Joe Patrice is an Editor at Above the Law. For over a decade, he practiced as a...
Kathryn Rubino is a member of the editorial staff at Above the Law. She has a degree...
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021....
Published: | July 3, 2024 |
Podcast: | Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer |
Category: | News & Current Events |
The Supreme Court closed out its season sidestepping text, precedent, and history — the trifecta! — to invent a new form of immunity to bail out Donald Trump. Weird, because so many of them were asked about this precise issue under oath and offered very different analysis. We also got January 6 legalized — over the fiery dissent of Amy Coney Barrett — the foundation of the administrative state thrown into chaos — and a blessing for anyone who wants to make it illegal to be homeless.
Special thanks to our sponsor McDermott Will & Emery.
Chris Williams:
Hello, welcome to Thinking Like. A Lawyer.
Joe Patrice:
Hi. That was great. Thank you for taking on introductory duties. This is Thinking Like. A Lawyer. As Chris just said, I’m Joe Patrice. That’s Chris Williams. We’re also joined by Kathryn. Rubino. Somewhere in here.
Kathryn Rubino:
I’m here.
Joe Patrice:
Yay. And this is your weekly dose of Above, the Law content on the radios
Kathryn Rubino:
On the podcast
Joe Patrice:
For your ears. That’s
Kathryn Rubino:
Weird.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah. Well, okay.
Kathryn Rubino:
Okay. We’ll workshop that one. Sure.
Joe Patrice:
Let’s
Kathryn Rubino:
Keep rolling.
Joe Patrice:
Yes. So this is the podcast where we talk about the week’s big stories in the legal universe. But first, too
Kathryn Rubino:
Bad, nothing much happened really. It’s going to be a pretty dry week, I imagine.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah. Nothing’s happening at all. Oh,
Chris Williams:
Nothing unexpected.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah, talk. But first we do have to have our small talk. It is holiday week, so maybe some of you aren’t even listening to this when it drops. You might be hitting it sometime over the weekend, but if you are happy holidays.
Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah, we do some BBQing.
Joe Patrice:
So yeah, you’ve got plans.
Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah, I’m going to be grilling. It’s still weird for me to say grilling as opposed to barbecuing because I am now at the age where I recognize that when people say barbecue, they mean slow cooking and smoking food. But I grew up calling grilling, barbecuing, so it still feels like I’m going to want to say barbecuing, but grilling actually food, which should be fun. We’ll see. I am not a fireworks enthusiast personally. I like them when real professionals do them. When Disney does their nightly fireworks spectacular. I would like a front row seat if at all possible. But when Joe Schmoe and his 15 beers of
Joe Patrice:
Coke, his foot is on a train platform, and that’s the mo.
Kathryn Rubino:
There you go. That’s also true, but I dislike that it is also a day where a lot of people lose fingers and et cetera. It’s not great. It makes me really anxious and apprehensive, so I will not be partaking in that tradition.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah. Well, with the Paul’s graph, shout out aside, how about you, Chris? You got anything going on with your days off here?
Chris Williams:
Oh, I’m still processing that. We’re going to have a monarchy under July 4th.
Joe Patrice:
Well, that is
Kathryn Rubino:
Now, who’s not keeping to the structures of small talking. Yeah.
Chris Williams:
Hey, I’m talking about living under it. I didn’t talk about
Joe Patrice:
Why yet. I get all kinds of bad flack for that. And now here we are,
Chris Williams:
Listen, and now you see how bad it is when you’re not one doing it.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah. See, I don’t mind if it’s legalish. And also mine
Chris Williams:
Isn’t that
Joe Patrice:
Bad. Yeah. I don’t mind if it’s legal ish, but when it’s one of the topics we’re about to get to, I guess we should probably wait until we get there. But yes.
Chris Williams:
Well, I didn’t, I never said why
Kathryn Rubino:
Mine is Spoiler.
