Deans often defend the high salaries of their professors by claiming that they're required in order to entice brilliant scholars away from Big Law (as if someone who wants to be an academic would really be keen on the Big Law environment). The response from the reform crowd is largely that once away from Big Law, profs can't get back in the game. Maybe professors in certain specialty areas could, or ones with big names who are hired more for the prestige they bring than their actual skill, but rank and file profs teaching fox hunting cases and dormant commerce clause wouldn't find a junior partnership position in a Vault 50 firm.

But instead of theorycrafting, what if someone actually conducted an experiment? Release a law professor back into the wild, and see what happens.

Such an experiment was conducted. We have the video:

Afraid Obama is going to take your AR15? Better move to The Citadel.

No, not the military college, but the right wing extremist compound in Idaho. Technically, it's just an idea so far, but as far as ideas go it's pretty stupid. It's planned to be a 1000 acre fortress city, housing 3500-7000 families, with another 1000-2000 acres of farmland outside the curtain walls. Here's the artist concept:

Yo dawg, I heard you liked gated communities...

The best part of The Citadel is that living there requires signing the Patriot Agreement. There's a bit of liberty talk in the preamble, but pretty quickly the agreement jumps into what the Citadel is really all about, guns:

Two: Every able-bodied Patriot aged 13 and older governed by this Agreement shall annually demonstrate proficiency with the rifle of his/her choice by hitting a man-sized steel target at 100 yards with open sights at the Citadel range. Each Resident shall have 10 shots and must hit the target at least 7 times.

Three: Every able-bodied Patriot aged 13 and older governed by this Agreement shall annually demonstrate proficiency with a handgun of choice by hitting a man-sized steel target at 25 yards with open sights at the Citadel range. Each Resident shall have 10 shots and must hit the target at least 7 times.

Four: Every able-bodied Patriot of age within the Citadel will maintain one AR15 variant in 5.56mm NATO, at least 5 magazines and 1,000 rounds of ammunition. The responsibility for maintaining functional arms and ammunition levels for every member of the household shall fall to the head of household. Every able-bodied Patriot will be responsible for maintaining a Tactical Go Bag or Muster Kit to satisfy the Minuteman concept. Details TBD and posted elsewhere.

These people are nuts. And not just normal "Obama's gonna take yer guns" nuts, but self-contradictory gun nuts. The requirement that you maintain a basic level of proficiency isn't that far out there. Many countries have mandatory military service for the purpose of creating a larger force that can be drawn from in times of war. Basically, everyone has to be part of the national guard here. What's ridiculous is the third requirement, that everyone be required to own an AR15. You have to both be a marksman, and be armed with a weapon designed for a mode of combat known as "spray and pray." That's like requiring everyone be able to cook and have proficiency in nutrition science, and also keep a stockpile of government cheese.

And then there's this bit of crazy nonsense:

Eight: All Patriots, who are of age and are not legally restricted from bearing firearms, shall agree to remain armed with a loaded sidearm whenever visiting the Citadel Town Center. Firearm shall be on-the-person and under the control of the Resident, not merely stored in a vehicle.

Yeah, that sounds like a place we'd want to hang out. Everyone is required to bring a gun with them. And since it's the big park in the middle of the community, it's probably the location where things like barbecues and wedding receptions and other celebrations will take place. And those events involve a lot of drinking. So no saying "I'm gonna drink tonight, and it's probably a good idea that I leave my gun at home." No siree! Gotta make all your bad decisions while armed.

While the requirements to own and be proficient with a weapon might mesh with the Citadel's general purpose, the requirement to carry a gun in the central park is just bizarre. Oh, and by the way, here is their general purpose, or specifically, the threat they want to prepare against:

The Citadel is primarily designed to defend against a grid-down, economic collapse scenario. When most people ask this question they are thinking in terms of defending against violent action but there are other aspects to defending ourselves. Self-sufficiency in terms of food, water and energy are also a form of defense against a collapse scenario, so these are a major part of our plan.

All sorts of rules about keeping armed, and there's another rule about being proficient in field medicine and basic survivalism, but if you really want to prepare against an economic collapse, you only need a small force of sharpshooters to defend against roving bands of thieves. What's more important to the long term survival of the community is renewable healthy foods. Citadel families are required to keep a year's worth of food stuffs, but it's all going to be canned, processed crap. Their farmland will likely be used for corn and potatoes, creating a diet of largely grains and starch. Odds are the society would collapse from a health epidemic long before the American economy and society collapsed.

We don't mean to discourage the Citadel or paranoid, heavily armed, poorly educated people who want to join the community. By all means, please do. Please, move to a secluded spot in Idaho behind high walls and towers where we can keep ourselves safe from you.

