If the Yale protests weren't so focused on singling out the Christakises, I'd really have no problem with them whatsoever. I'd even support them, just as I've been quite vocal in supporting - and indeed, applauding - the Mizzou protesters.

There are no doubt plenty of problems at Yale that need addressing, but it's really hard to see how the Christakises' behavior is contributing to those problems.

Nor is this a question of "kids these days" for me so much as it's a question of the following:

1. I have a daughter. It is important to me as a parent that she learn how to solve problems on her own rather than learn to turn quickly to authority figures whenever she feels insulted.

2. The frequency of these incidents really is becoming an attack on academic freedom, which I think is a value that needs protecting, particularly in light of the adjunctification of higher education.

3. Safe-spaces as a sword rather than a shield is a really troubling concept to me: https://popehat.com/2015/11/09/safe-spaces-as-shield-safe-spaces-as-sword/

4. Support for free speech is not a given as it stands: https://today.yougov.com/news/2015/05/20/hate-speech/ These students will in a few years be an important bloc of voters and will give rise to a generation of politicians and business leaders. Free speech is something I'm pretty much an absolutist about - it is my strongest political value.

5. It's not "just college kids." The ease with which speech causes extreme outrage seems to be an increasingly widespread phenomenon. It is a phenomenon that, I think, is creating both a huge empathy gap on the left in which little attempt is made to actually understand what people who deviate from a particular viewpoint are trying to say, and also creating space for a particularly virulent countermovement of people on the right for whom being politically incorrect is a badge of honor, and for whom there is literally no interest in dialogue with minority groups. In short, it exacerbates polarization and makes it a lot harder to get a critical mass of people to cooperate on solutions to the very problems activists identify (even when those activists are themselves doing a good job of avoiding these pitfalls).

6. Movements on college campuses can be important, and often are in the long run. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was important, certainly, and had significant (positive) implications in the long run that resonated far outside of Berkeley. When you agree with a movement that gains momentum on a college campus, it can be well worth expressing support for it. But just as much, when you disagree with such a movement, it is no less worth expressing that opposition.

7. Relatedly, and perhaps most importantly, I can assure you that empowering authority figures based on claims of offense-taking will, in the end, be used disproportionately against minority groups.

No doubt, but do we know whether that "muscle" in fact showed up? It's also not clear to me whether the students who were actively trying to keep the media out were part of the core group of protesters (ie, the CS1950 group) or were acting on their own. Certainly, CS1950 seems to have pretty authoritatively told the protesters today to let the media in.

@north For what it's worth, my initial comment was before the Melissa Click news broke - I completely agree that that incident was absurd. That said, it seems like the protesters at Mizzou have seen the error of their ways in terms of trying to keep the media out entirely and are now making clear that people shouldn't be interfering with the media. So kudos to them on that.

I'm also not terribly inclined to impute Melissa Click's actions as a faculty member to the students at the core of the protests at Mizzou.

My mistake about the 2d/4th distinction. Probably wise of the plaintiff's attorney to sue in the 2nd Circuit, which is definitely more labor-friendly.

While I'm aware that the agencies typically don't care where you're admitted (except to the extent the place you'll be doing the work requires you to be admitted there, which as I said, is the case in DC IIRC), my point is that if the standard is "does this amount to the practice of law in North Carolina such that the review attorney is FLSA-exempt," then there are definite implications if the court rules against the Plaintiff and for Skadden, and those implications include that Skadden (or at least the agencies it uses) needs to start making sure that the people it hires to do doc review work in NC are barred in NC.

If the answer is just "it's not the practice of law, but it is legal support services," then there's no legal requirement for the reviewer to be barred anywhere, and never was. This is probably the right conclusion in most instances, anyhow - as long as the supervising attorney is barred in the state where the case is pending (or in another relevant state if it's a merger/transactional issue), then it doesn't matter from a legal standpoint if anyone else involved is admitted anywhere. But that's always been true of any type of work - it's always been the case that, say, paralegals are allowed to draft briefs as long as an admitted attorney ultimately reviews their work and takes responsibility for the actual submission.