Chris Williams:
Let me have my fun. But yeah, fun thing I learned recently. I learned the history of the word podcast, which I thought was super interesting. So y’all familiar where the word podcast comes from?
Joe Patrice:
Is it just because they were on iPods?
Chris Williams:
Partially. That is a major credit.
Kathryn Rubino:
That is a pod part.
Joe Patrice:
I thought
Chris Williams:
It a pod part. And the thing is most Gen Alpha wouldn’t get that because they wouldn’t be part of the I universe. They wouldn’t, what
Joe Patrice:
Is,
Kathryn Rubino:
My nieces are Gen Alpha. They got iPods a couple of years ago for Christmas.
Joe Patrice:
Oh. Because
Kathryn Rubino:
They’re, I iPad touches
Joe Patrice:
In the like, so you can listen to music but not have a phone kind of a thing.
Kathryn Rubino:
Right. As kind of a precursor to them eventually getting phones despite being in middle school, I guess. That’s fair.
Chris Williams:
Yeah. Fair. Well, you gave them old tech. So like UpToDate ones?
Kathryn Rubino:
No, they were new. They still sell them, or they did then a few years ago.
Joe Patrice:
Anyway. Yeah, I never would’ve thought of
Chris Williams:
It. Yeah, so interesting on two parts. So it’s a Port Manu of iPod and broadcast, but broadcast is, it used to be a farming technique where you would have a broadcast of seeds. So you have the I pod and broadcast, so you have peas in a pod and then broadcasting. So you could do some fun history playing with words where both vegetable or plant related terms, and now that’s people podcasting.
Kathryn Rubino:
There you go. Well, let’s eat your veggies folks, and
Joe Patrice:
We will get back to that specific analogy in a bit. But for now, I guess we should turn to the already previewed opinion section. There’s not really much to talk about other than various Supreme Court things this week. So what do you mean?
Chris Williams:
Nothing much other than major changes to our fundamental government?
Joe Patrice:
Yes. Other than that, that’s a
Kathryn Rubino:
Pretty good summary actually,
Joe Patrice:
As of this recording, we are only about an hour or so removed from learning that presidents have functional absolute immunity for all criminal behaviors. So that was exciting.
Kathryn Rubino:
It was something I’ll tell you that.
Joe Patrice:
So the opinion is an interesting, it’s interesting in its clumsiness, I feel this is sort of situation, obviously the conservatives on the Supreme Court, were trying to delay all the prosecutions of Trump, and there are some legitimate questions one might have about whether or not certain of his actions, did he really do an illegal thing when he gave a speech and whatever. And those kinds of questions, which are all the subject of the DC case, are fascinating and completely irrelevant to this discussion. But nonetheless, the Supreme Court decided to weigh in and say that the DC circuit’s incredibly thorough and detailed opinion was not enough for them, and they remanded the case for further evaluation to determine, basically presidents have in their eyes some form of immunity for the core constitutional duties that they have. Basically, you can’t pass a law of saying it’s illegal for them to be the commander in chief or anything like that, which makes sense. What is not covered in this opinion in the majority’s reasoning is the argument of the Trump’s lawyers that came up at the DC circuit, which is, well, what if the president were to use Seal Team six to assassinate a political rival and claimed it was essential to national security, what would you do then? And their answer was, I guess that would be legal. The Supreme Court’s response to that was,
Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah, probably.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah. Anyway, we can do whatever he wants for national security, which somewhat glosses over this problem. Yeah,
Kathryn Rubino:
I think you’re right, that it, it’s very clumsy. I mean, you still haven’t read them. I would start with the dissent and work backwards. I think that’s right. Yeah. To sort of give you a better framing of what’s going on. You, Joe, I know have pointed out that one of the most sort of egregious parts is actually not the part one of the parts that Amy Coney Barrett signed onto, which is the evidence.
