy League Institutions, who are leading a smear campaign against Black Lives Matter.” While I am not mentioned by name, based on what I’ve seen BLSA and possibly others were told it was about me. The letter is absurd name-calling, distorting and even misquoting my writings, to the extent it purports to be about me. According to a document I’ve seen, the letter was shared with these students before it was published in the Cornell Sun.

None of the 21 signatories, some of whom I’d worked closely with for over a decade and who I considered friends, had the common decency to approach me with any concerns. Instead they ran to the Cornell Sun while virtue signaling to students behind the scenes that this was a denunciation of me. Such is the political environment we live in now at CLS.

BLSA and other groups are working on their own effort against me. Based on documents I’ve seen, there was consideration of demanding my firing, but it appears to have moved away from that not because they don’t want me fired, but “because calling for his firing would only draw more attention to his blog and bolster his platform, and we do not want to give him that satisfaction.” The plan is to call for “the law school to unequivocally denounce his rhetoric, acknowledge the harm caused by subjecting students to his racist pedagogy, and critically examine the views of the people they employ as professors of the law.” They plan to circulate the petition to the law school community and to “inform incoming students” of the situation.

I have little doubt that many students will sign because there is no choice in this environment. BLSA has announced on its Facebook page that “Silence Is Violence.” Who would refuse to sign when failure to sign would be deemed an act of violence?

I thank people who have voluntarily shared information with me, and if there are students, faculty or staff reading this, please feel free to forward information to me at legalinsurrection@protonmail.com. This is not just about me. It’s about the intellectual freedom and vibrancy of Cornell and other higher education institutions, and the society at large.

Open inquiry and debate are core features of a vibrant intellectual community. This has been the way Cornell Law School operated for the 12 years I’ve been here, until now. In this toxic political environment in which intellectual diversity and differences of opinion are not tolerated, trying to shut down debate through false accusations of racism seems to be the preferred tactic.

I challenge a representative of those student groups and a faculty member of their choosing to a public debate at the law school regarding the Black Lives Matter Movement, so that I can present my argument and confront the false allegations in real time rather than having to respond to baseless community email blasts. I ask the law school to arrange an in-person live-streamed debate during fall term, or if for some reason the law school does not have in-person instruction, to arrange a ‘virtual’ format.

Throughout my legal and academic career spanning over three decades, there has never been a single instance in which I have been accused of discrimination toward any student, client or colleague. I have always treated my students as individuals, without regard to race, ethnicity or other such factors. I condemn in the strongest terms any insinuation that I am racist, and I greatly resent any attempt to leverage meritless accusations in hopes of causing me reputational harm. While such efforts might succeed in scaring others in a similiar position, I will not be intimidated.

We are living in extraordinarily dangerous times, reminiscent of the Chinese Communist Cultural Revolution, in which professors guilty of wrongthink were publicy denounced and fired at the behest of students who insisted on absolute ideological orthodoxy. It’s a way of instilling terror in other students, faculty, staff, and society, so that others shut up and don’t voice dissenting views. We are seeing monuments destroyed in Taliban-fashion because they represent an uncomfortable history, movies and TV shows cancelled, and individuals disappeared from employment due to even the slightest deviation from the prevailing political culture.

This is not going to end well unless people of good conscience, who support black lives but not the Black Lives Movement as it was founded and currently operates, to speak up and refuse to cower in fear.

The Dean of the Law School responded with a statement reading, in part:

 In light of this deep and rich tradition of walking the walk of racial justice, in no uncertain terms, recent blog posts of Professor William Jacobson, casting broad and categorical aspersions on the goals of those protesting for justice for Black Americans, do not reflect the values of Cornell Law School as I have articulated them. I found his recent posts to be both offensive and poorly reasoned…. But to take disciplinary action against him for the views he has expressed would fatally pit our values against one another in ways that would corrode our ability to operate as an academic institution.

But Jacobson did not criticize “those protesting for justice for Black Americans.” He criticized the Black Lives Matters Movement and the rioting and looting and cultural purge. Jacobson went on to observe that you generally don’t see these sort of statements issued for far-left professors. “[I]t’s a one way street and it’s just as much a part of the cancel culture as firing someone.”