The reason this is usually done by lawyers isn't that there's some legal or ethical obligation for lawyers to write briefs (or review documents), but because clients and firms generally recognize that this type of work is usually best performed by people with legal training.

Point being that this convention will not be impacted one way or another by how this case is ultimately decided. If the court ultimately ruled for the plaintiff here, clients and firms would be no more or less likely to want attorneys to do this type of work other than the extent to which having to pay overtime exacerbated the cost differentials between having attorneys and non-attorneys do the work (which will be minimal because most firms and agencies, as I understand, already pay overtime anyhow).

1. I took the liberty of correcting the reference to the "FSLA" to the "FLSA."

2. This is definitely an interesting case. As I recall - though it's been awhile now, so I could be wrong - right around 2003 or 2004, the DC Bar took the position that document review was inherently the practice of law and demanded that all attorneys doing document review be barred in DC. I mention this because it seems that the reliance on state law to determine whether a document reviewer is engaged in the practice of law could potentially limit this decision.

3. My initial inclination was to disagree with the Fourth Circuit on this, but reading the opinion, I think they got it right on the facts, at least as alleged. From what I can gather, it seems like the allegation in the complaint was that, while the plaintiff was doing document review, he wasn't being asked to use any legal judgment in the process. In other words, as alleged in the light most favorable to his claim, his complaint could be construed as saying he was just being asked to categorize by subject matter according to rules set up for him by others, rather than being asked to make any determinations as to whether something was privileged or relevant. It seems to me that if it turns out he was being asked to make at least initial determinations about privilege or legal relevance, etc., then he will lose on summary judgment.

Then again......there's a bit of a conundrum here since this plaintiff is not barred in North Carolina but the court determined that his allegations could have amounted to the practice of law in North Carolina, creating all sorts of UPL issues for both him and - potentially - Skadden.

3. This case may settle, but it seems that it's also a case that is unusually likely to go to trial if Skadden thinks it can win at trial because of the precedential issues. If the 4th Circuit ruling on the MTD stands as the final word on the case, then Skadden (and other biglaw firms that are equally stingy on overtime for doc review attorneys) is going to have to start paying its doc review attorneys overtime going forward even if it settles with this particular class for just back pay; otherwise, these suits will keep being filed since you can't evade the FLSA by contract. More likely to me is that it at least goes through an MSJ unless Skadden just decides to completely wave the white flag.

4. I'm not at all sure how technological advancement is hurting lawyers here. Like you said, most document review work still requires at least some legal judgment and, if firms are going to charge clients more than peanuts for document review work, they need to have attorneys doing the work. What's more, it's worth pointing out that the sheer number of documents to review nowadays has grown exponentially in just a few years. The entire concept of e-discovery effectively didn't exist at all 20 years ago, and even Zubulake was just a little over 10 years ago. I also recently saw a statistic showing that the amount of data companies store has increased something like 10 fold in just the last decade, meaning that there's effectively 10 times as much data to review now. In other words, technology is the reason why document review work exists as a substantial thing at all, despite the many other problems with document review work. Predictive coding certainly mitigates the effects on document review jobs of a lot of this growth, but it seems to me that its primary effect is to make those jobs more manageable rather than eliminating them altogether. Though, I suppose it depends on your frame of reference, too - the explosion in data is, I assume, slowing, and so if you're comparing to, say, two or three years ago, then predictive coding may well be resulting in fewer doc review jobs; on the other hand, if your comparison is to even five or six years ago (and certainly to 10 years ago), then my guess is that it probably is just mitigating the explosion in data.

Whether or not this is accurate, though, it doesn't change that the primary reason for their withdrawal was a desire to not only sustain, but also expand, slavery. The secession resolutions are very clear about this fact.