Joe Patrice:
So this opinion will go down in history reading as a six three opinion, but it really was six three on a lot of questions. But one of the more important issues, it was actually five four, because Justice Barrett actually did set out one of the key arguments, which is, and an argument that I actually think might be the most important because the idea that there’s some official acts that you can’t criminally prosecute over versus unofficial ones is glib for all of the reasons we just talked about. That you can find excuses, whatever. But while glib, it is a generally defensible thing in a broad 10,000 foot level, what is not, however, is the five Justice majority also went so far as to say that if the president were to do some unofficial criminal act, the prosecutors would not be allowed to use any evidence that is connected with the President’s formal duties. Meaning if you, for instance, assassinated somebody, maybe that’s not legal, but all your communications with the Department of Defense about doing that would not be able to come before a jury. That makes good luck proving that.
Kathryn Rubino:
But also, it’s weird that they’ve grafted in rules of evidence into an immunity conversation, which no one asked,
Joe Patrice:
Right? There’s no text for any of this shit, right? There’s zero text for it in it. This
Kathryn Rubino:
Is whole cloth. How can we make sure that even if what Donald Trump did was not an official part of his duties, he still can’t get prosecuted. Right. That’s all this is.
Joe Patrice:
So how that works within the context of the DC case is actually pretty on point because one of the defenses that Trump makes is that No, no, no. When I was calling people and saying, you’ve got to overturn this by
Kathryn Rubino:
Me, X number of
Joe Patrice:
Votes when I was calling people and saying, you need to overturn the election. I was really interested in voter fraud and I was communicating with the Department of Justice about that. The argument would be under this new opinion would be, okay, so maybe that’s illegal, but you don’t get to have the jury see any of the conversations in which he was telling the Attorney General any of this stuff. And to that extent, you can’t really prove a crime and that extends that immunity. It is wild. Roberts, in his opinion on this point, says, well, we need to do that, or also it would swallow the rule of Barrett in her concurrence. It’s like, that’s absolutely bonkers. There’s no way that, in fact, it’s the opposite. It swallows any hope of there being a limit to immunity if you don’t allow that. She actually uses the example, imagine a bribery case. Bribery is illegal, but if you couldn’t bring in any communications that you had about the official act, the bribery was inducing, then it would prevent you from doing any of that. Now, she forgets that the Supreme Court already has legalized bribery as of last week, but that’s another thing altogether.
Chris Williams:
Well, to that point, we don’t know when the opinions were written, so this might’ve been written before that. And they were like, well, let’s put the out there to temper them, and then this dropped.
Joe Patrice:
Well, it’s interesting. We’re going to talk about that in a later segment, the whole issue of when they’re written and how much the justices know about what’s coming, because that’s going to come in when we have a conversation about another case. But yeah, so it’s interesting. The dissent is very originalist liberals yet again, being better at the made up philosophy that conservatives claim to live by.
Kathryn Rubino:
Yeah, well, just further evidence that it was never a real judicial philosophy and instead, veil that they put over their political leanings, which people have been paying attention, have known for quite some time. But it’s almost like sad to read, and I don’t mean it just because now we have kings, but also to watch Sotomayor play the game as if doing a better originalist job should convince Originalists when it has already been laid bare, that their political actors not originalists.
Joe Patrice:
And Kagan does this all the time too, with both Textualism and originalism, both. She will write the sense where they lock in on try to shame, look, shame. This is what you say you believe in. And the issue is that only really functions, if any of them have shame, exhibit shame, which it seems as though Barrett might maybe,
Kathryn Rubino:
Maybe, sure.
Joe Patrice:
It may not have had that muscle fully removed, but everybody else seems to have zero.
