Applying the Law to Dan Snyder

Excellent:

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has canceled six federal trademark registrations for the name of the Washington Redskins, ruling that the name is “disparaging to Native Americans” and thus cannot be trademarked under federal law that prohibits the protection of offensive or disparaging language.

The U.S. PTO’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board issued a ruling in the case, brought against the team by plaintiff Amanda Blackhorse, Wednesday morning.

“We decide, based on the evidence properly before us, that these registrations must be cancelled because they were disparaging to Native Americans at the respective times they were registered,” the board wrote in its opinion.

“The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board agreed with our clients that the team’s name and trademarks disparage Native Americans. The Board ruled that the Trademark Office should never have registered these trademarks in the first place,” Jesse Witten, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, said in a press release. “We presented a wide variety of evidence – including dictionary definitions and other reference works, newspaper clippings, movie clips, scholarly articles, expert linguist testimony, and evidence of the historic opposition by Native American groups – to demonstrate that the word ‘redskin’ is an ethnic slur.”

“But this denies Dan Snyder of his inalienable right to make maximum monopoly profits in the face of the clear language of the law! Political correctness! People who object to racial slurs are the real racists! We have another count to add to Andrew McCarthy’s endless impeachment laundry list!” — Pretty much every conservative in the United States over the next 24 hours

Trigger Warning: Brutal Stupidity

Rebecca Cusey wishes you feminists would quit raping rapists with your hashtags.

Angelina Jolie wants us to talk about rape, but not in the Western-centric, man-blaming, feminist-professor way of the chattering classes.

She would like us to move beyond insular #YesAllWomen Twitter outrage to a global perspective with a broader, wiser understanding of the evils of human nature and the ability to overcome that evil with good.

Getting from Angelina Jolie made a movie about metaphorically surviving rape to “this hashtag offends me more than rape does” is a weird, convoluted little journey only a wingnut could make.

Also, I’m not sure Angelina Jolie wants fuck-all to do with Ms. Cusey’s bizarre little tantrum. I imagine what Angelina Jolie wants is for us to acknowledge that there are women who face egregious sexism and rape and who have even less agency than Western women. I doubt she wants to pit Western women against all other women. Then again, who knows? I can’t see into Jolie’s head or heart. For all know, she is an incredibly awful person who likes raisins and named her child “Shiloh.” Oh wait, she did that second thing.

Jolie says:

“We must send a message around the world that there is no disgrace in being a survivor of sexual violence—that the shame is on the aggressor…We need to shatter that impunity and make justice the norm, not the exception, for these crimes,” Jolie said. “I have met survivors from Afghanistan to Somalia and they are just like us, with one crucial difference: We live in safe countries, with doctors we can go to when we’re hurt, police we can turn to when we’re wronged and institutions that protect us.”

This sounds like an extremely well-meaning but naive quote from Jolie. If Western women often have positive experiences reporting rape and abuse, it’s certainly not something that’s been well-documented. However, women having terrible experiences reporting rape/abuse/harassment has been rather well-documented. That being said, certainly most of us have far more agency than your average Somalian. But comparing ourselves favorably to Somalian women seems to me like setting an ankle-bruising bar. Surely we can do better.

Cusey mouthfarts:

In other words, Western women have what many women around the world do not: Tools to fight back. That’s hardly the word from the #YesAllWomen crowd.

Having tools and having good tools that actually work are two different things. I would argue that many Western women have been shortchanged in this area. It’s gonna be hard for me to fix a leaky pipe with this:

I could not find a tool kit for Barbie. But sexism is over, folks.

I leave you with an excellent comment I found Roy’s place, which nutshells this idiocy beautifully:

Pff, these jerky feminists, with their civilization that’s too advanced, smugly demanding there be no rape! Why don’t they ever tweet about how great it is to have universally noble cops and problem-solving rape kits?? Ungrateful bitches!

Look, Western civilization is perfect as is. But it’s also fragile. And if these bitches try to make it perfecter by reducing rape — angrily! — then we will topple, as we will have committed civilization’s gravest sin: Refusal to accept a certain amount of rape while tweeting heartfelt appreciation for how it could be worse.

 

 

 

UPDATE…another great comment from Matt:

By Ms. Cusey’s standard, does that mean the American Christianists should STFU about how “persecuted” they are, since there are other members of their religion being *killed* overseas? Or is the argument that being called a bigot after they go on a rant about how terrible “TEH GHEYZ” are somehow supposed to be worse than being killed?

A Comparison

Will Clark was a tremendous player — not quite Hall of Fame caliber, and hence not Tony Gywnn caliber, but damned good. As human beings, though, Clark and Gwynn couldn’t have been more different.

Dear LGM Forum

R. Porrofatto could see this week’s Scalia dissent coming from a mile away, thanks to a chance encounter:

I’m afraid this is all my fault. I was waiting on line at the DMV, and, as usual, I had Petrouchka playing on my boombox (I save Rite of Spring for bus rides). This short pudgy guy who looked like a Hans Holbein painting of Leo Gorcey started busting my chops. He made some hand gesture on his chin and screamed “vaffanculo” at me. I had no idea he was a Supreme Court Justice.

My apologies to those who still believe in the separation of church and state.

Finally a Soup for Me

By the folks who brought you Porridge for Prudes!

I’m just kidding. I don’t eat soup.

The tuition puzzle

This is the first of what will probably be several posts about the extraordinary increases in law school tuition over the past half century (In this as in so many other respects, law school is merely a particularly extreme version of something that has happened all across higher education in America).

