I went to Cancun once, in 1994, to Club Med. My grandparents gave me a very generous present of a vacation to celebrate graduating law school and surviving the bar. They were under the impression Club Med was some sort of young Christians organization.
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/2 Anyway I had just started dating the person who is now my wife. We'd had like two dates, and hit it off, but then I was all "so anyway I'm off to Club Med, see ya."
I sent flowers during the week I was gone.
Anyway by all reports from me I behaved at Club Med.
/3 We got engaged quickly and married a year after that. So we're young marrieds in our first place and we're having a dinner party for fellow post-docs from my wife's job and I hadn't met them and they're arriving and all of a sudden I'm "gosh, this woman looks familiar."
What might @ProjectLincoln have done legally (as opposed to morally) wrong, if -- as it appears -- it accessed the Twitter account of its former partner @NHJennifer to publish her DMs with a journalist writing about them?
/2 The most obvious potential crime lies within the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a train wreck of a statute that illustrates what happens frequently when Congress legislates about things it doesn't understand.
/3 I'm not a CFAA expert -- thats @OrinKerr, for instance, and @mmasnick is very knowledgeable -- but I know a little. CFAA criminalizes, to the best of Congress' limited ability and understanding, certain unauthorized access to computer systems.
Hi, it's Ken, your friendly area guy who gets offputtingly agitated when you don't display the same obsessive grasp of legal history and terminology that he has amassed at the cost of his very soul!
Let's talk about the "shout fire in a theater" thing.
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/2 First point: "you can't shout fire in a theater" is an empty cliché meaning "some speech is not protected by the First Amendment." But that's (a) undisputed and (b) a useless observation without analysis of whether an exception applies to THIS speech.
/3 Free speech exceptions are known, established, and heavily litigated leading to extensive precedent. Saying "not all speech is protected" conveys zero useful information, and no persuasive argument, about whether THIS speech is protected or not.
The Lincoln Project should not threaten to sue Rudy Giuliani, let alone sue him, for his psycho claims that they promoted the domestic terrorism at the Capitol on 1/6.
/2 Someone needs to be the grown-up in the room. Someone has to do the right thing. Someone has to be patriotic, to show fidelity to American values.
It won’t be Rudy or the people who support him. It should be them.
/3 Performative litigation is a scourge. Suing as a vehicle of politics, suing to pwn the other side, suing to fundraise, suing to preach to the choir — these things are a cancer. They are particularly destructive when used to attacked speech.