Kathryn Rubino:
As the most recent Republican put on the court. She still has some shame.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah. It’s an interesting history lesson though, going, Hey, did you notice that there’s no immunity text in the Constitution? There’s a reason for that. And rolling through everything of it, Roberts dismisses it by saying, this is just kind of cherry picking, which is
Kathryn Rubino:
LOL
Joe Patrice:
Absolutely. Mind blowing as a statement from somebody who rules on historical vibes all the time. Anyway,
Kathryn Rubino:
Here we are, American democracy, we barely knew. Ye
Joe Patrice:
The
Chris Williams:
Wild thing is, and this is one of those things where the empire is scripted. There was a point where Trump was running before he was elected. He was like, I could go shoot somebody in the head and people would, I wouldn’t get in trouble for it. He was right.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah. He came shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue,
Chris Williams:
Long as it is,
Joe Patrice:
As long as he’s president at the time and writes a letter to the attorney general telling me he’s doing it. We of course have to remember those parts or else it would just be crazy.
Chris Williams:
Well, I was going to say, which I think is the bullshit, as long as it’s an official act opposed to an unofficial one, which is not clear,
Joe Patrice:
And especially with that evidence caveat, the line between official and unofficial becomes a distinction without any real difference at that point. Just wild times. So the takeaway from that is that at
Kathryn Rubino:
Least become president, you can do whatever you want.
Joe Patrice:
At least the DC prosecution is probably doomed the classified documents, which is a much more damning one. That actually could be interesting, because of course, if he did have any official power over those documents, it ended when he ceased to be president. So it’s hard to say that immunity should extend to that, but I’m sure they will try.
Kathryn Rubino:
Well, they’re even have to get to it because Eileen Cannon’s in charge. Right.
Joe Patrice:
In addition to all of this with former presidents and wait,
Chris Williams:
There’s more. There’s more than fuck the guy McCada.
Joe Patrice:
There sure is the administrative state, the series of institutions that have maintained general order and peace throughout the United States for years. Those aren’t really, they don’t get to be things
Kathryn Rubino:
Anymore. Yeah. I mean, we talked earlier about grilling and barbecuing. This is probably the last holiday. I am going to have some hot dogs feel comfortable doing that. Oh, no.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah. The sorts of organizations like the FDA and stuff who do things like make sure that there’s not much rat poison in your hot dogs. It’s
Kathryn Rubino:
Only just a little seasoning amount of poisoning.
Joe Patrice:
So historically, those organizations have been granted broad deference in how they interpret the implementation of laws. A congress passes a law that doesn’t say a million and list 1,000,001 possible pollutants, but instead says, Hey, we should have an FDA, and their scientists should figure out what kills people and then not let us eat it. It is intentionally written vague, not just because Congress doesn’t care, but also they can’t predict 1,000,001 things coming in the future, but scientists generally can,
Kathryn Rubino:
And they have the ability to write new rules as new substances get invented or circumstances change in some fundamental way.
Joe Patrice:
So for a long time, we’ve allowed, we’ve given some degree of deference to those folks. We do not anymore. John Roberts has overruled that and determined,
Kathryn Rubino:
I mean, Joe mean the smartest among us are in fact lawyers. So where’s the problem?
Joe Patrice:
He specifically overrules it by saying that there is no, that scientists and agency people have no special skill to interpret statutes and judges do. This is absolutely insane as Justice Kagan points out in dissent, because obviously this is not true. And it was proven true almost immediately because a decision that also happened last week had to be pulled quietly and reedited because Gorsuch had written an opinion where he went off about laughing gas for a long period of time, not understanding it’s different than nitrogen oxide, which is an actual pollutant. So we turned over scientific interpretation to the specially talented courts, and the court immediately had to turn around and point out that one of the justices didn’t understand how gases work,
Kathryn Rubino:
Which isn’t shocking, frankly, as Joe, you pointed out in your writeup of this, this is a lot of lawyers or a lot of people who dropped out of med school or their medical plans, they failed Orgo, right? Yeah.
Joe Patrice:
Orgo is a little too tough for you. So now you are here where you were told there would be no math.