First, some numbers:

Law School Transparency has done a nice job graphing what has happened to law school tuition since 1985, in both current and inflation-adjusted dollars. Private law school tuition has gone from just over $16K to just under $42K in 2013 dollars. Public resident tuition has gone up even more sharply, from $4,300 to $23,000, again in constant inflation-adjusted dollars.

These numbers are startling enough, but they obscure the extent to which by the mid-1980s tuition had already skyrocketed over the course of the previous 25 years. LST is using data the ABA posts on its web site, which only go back to 1985. Looking back to 1960, private law school tuition averaged around $7000 in 2013 dollars, while public law school tuition was perhaps a third of that, i.e., essentially nominal (These estimates are based on Harvard’s and Michigan’s law school tuition at the time. They assume that tuition at HLS was around 20% higher than at the average private law school, which has been the norm over the past three decades, and that Michigan’s resident tuition was typical of state law school resident tuition. If anything this latter estimate probably overstates public law school resident tuition in the 1960s).

This is, in the context of normal economic activity, a remarkable situation. People often speak these days of a “tuition bubble,” but a classic price bubble involves a sharp short-term run-up in prices, followed by an even more sudden collapse when the bubble bursts. For example, the US housing market was relatively stable between 1970 and 2000, with median home prices staying between $150,000 and $180,000 in real terms. The housing bubble featured a five-year run up, during which the median price rose by nearly 70%, before falling back to pre-bubble levels just three years after the peak.

By contrast, the law school (and to a somewhat lesser extent, the higher ed) tuition “bubble” has now featured more than 50 years of basically continual real price increases, with essentially no retrenchment. This has led to prices rising in real terms not by 70% in the short term, but rather by 500% for private law schools and 900% for public law schools — and in the long and continuous term.

Is there anything else in the contemporary economy that has featured similar sustained price increases? The only examples I can think of are the ownership interests in certain professional sports teams, some extreme high end luxury goods –paintings by famous artists and the like — and of course health care, in regard to which spending per American increased by 7.6 times in real terms between 1960 and 2009.

The markets in NBA teams and Klimt paintings involve a few dozen extremely rich buyers, whose behavior can be explained readily enough by concepts such as the declining marginal utility of income and the perverse attractions of Veblen goods. The market for law degrees involves more than 100,000 people at any one time, while that for higher education in general involves more than ten million simultaneous purchasers. Why are Americans willing to pay literally five or ten times as much, in real terms, as people paid two and three and five decades ago for essentially the same thing?

In the case of health care, the answers are by now well known, involving the profound distortions created by third party payment systems, in the context of the purchase of a good that often doesn’t allow for any meaningful price competition. Indeed it’s now universally acknowledged by disinterested observers that the American medical system is a textbook example of massive market dysfunction, leading to severe overpayment for a good that is provided by the medical systems of every other developed economy for a small fraction of the price, with little or no loss of quality.

In the case of higher education in general, and law school in particular, the answers are not as well understood, in part because until very recently the American higher education establishment had done a masterful job of selling the idea that higher ed was a “great investment” at almost literally any price. Only in the last few years has that idea begun to be questioned in any serious and sustained way.

In subsequent posts I’m going to look at some of the factors that have produced this increasingly destructive social situation.

Stupid Wars Cannot Fail, They Can Only Be Failed

Yglesias is making sense:

The logic on display here shows the toxic self-justifying nature of American military adventures. If a war accomplishes its stated objectives, that goes to show that war is great. If a war fails to accomplish its stated objectives — as the Bush-era surge miserably failed to produce a durable political settlement in Iraq — then that simply proves that more war was called for.

But there is simply no reason to believe that the presence of American soldiers in Iraq makes a durable political settlement more likely, and there never has been. If eight years weren’t enough, why would one more — or two more or twenty more — be the key to success?

The truth is the opposite. The speed with which the apparent gains of the surge melted away in the face of Iraq’s entrenched domestic political problems underscores how futile the US-led campaign there was.

The US military is the finest military in the world, the sharp spear of the mightiest empire in human history. But the considerable virtues of America’s fighting forces do not give it any particular expertise in micro-managing Iraqi politics. And the fundamentals in Iraq have simply never been very good for a peaceful and democratic settlement. The country is not only divided between sectarian groups, but sandwiched between two rival regional powers, with Iran tending to favor Shiite interests, Saudi Arabia tending to favor Sunni ones, and neither power having any particular interest in democracy and pluralism. Throw in the well-known phenomenon of the oil curse and the country’s lack of stable institutions, and you’ve got a recipe for problems, problems that a bunch of heavily armed young people — no matter how well-intentioned or well-led — are not capable of solving.

Standing For Me…

I think the Supreme Court was correct to allow the First Amendment challenge against Ohio’s ban on lying in political campaigns to proceed although the complaint had been dropped.  It would be nice, however, if the have Republican appointees in the majority didn’t use a Catch-22 to deny standing to litigants mounting an even more important First Amendment challenge.  A comparison of the two decisions is an excellent illustration of how conservative judges tend to adjust their First Amendment-related jurisprudence based largely on whether they like the speakers. 

I also think Epps is right on the merits:

And that—who decides—is the First Amendment issue behind this case. There is no clear “right to lie,” but a lot of precedent—and simple common sense—suggest it’s a bad idea to allow government officials to determine truth and threaten designated “liars” with jail. In fact, the existence of the law affects politics, even if no one is ever prosecuted; candidates can complain, get a “probable cause” ruling, and then proclaim that an opponent or critic has “lied.”

If you think that criminalizing lies in political campaigns is a good idea, I would urge you to consider PolitiFact’s 2011 Lie of the Year.