The South Carolina resolution opens by referring to its previous 1852 resolution. I can't find a copy of that quickly, but as I understand, that resolution was a protest of the 1850 Compromise, which had nothing whatsoever to do with regulating slavery in the Southern states, but instead primarily served to admit California as a free state and allow New Mexico and Utah to decide themselves whether they would be free or slave states. The Compromise also strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act, thus imposing federal will on Northern states. Part of South Carolina's 1852 complaint was, from what I can gather, that the Northern states weren't doing enough to enforce this strengthened provision.

In other words, the very first complaint that South Carolina's secession resolution makes is that secession was necessary because the federal government was not doing enough to expand slavery and force the Northern states to comply with Southern wishes in their own internal affairs. That's not a complaint that states' rights are being disrespected - it's a complaint that the federal government isn't doing enough to support slavery.

While it's true that the secession resolution speaks in terms of a compact, the alleged breaches of the compact are entirely that the federal government wasn't doing enough to force the Northern states to return escaped slaves to the Southern States, and further complains that the Northern states have breached the compact by passing laws under which "the fugitive (slave) is discharged from service or labor claimed."

The resolution insists that, but for assurances about slavery and about Northern obligations to enforce the South's "right" to hold slaves, the Southern states would not have signed the Constitution.

It also complains that the Northern states have treated immigrants and escaped slaves as citizens.

Lincoln's declared general hostility to slavery is cited as nothing more than the final straw, and then specifically because the Republican Party (which, absent secession, would not have had a majority in either house of Congress) "has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States."

"War" in the secession resolution is a figurative term. "Excluded from the common territory" refers to the territories that were not yet states - in other words, this is a reference to the fact that the Republicans opposed allowing the expansion of slavery into the territories." Finally, "That the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional," from what I can gather, is a complaint that the Republicans wanted to decentralize the federal courts, which is what they ultimately did with the Judiciary Act of 1862. This also seems to be a complaint that the Republicans wanted to include the Western states in the circuit court system and rebalance the circuits so they better reflected population, rather than providing the Southern states with an automatic majority amongst the circuits (and, as I understand based on how Supreme Court justices were appointed at the time, thus an automatic majority on the Supreme Court).

In other words, there's virtually nothing in here about states' rights as we generally understand the concept. To the contrary, it appears the primary complaint was that the feds weren't doing enough to ram slavery down the throats of the northern states, and that the Republicans were going to make it even harder to do so (even though they wouldn't have had a majority in Congress absent secession).

@leeesq The case never went to a jury. Apparently there was a plea deal where the young man would accept the 90 day sentence, and the prosecutor would remain silent on the question of whether he should be put on the sex offender registry at the plea hearing - there is a leniency provision under the state law that allows first time defendants to stay off the registry if they are under 21, provided the judge applies the provision.

At the hearing, the prosecutor seems to have reminded the judge that he has declined to apply the leniency provision in the past. The young man's family is hoping that the prosecutor's decision to do that will be viewed as a breach of the plea deal allowing the withdrawal of the guilty plea.

I could find similar examples from almost any country, though. Off the top of my head, Alberto Fujimori was twice elected President of Peru. This seems to have been without much regard for his Japanese heritage, the second time with two-thirds of the vote, and neither election was viewed as being rigged (his third election was a different story, obviously). This suggests that a substantial percentage of Peruvians accepted him as being Peruvian. His subsequent problems can't be overlooked, but it's fair to say that those problems were mostly of his own making, not because Peruvians suddenly realized he looked Japanese and had a Japanese last name.

I lightheartedly chose Pogba because I think his hairdo is about the most gloriously French thing I've ever seen, the epitome of elan.

I think this ignores the point, though, which is that race and ethnicity are primarily social constructs, a fact over which there is presumably little dispute these days outside of the Steve Sailers of the world.

