A clash of state and federal judicial systems on same-sex marriage

A US District Judge Callie Granade ruled on January 23rd that Alabama’s ban on same-sex marriages violated the US constitution and ordered that marriage licenses be issued beginning today. That verdict was appealed by Alabama and last week a federal appeals court declined to issue a stay of the lower court judge’s ruling. In response Roy Moore, the chief justice of Alabama’s state supreme court and a vehement opponent of same-sex marriage, issued his own order late last night that said that until the US Supreme Court ruled on the issue, probate court judges were not obliged to issue licenses and he was ordering them not to do so.
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Why innocent people plead guilty

Jed S. Rakoff is a United States District Judge for the ­Southern District of New York and in a recent article in the New York Review of Books he discusses why so many innocent people plead guilty. He puts it down to the system that is peculiar to the US, that of plea bargains where, instead of going to trial, prosecutors and defense attorneys agree to have the defendant plead guilty to a lesser charge. So even though the defendant might be innocent, the prospect of being found guilty of very serious charges and facing very heavy punishment can persuade them that it is not worth the risk. This is why so few cases go to trial.
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Some words behoove me not

In my writings, I use whatever words that come to my head and that I feel comfortable using and never go to a dictionary or thesaurus to look for the appropriate word. I do not gratuitously use swear words or scatological words unless I am quoting someone else. It is not that such words offend me (they don’t) but it is just not my style to use them. I also do not shy away from words that are not too commonly used as long as I think they exactly fit my needs and are not so esoteric that too many readers are baffled because its meaning is not clear from the context.
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Hot Spot not going to be used in World Cup

In my post on the increasing role of technology in helping adjudicate close decisions in cricket, I mentioned three of them: the Hawkeye ball tracker (using multiple camera angles to track the path of the ball and predict its future trajectory), the Snickometer (that displays sound as an oscilloscope signal to show the sound if the ball struck anything), and the Hot Spot (that uses infra-red cameras to detect the minute amounts of heat generated when the ball strikes the bat or the person of the batsman).
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Protecting children too much

Thanks to the relentless scare-mongering by our news media, parents nowadays are terrified that their children will suffer harm, either due to accidents or at the hands of strangers. This has led to them placing very strict limits on their children, to the extent of some never letting them out of their sight, not having play dates with other children, or letting them have sleep overs at friends homes, riding bikes, and so on.
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The Daily Show on the anti-vaxxers

Jon Stewart looked at the recent outbreak of diseases that we once thought had been eliminated in the US and some of the reasons given by people behind the trend to not vaccinate children. Potential presidential candidate Rand Paul said the same kinds of things that Michele Bachmann said about vaccination back in 2012, and passed along stories that he had heard about children getting neurological problems from getting the vaccine. She was mercilessly ridiculed for it back then and it will be interesting to see if it will similarly come back to haunt Paul.
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From the “Well, duh!” files

A Utah lawmaker has questioned as to whether having sex with an unconscious person necessarily constitutes rape. He raised this issue during hearings on a bill that removed an ambiguity in current law by clearly stating that it was rape. Prosecutors had said that the existing ambiguity made it difficult to pursue charges in certain cases, and thus made women who had been drugged or intoxicated more reluctant to come forward
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John Kiriakou finally out of prison

Former CIA official John Kiriakou has been released from prison and will serve the remainder of his 30-month sentence under house arrest until May. His crime? Revealing the fact that the US tortured prisoners during the Bush-Cheney era. The Obama administration got him to plead guilty they way they usually do, by piling on charges under the Espionage Act, difficult to defend under, so that he faced the prospect of 45 years in jail and millions of dollars in legal fees.
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Why so few women in philosophy?

In general in US academia, the numbers of women in the arts, social sciences, and the humanities are less than men but not too far from equality. The one exception is philosophy, where the number of women dip dramatically to the level of the sciences.

The reality is that the discipline of philosophy lags far behind other disciplines in the humanities in terms of number of women undergraduate philosophy majors, graduate students, and tenured faculty members. The best numbers indicate that women make up 21% of academic philosophers compared to humanities as a whole where women are 41% of academics. Our numbers are comparable to the physical sciences, where there has been more recent interest and intent to elevate the numbers. Women are 20.6% of academics in the physical sciences and 22.2% of the life sciences.
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Some of the problems diagnosed include the long history of professional male philosophers’ criticisms of women’s rational capacity (Marilyn Friedman), implicit bias and stereotype threat (Jennifer Saul), belief in meritocracy (Fiona Jenkins), difficulty in establishing credibility and authority (Katrina Hutchinson), problematic pedagogy (Catriona Mackenzie and Cynthia Townley), microinequalities (Samantha Brennan), and silencing (Justine McGill). Combine and compound the effects of all these practices, and one has very large systemic problems.

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