I just want to be very clear so nobody is confused. I think most of the administrators in higher education are garbage humans that make too much and do little other than institutionalize single viewpoints in colleges and universities (and the Dean of Cornell looks to be one of them). I don’t happen to like the idea that Jacobson, a smart and insightful author in the legal field, could be “cancelled” because his opinion is not currently approved by the mob. The worst part is that law students and law school alums ought to be better able to hear opinions they don’t like without resorting to demands that he be fired or demoted or otherwise sanctioned for unapproved thoughts. Garbage humans.

Professor Jacobson, I apologize for quoting your post almost completely, but people who don’t get to Legal Insurrection ought to have a chance to read your statement.

I’m thinking about posting my response to the letter I received from USC Law. Still debating that, but it’s just one more example of preening to look good for the mob.

The great pandemic?

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Back in November, I came down with some respiratory bug that wiped me out pretty good for quite a while. It was a struggle for two months to find the energy to get my work done. Coupled with running my first archery tournament, I didn’t have any gas left in the tank to blog about big decisions. I’m hoping to have the time now to fix that, since I’m going to be working out of a home office for at least the next several weeks.

But my illness from November has given me something to think about. Nobody really cared that I was sick, aside from co-workers telling me to wash my hands and stay in my office, which I did. The world didn’t come to a halt because I caught one of last Winter’s circulating illnesses. So why is the Wuhan coronavirus so different? I have two theories, but I’ll spare you from them, since I’m not a virologist and this isn’t a biomedical blog. And because I have no way of ascertaining which, if either, theory is more likely true based on what information I can gather. But I do want to share a long article providing data analysis known to date. It updates frequently with new data. The end conclusion of the data analysis is that we’ve gone absolutely nuts.

If you’d like a dose of data-driven sanity, enjoy: Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19

UPDATE: So I find this troubling. The article that I linked was later pulled off of Medium and is either under “investigation” for supposedly violating Medium rules or yanked entirely. I read that entire article (it is very long) and found it to be seemingly reasonable and apparently well-supported by underlying data sets (but it does, for example, rely heavily on WHO data, and the accuracy of that data with respect to China has been questioned by many; and some comments on the original post argued that there were comparisons of non-equivalent data sets that led to inaccurate conclusions in the article). It sort of looks like people have a vested interest in perpetuation of hysteria rather than taking a non-emotional look at what all the world-wide data really shows or simply putting up a rebuttal data analysis that identifies any errors in the article. This whole business is starting to stink like rotten fish, where noise about who responded better when is drowning out an analysis of whether shutting down the economy for weeks is a rational strategy based on cost. Here is a link to a new host for the article: Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19 (As an aside, ZeroHedge is just hosting the article for the writer after it was pulled from Medium. I’m taking no position on ZeroHedge generally, given the very “loose” filter at ZeroHedge on what that site chooses to report or claim of its own volition. I view this as a simple repost rather than constituting original work.)

Tech Tip: Updating Dell computers to Windows 10 version 1903 (the May 2019 update)

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I absorb the pain so you don’t have to. If you have a fairly new Dell computer from the Dell Business line of offerings (as opposed to the Home machines), and run into a blocking bug that prevents you from updating from Windows 10 version 1809 to Windows 10 version 1903, here’s a possible solution.

If the update fails immediately with an error that preinstall.cmd scripts could not run, it is likely that the Dell Data Security software is blocking the update. But…you will likely not be able to uninstall all of that software. Some of the elements have very deep hooks into the system, and using the uninstall programs settings page will not work. In addition, there are installed components that do not register as standalone programs, so you can’t remove them with a simple uninstall option.

The solution is that Dell makes a tool to remove all of these components, but you have to call Dell and get to the team that handles the Data Security software. They will make sure that you are not using the encryption and data security tools (NOTE: if you remove the Dell Data Security and Encryption software, you can’t access encrypted data, but unless you are in an enterprise that is managing a lot of Dell machines, odds are that you are NOT using any of those tools — this issue appears to happen only if you have ordered a Dell machine from the Business line, where data security is a selling point, rather than the Home line). The tool Dell provides quickly removes the offending data security tools, and the Windows update seems to work without a hitch thereafter.

If this has been driving you nuts, I hope it helps. I separately note that there are a lot of blocking issues that could stymie a Feature Update, like driver compatibility, etc. This is only for update failures that never start because the preinstall.cmd scripts cannot run.

Happy Fourth of July!

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Today I am thankful that I can say what I want, provide for my family, and succeed by my own hand in the greatest nation in the history of this Earth.

…and if you find this image triggering, then this holiday is not meant for you.