I'm not saying that you get to become, much less be viewed as, a different ethnicity just by saying you are. I'm saying that ethnicity and race are things that are earned or developed over the course of a lifetime in a way that doesn't show up on a census form. It's not something you can develop just by reading some books or educating yourself or obsessing over culture - it's something that must be developed through shared experiences.

In your example - yes, this "yuki-no-monogatari" seems absurd. But what makes her absurd isn't her skin tone. What makes her absurd is her apparent belief that the only thing that prevents her from being Japanese is her skin tone - she doesn't seem to have ever lived in Japan or surrounded herself with Japanese friends or done much of anything that would give her the experience of actually being Japanese. But what if she was born in Japan to American parents, grew up in Japan, spoke Japanese as her first language, married a Japanese man, and then emigrated to, say, the UK. Would we really say that it would be wrong of her to identify primarily as Japanese rather than as American? Should we?

It gets a bit trickier when you're talking about primarily racial (as opposed to primarily national or ethnic) identities because substantial portions of those identities arise indirectly from visual appearances - prejudices faced can and do form a big part of a racial community identity. But even then, as Jamelle hints at, there are at least some situations where someone who ordinarily appears racially white can experience some of the same prejudices by fully identifying as racially black.

As to the Rachel Dolezal situation specifically, I think Jamelle should be required reading: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/06/rachel_dolezal_claims_to_be_black_the_naacp_official_was_part_of_the_african.html

As to Dolezal, he says that the problem with what she did isn't that she claimed to be black, it's that she told a whole ton of lies in the process and it's unclear whether she accepted both the costs and benefits of being black.

Jamelle's piece also leads me to my bigger point - I don't see why "transethnicism" is inherently a problem, much less dangerous.

Race and ethnicity are complicated matters, but at root they're primarily social constructs, of which skin tone and other genetic traits at least should be the least significant elements. To be sure, they're the easiest identifiers because they're visible, but what makes a person truly part of an ethnicity is - or at least should be - a common cultural heritage, shared trials and tribulations, shared language, and shared interests.

What's more is that historically the concept of race and ethnicity have been very fluid, and in most cases it really has been the cultural identifiers that are the most important markers.

For instance, despite my last name, I am primarily of Polish descent. I have plenty of Slavic features. I like kielbasa and pierogies and various other Polish things. But if I were to change my name tomorrow to my mother's maiden name and move to Poland, I'd be viewed as no more Polish or even Slavic than LeBron James or Mitt Romney. I'd be viewed as an American - and rightly so. On the other hand, if we kept our last name and we raised a child from birth in Poland, then wouldn't it be fair to say that the child was Polish, last name and lack of Slavic features aside? To push it a bit further, what if I moved to Poland, kept my last name, but learned to speak fluent Polish, was heavily active in my local community, raised a child as a Pole, paid Polish taxes, and did everything I could to become fully Polish, including renouncing many of the benefits of my American citizenship - at some point, it seems at least possible that my neighbors might come to see me as damn near fully Polish.

Similarly, is Paul Pogba, with his gloriously French hairdo, any less French because his parents were from Guinea and he has dark skin? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Pogba

What makes the Dolezal situation unique (besides the lies involved) is that it's someone who has the genetic markers to be a member of a locally advantaged group identifying as a member of a locally disadvantaged group.

But is that necessarily dangerous - assuming for the moment that the person's self-identification is complete and that she did not shirk that identification in situations where it was advantageous to do so?

Such a person would need to live in a black community or travel primarily in black social circles. In other words, they would need to be largely accepted as a member of the community. So what would be the harm of them identifying as a member of that community or becoming a leader of that community, particularly if that community has chosen her as a leader?

Indeed, wouldn't the effect of this being done on a certain scale be to demonstrate the arbitrariness of skin tone as a marker for race or ethnicity?

But again - the key here is that the individual's self-identification would need to be complete rather than self-serving, which will be exceedingly rare. Nonetheless, I fail to see how it would be in any manner dangerous.