Kathryn Rubino:
There’d be no math, but unless you’re a judge, in which case you get to do all of the silencing for all of us. So that’s a thing.
Chris Williams:
I will say, this does open us up to a possible world where whatever judge, whatever president elect gets elected and decides to pack the court, puts Neil deGrasse Tyson on.
Joe Patrice:
I mean, they’ve already said they do everything based on history, and then they don’t want opinions from historians. So they just are kind of anti expertise all the way down. Oh, no.
Chris Williams:
Imagine what Textualism would look like on a high level medical case where the founding fathers thought that the blood actually consisted of
Joe Patrice:
We need to balance the humors a well applied leach. There was, back in the day, a early Saturday night live seasons, there was a character that Steve Martin played who was like Theodoric of York, medieval barber, and it was him going around going like, well, medical science has progressed. Now, we used to say that your humors are out of balance, but now we know it is a small troll that has decided to move into your stomach. Anywho, yeah, no. So on social media, there was some back and forth. The conservative line on Chevron being overruled, which is the case we’re talking about, has generally been, well, now this is good because we shouldn’t have unelected bureaucrats making these sorts of decisions about legal text, because this isn’t about the science. This is about the statutory text. Well, one judges not elected. So if that was your problem, you shifted, you done screwed yourself, and you did it worse.
You can vote out the administration who has the agencies you don’t like, but also the statutory text at issue. It’s important to remember what that is. Yes, statutory interpretation is something lawyers are better at, but the words that we’re talking about are, and I use in my writeup of this, an example of what the world is going to look like. Now, when the mask mandate got struck down, the way in which it happened was Judge Mazel, who was rated unqualified by the A, BA and has managed to live up to that as in her run. She struck it down by arguing that the statutory text, which authorizes the CDC to stop disease by implementing measures up to and including sanitation measures. She said, well, masks can’t be sanitation. Now they’re called sanitary masks, but she blows over that by saying, well, I interpret the word sanitation to mean removing trash so they can make rules about removing trash, but nothing else.
Now, this is not what the word sanitation means. It’s not what a doctor would think it would mean, which would be who you would think you would trust. But this, especially when you’re talking about disease control, right? But this gets to the question of when people say, oh, it’s just statutory interpretation. It’s not the science, the statutory text that’s at issue in all of these are the scientific statements. These are the ones and another point more so than the courts, the people who help Congress write these intentionally broad terms that Congress intends to be filled in by these agencies. Maybe it’s a bad thing about the revolving door, the world that we live in, but they’re usually the people who end up running agencies, the lobbyists and so on, who are involved in those discussions end up on the other side. And so they more so than the judges buy a lot understand why certain text was chosen. So that’s bad. But we can continue this discussion of the dismantling of the state administrative administrative state with today’s conversation, which was that there used to be statutes of limitations. You couldn’t say if you thought that the rule was wrong, you had six years to say, Hey, this rule is wrong, but that’s not round anymore.
Kathryn Rubino:
No, no, no, no. You can bring ’em whenever you think you’ve been harmed. That’s when the statute of limitations here to actually begin to toll.
Joe Patrice:
So essentially, if a rule was made in the 1960s banning certain chemicals, all you need is to have a new company use that chemical that didn’t exist back then, but exists today, and they can mount that challenge. So rules are never actually settled, ever. They can always be brought up and make no mistake. People are like, well, how do they don’t get to just create willy-nilly new companies. Make no mistake, we had a Supreme Court opinion last year about a web design company that as far as anyone knows, never designed any websites, they are perfectly willing to invent new companies out of whole cloth to get to where they need to be. And that’s what we have now. So now we not only have no deference, we now also have no statute of limitations.
