What About Bob?

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I teach a cross-listed course, Phil/Crim 380, called “Criminal Law: Theory and Practice,” intended as what I call a “citizen-philosopher’s” perspective on criminal law and criminal procedure. It complements Crim 220, Criminal Law, taught by Professor John Link, a former police chief. As one of my students so aptly put it, “Professor Link teaches criminal procedure from the perspective of the cop, but you teach it from the perspective of the criminal,” a statement apparently intended to suggest that she found my class the more practically relevant of the two.

One of the assignments I have my students do is “a short paper (around 3 pages) describing and analyzing an hour-long visit to a criminal court in session.” Alternatively,

Many law enforcement agencies and independent agencies put on informational events designed to engage in community outreach. In the past the Bergen County Prosecutors Office has done so, and the Independent Monitor of the Newark Police Department frequently does so. If you’d prefer, you can attend one of these events instead of visiting a criminal court session. But ask me before you attend one of these.

A student raised her hand in class today to do just that. “My dad is friends with someone at the Bergen County Prosecutors Office, so I was wondering if I could go to something there?” Sure, I said.  Continue reading →

No More Tears: The (Elizabeth) Warren of Identity Politics

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So Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test is outrageous identity politics, but “Birthright” tours to Israel aren’t. I guess this is because it’s socially-approved virtue signaling in this country to attack a fake Cherokee, but anti-Semitism to attack the fake descendents of King David. Or maybe because DNA tests for tribal membership are racist identity politics, but Zionist archaeology is a fitting riposte to the Nuremberg Laws.

Here’s a thought: if Elizabeth Warren is Cherokee, and the Cherokee are one of the Ten Tribes of Israel, doesn’t that mean she’s Jewish and has a right of return to Israel? If so, maybe she can go to the West Bank and re-enact the Trail of Tears from Andrew Jackson’s perspective. Wouldn’t that be payback? And wouldn’t the contradictions involved shut just about everyone up in this stupid controversy?

“Policing from a Cop’s Point of View”; “Defending Immigrant Rights”

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For people in the New York/New Jersey metro area:

Policing from a Cop’s Point of View
Thursday, November 8, 2018, 1-2:15 pm
“Ray’s Place,” Main Auditorium, Education Commons Building
Felician University’s Rutherford campus
227 Montross Ave.
Rutherford, New Jersey 07070

We live in a climate of opinion that is highly critical of the police: charges of racism, brutality, procedural irregularity and the like abound. But what is the experience of working police officers? How do they experience what they deal with on the job, and what do they think about the criticisms commonly made of them?

We’ll hear answers to these and other questions from four local police officers: Louis Mignone, a former detective for the West Orange Police Department (now an adjunct in Felician’s Department of Criminal Justice); Julie Ann Zeigler, a sergeant for the Rutherford Police Department; John Russo, Chief of Police of the Rutherford Police Department; and John Link, former Chief of Police of the Clifton Police Department (and an adjunct in Felician’s Department of Criminal Justice). The event is free and open to the public.

For more information, go to this page, or contact Irfan Khawaja, khawajai at felician dot edu.

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Character-Based Voting and the Policy of Truth

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For the past six months or so, I’ve been working on a project on what I call “character-based voting” (CBV), construed as voting for a political candidate based on her traits of character, as contrasted with “policy-based voting” (PBV) which is voting for a political candidate based on the expected consequences of the candidate’s expected policies.

It’s a rough and in some contexts problematic distinction, but clear enough to work with. There’s a clear enough distinction to be drawn between voting for a candidate because you regard her as more honest than her rival, and voting for a candidate because you expect her to enact policies X1…Xn, which have expected consequences C1…Cn, which you regard as net favorable, but which you don’t expect her rival to enact. My modest claim is that CBV can in principle be justified, and has its place. Continue reading →

Imagine: Living in a Socialist America (Run by Republican Aristocrats)

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I met these Democratic candidates for Readington Town Committee over breakfast the other day, and asked them what differentiates them from the Republicans who dominate politics around town. Without blinking an eye, they said that as Democrats, they favor a pro-development, pro-business platform against the local Republican machine, which is running against development and against business in the name of “Open Space.”

Image result for elizabeth fiore denise esakof

According Esakoff and Fiore, thirty percent of Readington Township is already open space, large swatches of it off limits to most people, but the Republicans want more: because you can never have too much of a resource that lots of people are excluded from using.  Huge swatches of “preserved farmland” lie in Readington Township alone, acquired at 50-100% “State Cost” i.e., through purchases by the county or the municipality, or through purchase by State Agricultural Development Committee fees. Continue reading →

The Obligation to Smile

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I just taught a class on cat-calling in my ethics course, focused in part on this famous viral video on the subject just below. A number of issues came up about cat-calling as such, but for reasons that are obvious to anyone who’s seen the video, a secondary issue came up as well: whether anyone ever has an obligation to smile.

I had always assumed that the answer had to be “no”: you have no free-standing obligation to smile, and certainly no obligation to smile on command. Properly conceived, smiling is the epitome of a spontaneous expression of one’s inner states: you smile when you’re genuinely in a good mood. To fake a smile is to wreck it: you fake a smile when you want other people to think (or even pretend to think) that you’re in a smiley mood when you aren’t. But there’s no good reason to do that, and lots of good reasons to avoid it. Fake smiling distorts your relationship with others, and distorts your relationship with your own inner states. It demands that you literally present a face to the world that in some sense isn’t yours, then do your best to believe that it is.    Continue reading →

Police Tailgating as Entrapment: A Comment and Query

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I live a fair distance from work, so I spend a fair bit of time driving on interstate highways. Because I do, I have a fair opportunity to observe the rather unfair doings of the New Jersey State Police on our interstate highways. This is the kind of behavior I see just about every day:

And this is the kind of behavior I’ve seen more than once (albeit by local police, not by state troopers):

I once saw a Glen Ridge police officer tailgate and then crash into the car he was tailgating, in part because he was lighting a cigarette while doing so. Having crashed into the car in front of him (at a red light), he called in backup, surrounded the victim’s car, then aggressively interrogated her at the scene–presumably for the crime of his having crashed into her. (This despite the fact that liability for rear-end collisions is almost always pinned on the car in the rear.) I wish I’d recorded it, but I didn’t have a cellphone at the time.   Continue reading →

Reason Papers Vol. 40.1 Out

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As might be surmised from my last post, the Summer 2018 issue of Reason Papers (volume 40, number 1) has just come out. The whole issue is available as an 111 page PDF via this link. Individual items are more easily accessible via this link (you’ll have to scroll down a bit).

The editors have posted this announcement on the website:

After serving for twelve years—first as Co-Managing-Editor and then as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Reason Papers—Carrie-Ann Biondi has stepped down from her Co-Editor-in-Chief position. Demoting herself to Book Review Editor will allow her time to turn to other projects calling from the wings. Shawn Klein now serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Reason Papers. 

Shawn Klein remains Editor-in-Chief. I remain in place as the journal’s “Editor-at-Large,” a position that involves more livin’ large than editing.

Here is the Table of Contents (yet another way of accessing the issue).

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