It seems to me that at some point, in fact, the effect of transracialism/transethnicism would be to seriously undermine the ability of racial prejudice to function, as immediately visible features became a less reliable way of determining race or ethnicity.

Meanwhile, Sepp Blatter is about to get elected to yet another term despite the fact that John Oliver has gone after him magnificently on multiple occasions. The lesson? FIFA is even more powerful than the government of the United States.

The image of that incident should probably be engraved on Ventura's tombstone when he goes. It's the first thing even I think of when I hear his name - and I'm a Mets fan.

@kazzy So close - Pratt was the guy who got the walk to tie the game. Robin Ventura got the Grand Slam Single.

I'm not sure where you're getting that statistic, but that seems off to me. From everything I had ever read, even within the state of New York, the poorest counties were the Bronx, followed by Kings (Brooklyn), and various counties upstate. This seems to confirm that recollection - http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2013/12/16/household-income-and-poverty-rates-in-new-york-sta

That obviously doesn't address the curious case of Kiryas Joel (pun intended), but Orange County as a whole seems to be pretty middle of the pack compared to the rest of the state.

@zic The thing is that, at least you seem to be using the term, all RFRAs create a "positive right," so I'm not seeing how this is any different. The only differences Epps cites are the two mentioned above, but my point is that those aren't really differences because many federal courts have basically interpreted the federal RFRA in the same way as they would if it had the same language as in the Indiana proposed law.

I emphasized the "least-restrictive means" test in the HL case because that's how the law is written and thus that's what the law requires, whatever my personal feelings about it may be. I also said that I thought this should have been a fairly easy bar for the government to meet, but that it made almost no argument to meet that bar.

The issue of whether something was a "sincerely-held belief" and a "substantial burden" on that belief is absolutely extremely subjective. But that, again, is what's in just about all RFRA laws, and for various reasons courts have pretty uniformly said for 20 years that the party making a RFRA claim should just about always win on these prongs with virtually no inquiry. Personally, I have definite problems with this low of a bar, but it's the bar that's in place. Indeed, you may recall that I eventually came to the conclusion that HL should have lost on this ground, but it's hard to ignore that the bar the courts have set on this issue has long been so low as to be almost impossible to miss.

As I vented on Twitter the other day (I actually Tweeted!), there are some basic things that any story about a controversial law or proposed law absolutely needs to cover:

1. What does the law actually say? If there's a controversy about language in the law, then what, exactly is the language that's controversial? Prior to the last 24-48 hours, I couldn't find a single major media outlet story that quoted any part of the proposed law.
2. If the controversial consequences are not explicitly set forth in the text, why do opponents think it will have those consequences? This was almost impossible to find in most stories I saw until the last 24-48 hours.
3. Do other jurisdictions have similar laws? How many? This was in some major outlet articles I saw previously, but not many.
4. If so, how have courts in those other jurisdictions applied their similar laws to the controversial situation? Outside of a few posts in, of all places, conservative outlets, I've yet to see an article discussing this at all. It's also critical.
5. How does this law differ from other similar laws? The article you linked is one of the very few (perhaps only?) instance where I've seen this discussed at all. That would make it a good article, except that it skips question 4.
6. What do the bill's sponsors and supporters hope to accomplish with the bill? On this, most mainstream outlets I've seen have also been lacking, but some left-wing outlets have actually been quite good.

@zic I thought that's what you were referring to. Like I said above, even though that language is not in other RFRAs, at least 4 federal circuits have nonetheless interpreted RFRA as allowing it to be raised as a defense against a private party, so there's definitely precedent for that aspect of it. And the idea that RFRA can be raised as a defense by a for-profit business is, after the Hobby Lobby case, settled law (before that, there was a circuit split) even though the federal RFRA doesn't explicitly say that it can be raised by for-profit businesses. So while those two items are not explicitly in the text of the federal RFRA, they're just as much part of the federal RFRA as if they were explicitly in that text. In other words, the federal RFRA was ambiguous about those two items, and a good number of courts have found that they are implied. In that regard, Indiana's law is different only insofar as it makes explicit what a lot of courts have found to be implicit in the federal RFRA.