Kathryn Rubino:
I mean, I think one of the interesting things that’s going to come from those two cases as well as the SEC case saying that there needed to be no ajs, you have to have jury trials for everything is going to be a tremendous backlog of cases in the federal judiciary. I don’t think we are truly prepared. I don’t think conservatives have really thought through the amount of cases that are going to be filed, the amount of litigation that’s going to be happened. I think somebody had said that, oh, this is a real boon for corporate litigators, and that is a horrible statement, but is completely true. There’s going to be so much more litigation and detailed time intensive, difficult to adjudicate litigation as a result of this trio of decisions.
Joe Patrice:
But, but this gets to that earlier conversation we were having about the meaning of words and broadcast and all that. This kind of semantic back and forth about how words came to be is now going to be dictating the quality of life for all of us on a whim. Oh my God,
Chris Williams:
There’s going to be some statutory case and somebody on the fifth Circuit is going to use a Bible definition for what counts as a weapon or something
Joe Patrice:
Already do bajillion.
Chris Williams:
But
Joe Patrice:
Now I’ll say also to the other thing that came up in small talk that I wanted to apply here, which was when do they know they write these things? When the court struck down Chevron, they released that opinion before this one, and in that opinion, Roberts announces basically, Chevron deference is always wrong and not the way the law should work, but all the ones that we’ve already applied it to, those don’t get disturbed, which was a little, it made no sense, but it was a handout to maybe this won’t be used to blow up everything in history. At that juncture, he knew that at the end of the weekend, they were going to release this opinion that reverses that claim. So he knew when he wrote that and tried to sound reasonable that he was going to do the opposite. He was going to sign on to an opinion doing the opposite.
Kathryn Rubino:
He was writing something so some future juris could cherry pick it, Joe.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Alright. What else happened last week?
Kathryn Rubino:
January 6th is legal.
Joe Patrice:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I forgot about that. That
Kathryn Rubino:
Happened.
Joe Patrice:
And not just because Trump has immunity for it, but the
Kathryn Rubino:
Actual Yes, the people who broke down the windows and stuff like that, they are over 300 convictions or prosecutions are now in jeopardy because words mean what the Republicans want them to mean, not what they actually mean.
Joe Patrice:
The
Kathryn Rubino:
Source of, I shouldn’t say Republican, I say Republican men because Amy Coney Barrett actually wrote a fire dissent.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah. She seemed pretty mad about it actually. Sure. Which was welcome. The basis of this, look, the basis of this, there is superficially a certain, maybe this is crazy. I believe it was Sarbanes-Oxley financial regulation as a means of preventing accounting fraud. Years ago, there was a law passed that made it a crime to basically submit fake financial statements to the government and stuff like that. Part of that was that you were disrupting an official proceeding or conspiring to, and that became a crime. Now, storming the capitol to prevent the votes from being counted was probably not top of mind for the people who wrote Sarbanes-Oxley. That said, the text of it is what the text of it is. It says, if you’re going to try to break up an official government and undermine an official government proceeding, that’s a crime. The majority who cares so much about textualism whenever they find it convenient, decided, well, that doesn’t mean anything. And a CB stuck to a little bit to our earlier point about they need to have shame. She seems to have that muscle a little bit. She was like, but I thought we all agreed with text, and text is pretty clear here.
Kathryn Rubino:
I mean, she recognizes that this is written in a post Enron world, but literally says, who could blame Congress for that failure of imagination? We never really imagined we’d be attempted coup USA, right? That really I don’t think was any, we didn’t contemplate that, but that’s not necessarily the failure of it. The majority admits it was an official proceeding, admits that it was disrupted. Why are we even here friends?
Joe Patrice:
So to you saying, why are, I’m going to kind of phonetically mess with that. If we lived in a world where the only crimes you could charge were what was top of mind for the Congress who passed it, there are a lot of wire fraud convictions that need to get overturned. We basically use wire fraud to cover almost everything that would all have to go. I mean, that’s ridiculous.
Kathryn Rubino:
This is a horrible decision. But Amy Coney Barrett definitely got the right of it, and I do appreciate the sort of saltiness in her dissent to make the point as clear as possible. But again, it doesn’t shaming folks doesn’t matter when there is no shame.