You know that reputation lawyers have for screwing people?

Yeah, that's not going anywhere. Quite the opposite actually, they're finding new ways to screw people, and for even more trivial reasons.

Seth Quest was a man with a dream. Or, a product idea. He designed an iPad stand, took his concept to Kickstarter, the crowd sourced fundraising site, and got over 400 investors to pool $35,000 to get his product launched.

Quest didn't really know what he was doing though, and had no experience in launching a business or producing a physical product, and the venture soon collapsed. After several months, Quest called it quits and returned the money to the investors. He may have been foolish for jumping in unprepared, but he sounds like a decent enough guy. It's not like he paid himself a salary with the money and left the investors empty handed.

That wasn't enough for Neil Singh though. You see, Neil is a lawyer, and by extension, an asshat. Neil was pissed that he didn't get the iPad stand he was promised (Kickstarter projects typically offer an incentive for funding, such as a copy of whatever is being made). So of course, asshat lawyer Neil sued.

The whole idea of Kickstarter makes it clear that if the project fails you won't get your funding reward, because, duh, the product never got produced. Kickstarter even explicitly says what happens if a project fails to be completed:

Is a creator legally obligated to fulfill the promises of their project?

Yes. Kickstarter's Terms of Use require creators to fulfill all rewards of their project or refund any backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill.

But, this was too confusing for Neil, a trained attorney. He even admits that the fault of not understanding the system was on his end:

To me, it looked like a cool thing you could buy. If you give me $70, I'll send you one of them.' I didn't do any due diligence. I didn't think I had to. I'm not investing. I'm not doing the same sort of things a potential shareholder would do. I'm just buying a product.

For a normal person, after "I didn't do any due diligence," would come "but I got my money back, so I'm not going to do something idiotic, like sue." Or even if you don't understand Kickstarter but really do just think you're buying a product, the mental process for a normal person is something like, "Too bad the product got called off, but I got my money refunded, so no harm done." But here's Neil's actual mental process, in his own words:

For me, this is why I became a lawyer. I guess I'm more of an idealist than anything else. It just ticked me off.

Really? This is why you became a lawyer? So when you get pissed off because you made a dumb mistake you can go screw someone else over? ...Sounds about right.

Neil did eventually drop the suit though. Too bad defending against it left Quest bankrupt.

[Inc. via Business Insider]

Last November, Los Angeles County approved a ballot measure (by about 55%) requiring the use of condoms during sex scenes in adult films. Los Angeles County is home to San Fernando Valley, where the vast majority of adult films in the US are filmed and produced because its geography allows it collect runoff from the Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

By and large, adult entertainment producers and performers were against the measure, claiming customers didn’t want to see condoms in porn. Porn production companies declared they would file suit against the measure if it passed. And so they did.

The suit was filed on behalf of Vivid Entertainment and two adult performers last week, asserting that requiring performers to wear condoms is a violation of their First Amendment rights. Chief advocate for the measure, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, contends the measure is about safety in a commercial endeavor and the freedom of expression argument is hollow.

We don’t have any skin in the game, but we might encourage someone to consider the statutory ambiguity angle. The full text of Ballot Measure B can be found here, but in relevant part, says, “The use of condoms is required for all acts of anal or vaginal sex during the production of adult films to protect performers from sexually tramsmitted [sic] infections.”

What the measure doesn’t include are definitions for condom, anal sex, vaginal sex, production, performer, or sexually transmitted or tramsmitted infections. Sure, we could use common sense or a dictionary for some of those terms, but that’s the crux of the statutory ambiguity argument: the terms are vague or undefined.

Is cunnilingus considered vaginal sex? Does it matter how the condom is being used? If one dude is penetrating another dude’s ass, which one is required to wear the condom, or are both? What about sex with strap-ons?

Certainly seems a bit difficult to require performers to wear protection during certain acts when there isn’t a definition of those acts. No offense to porn stars, but these are porn stars, not experts in statutory interpretation.

It also seems a bit difficult to imagine the Los Angeles County Department of Health sitting down to hammer out the details of those definitions. At the next board meeting, are they going to put “10:00AM – 11:00AM: defining anal sex” on the agenda? How many times will they say “anus” before there’s no one left smirking? Not wanting to discuss a topic isn’t a defense against an ambiguity argument. If the legislature wants to walk the walk, they should have to talk the talk. And since they don't want to talk the talk enough to even run a spell check on their bill, it's probably best they concede defeat and learn a lesson from the Japanese. In Japan, genitalia in porn have to be pixilated. So what did the porn industry do in response?

Tentacle sex.

You can try to regulate it all you want, but porn will find a way.