None of which, by the way, leads to the conclusion that Indiana's RFRA of necessity legalizes discrimination. I'm honestly not sure whether it does, and my sense is that it probably doesn't (and this is important) even though most of Indiana's GOP legislators almost certainly wanted it to.

The salient question is ultimately whether the government has a compelling interest in anti-discrimination laws and whether those laws can be enforced in a more narrow way, which is probably the ultimate question in most RFRA suits. I have strong doubts that courts would say that there is no compelling interest in enforcing anti-discrimination laws (there clearly is), and that uniform enforcement of anti-discrimination laws are the least restrictive means of advancing that interest.

But I certainly could be wrong. My problem is that the way the media has covered this story - as with most legal stories - has been utter crap.

because it’s not about the government finding least restrictive ways; Indiana gives this freedom to people to decide (rather like Stand Your Ground,) it creates a positive right for a person to not do business with you in discriminatory fashion. It doesn’t restrain government, it enables certain people. The judge, who doesn’t want to perform the SSM ceremony; the town clerk or court clerk who refuses to register a marriage certificate, the school principle who refuses to recognize the adoptive parent, partner to a biological parent.

@zic Do you have a link to your source for this conclusion? Because that doesn't seem to be an accurate description of what the Indiana RFRA says at all. At most, it contains a clause that allows RFRA to be asserted as a defense in a private suit, but there's actually a circuit split as to whether the federal RFRA allows this despite its lack of explicit language to that effect. So that aspect of Indiana's law is not without pretty major precedent.

@burt-likko I'm not following you here at all - my point in this comment has to do with the fact that RFRA isn't even relevant to the scenarios @dand is putting forth here - the RFRA question doesn't even need to get reached because there's already protection in place. If it's otherwise, then that would certainly seem to pretty strongly demonstrate the need for a much stronger RFRA in most people's eyes - you'd essentially be saying that Muslims and Jews cannot produce halal and kosher meats without violating discrimination laws.

But RFRA - whether or not you think it's a good idea - does not, in fact, come into play in these situations, whether because of the ministerial exception or the bona fide occupational requirement rule.

@dand I don't know enough about Kosher wineries. My guess is that @saul-degraw is probably right that the bona-fide occupational requirement exception would apply, especially if combined with the ministerial exception. Either way, I don't think RFRA would be necessary where you're talking about manufacturing an explicitly religious product that must meet explicitly religious requirements about who manufactures it.

RFRA comes into play for potential anti-discrimination law purposes in the instances of public accommodations law and clerical/secular jobs within religious organizations.

@dand @leeesq
1. My guess is that this would fall under the ministerial exception, which would make it a constitutional issue such that RFRA was irrelevant. I could be wrong about that, though, since the businesses themselves aren't religious institutions.
2. Even if, in the context of a kosher factory, most of the workers are not Jewish, and only supervised by rabbis, non-discrimination laws would, absent some sort of exception (whether RFRA or constitutional), still ordinarily raise questions about why only Jews could be supervisors. Absent such an exception, if someone sues on the grounds that a business is refusing to promote anyone who is not of a particular religion, it wouldn't be a defense to say "yeah, but we have lots of entry-level workers from other religions."

@mike-schilling It's worth mentioning that, even if people were talking about it, that scenario would actually be unconstitutional regardless of whether there was a RFRA. There's something called the "ministerial exception" to discrimination laws that would apply. I wrote about this a few thousand years ago: https://ordinary-times.com/blog/2010/12/14/repost-same-sex-marriage-and-the-religious-liberty-red-herring

That said, I'm still trying to figure out where I stand on Indiana's RFRA. It's pretty likelythat a lot of the worst claims about it would not come to fruition (even if most of the people who voted for it want that to happen). But the media coverage has been so consistently awful that I haven't been able to figure out whether some of the other, more specific and less drastic, assertions about the law would come to fruition.