Joe Patrice:
So with that said, have we now covered everything? I mean, I’m
Kathryn Rubino:
Sure there’s more,
Chris Williams:
But No, they made homelessness illegal.
Joe Patrice:
Oh yeah, yeah. Homelessness is illegal. That was a thing. Forgot about that bit. Yeah.
Chris Williams:
Yes. Also, one of the fun consequences of the spat of rulings is that the president can sleep outside and be homeless now without being charged.
Joe Patrice:
Oh yeah. So that case, what was interesting about that case is there was a rule that said, look, you can’t, there was an attempt to say, Hey, people can’t sleep outside in town. And the argument was, well, you can say that, but only if you have shelter for folks. Because if you don’t have shelter for folks who need it, then you’re basically criminalizing them. Yeah. It’s cruel and unusual because criminalizing them for their conduct. I will note that in interpreting whether or not this counts as a cruel and unusual punishment, Neil Gorsuch writing the opinion makes a point that says Judges don’t have any special skills in being able to interpret any of this. Literally right as they’re about to put out this Chevron decision about how they have the special skills to do all the specialists.
Kathryn Rubino:
It’s like no one shared their work up until that
Joe Patrice:
Edits over there. Well,
Chris Williams:
Now that you said that, that could be a point against the judges know, not a point against, but an interesting tension about the judges knowing when they issue the opinions,
Joe Patrice:
Because
Chris Williams:
I think they released Chevron and City Grant on the same day. Was that the case?
Joe Patrice:
But they read everything. It’s not like they sign on to things without reading them. They get passed around, they know what’s in everything and they just don’t care. It’s the lack of shame issue that Kathryn noted. They’ll just do the opposite.
Chris Williams:
So there was a thing that happened when I realized that states were starting to make the turn to start legalizing weed. At first I was like, yay, this is great. This has historically been used to disenfranchise and prison slave black folks, or have you. But then I was like, capitalism is still a thing. There’s still a market demand. I know that cities get sued if there aren’t enough people in their prisons, what’s going to happen that’s going to get criminalized to help Philip Cells? Homelessness makes sense. Like it is on the rise. It is getting more expensive to be able to afford rent, and also this actually applies people like sleeping in their cars, so you can’t even be homeless with a car. So I think if this is a great decision, money speaking for prisons,
Joe Patrice:
Yeah,
Kathryn Rubino:
That’s really who you want the winners to be.
Joe Patrice:
Yeah. Meanwhile, I will say also from the state of Oregon, Portland just started its new law, which is basically the flip side of the Grant’s Pass decision. It now has a homelessness law where they criminalize homelessness. If they don’t take the shelter space, basically saying, we will build all the shelter space. We’re on the hook for that, and homelessness only then becomes legal if you choose not to use that, which is kind of taking the logic that the people in Grants Pass were trying to push and institutionalizing it. Not sure that’s necessarily great either, but it is a sign that some people took the lesson from it and are going to roll ahead despite these Supreme Courts wishes. With all that said, now I think we’re done. Thanks everybody for listening. You should subscribe to the show, listen to new shows when they come out that way, you should give reviews of Bright Things, stars.
All of that helps. You should be reading Above the Law. Of course, you should also listen to other places that we are like Kathryn’s on the Jabot podcast. I am a guest on Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable. You should be listening to the other offerings of the Legal Talk Network. You should be reading blah blah law and following us on social media. It’s eight at ATL blog. I’m at Joseph Patrice. She’s at Kathryn one. Chris is at Writes For Rent. I also am occasionally over at Blue Sky as Joe Patrice, and that I think now concludes everything. Peace.
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Above the Law - Thinking Like a Lawyer |
Above the Law's Joe Patrice, Kathryn Rubino and Chris Williams examine everyday topics through the prism of a legal framework.