In other words, it seems pretty unlikely to me that it would blanket legalize discrimination, even if that's what the legislator's wanted it to do. Whether it might legalize discrimination in specific hypothetical cases is something I need to do some research on, but haven't had the chance to do yet. My guess is that even then, though, it's fairly unlikely - it's worth mentioning that New Mexico had a RFRA at the time of the Elane Photography case.

@drs As others mentioned on Saul's original thread, myself included, it's not remotely as straightforward and simple as that. Commercial/retail lease renewals are not "take it or leave it" affairs, but instead the culmination of sometimes lengthy negotiations. That the space is custom-designed is, I assure you, something that the landlord factored into the equation in assessing the risk of losing the tenant, because just about every commercial/retail lease space is custom-built in at least some manner, meaning that finding a new tenant typically involves committing to a redesign (the costs of which, of course, will be folded into the new tenant's lease).

And again, commercial lease agreements, at least in the US, are almost always for multiple years, and quite often can be for a decade or more. Indeed, the length of a lease is just as important to a negotiation as the monthly rent payments, and the lease length is usually going to have a serious effect on the rent payments term (and vice versa), though both the size and direction of that effect may vary. That means several things - first of all, you're not often going to see all of the retail tenants in a given neighborhood being priced out by rent increases at the same time, though that's certainly a possibility; second of all, a tenant with a long lease may wind up being the beneficiary of effectively below-market rent for quite some time (which seems likely to be what happened in the Jeffrey's Toys case) if the neighborhood becomes in-demand after the lease is already in place; and third of all, the tenant is trading the possibility of a huge increase in rent at the end of the lease for the certainty of a stable (or relatively stable) rent throughout the life of the lease.

I linked in the previous thread to an article discussing how a whole bunch of Manhattan Starbucks stores are set to close up soon because of anticipated rent increases. But those rent increases aren't because the landlord is being short-sighted or stupid. They're because the original agreements were for 20 years, and the real estate market in those corridors has changed substantially in the interim: 20 years ago, Manhattan was only just beginning to leave the grittiness (nostalgia for which Saul has been very critical) of the 70s and 80s behind.

I'll also add this: none of this is to say that landlords can't be wrong or are infallible, just as independent business owners can be wrong and fallible. It is, however, to say that when a landlord and commercial tenant can't come to terms on a new lease, it's because both sides are often making very different bets: the landlord that the neighborhood will, in the long run, be more attractive to higher-paying tenants, the tenant that it won't be able to survive the length of the lease at the rent sought by the landlord (and thus that the rest of the neighborhood won't develop quickly enough). But "bets" is all these are, because nothing is for certain. Sometimes bets pay off, and sometimes they don't.

And sometimes things that look like they were a bad bet can turn out to have just been part of a bigger bet that pays off. In other words, sometimes a landlord might want to get rid of all of the existing tenants in order to reconfigure the entire building or property. Since leases are for terms of years, getting rid of all the tenants can take awhile, meaning a "ghost town" effect takes hold in the interim. The "bet" in that case isn't that the landlord will be able to find a higher paying tenant to replace the existing tenant in that space. It's that the landlord will be able to find higher paying tenants overall if it starts anew and takes a big hit in lost rent over the course of several years.

The part I find particularly chilling is this bit, which does not appear to be in dispute:

A “master treatment plan” from Harlem Hospital backs up the Astoria Bank worker’s story.

“Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and will state that Obama is not following her on Twitter,” the document reads.

Additionally, if her attorney is correct about why she was institutionalized, then that sounds like "contempt of cop." However, those circumstances are definitely murkier and the suit will hopefully shake out the truth on that front.

Yeah, definitely not the best written version of the story, but I couldn't remember where I originally saw it, which did a better job. This was sort of the first link that popped up when I searched for it.