Medley Centre – Waste And Shame

In a suburb just north of Rochester called Irondequoit there was a rather nice, bright and airy shopping mall (‘nice’ as those things go, mind you), first called The Irondequoit Mall when it opened in 1990.

For reasons that will always be something of a mystery to me*, it began failing as a retail outlet within ten years and has now been almost completely vacant for about a decade.  A few hucksters have appeared on the scene in the years since promising this and that to the town board, but nothing of any significance has come to pass.  Then, a couple of months ago, with the rather brutal winter afflicting the entire country and of course in this area as well, a bunch of pipes burst in the now unheated gigantic space and the results have been captured on film (or digits, as the case may be) and posted by one of the local news stations here.

A couple of samples:

Bottom line is, it’s a tear down at this point. 

Everyone’s sights are turning on the most recent con man developer, but I think it’s clear from the photographic evidence that the waste of this facility, both inside and outside, is not the product of one pipe bursting incident in January, although I’m sure that didn’t help things.  I mean, like I said, the place has been largely vacant for 10 years and it looks just the way it should.

I don’t know why the story interests me.  Part of it may be the role that “rumors” of “crime” at the mall around the year 2000 might have played in gutting the place.

There’s a race angle there, of course.

In any event I’m sure some scapegoat will be identified and pilloried somehow, but I don’t think this is as simple as all that.  We may be letting ourselves off the hook too easily.

Maybe more on this later.

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*  Probably the most reasonable explanation is that opening a mall in the Rochester area in 1990 is pretty bad timing, and we might have been pretty well saturated with malls by that time, but like a lot of things economic, you can fake it for a long time, covering losses, etc.

Lawyers Need Not Apply? The Debo Adegbile Affair.

I’m not sure what to make of that name, but he’s a lawyer in Washington DC. 

I mean after all, just about everyone in Washington DC is a lawyer. 

But overall of course they’re not the type of lawyer who might ever represent a criminal defendant.  This guy (Debo Adegbile) did, and now he’s apparently unfit for public office in the minds of many United States Senators.

I’m not an Obama partisan by any stretch, but this is a profoundly socially dangerous attack on the legal profession.  Every lawyer – and especially prosecutors – should have weighed in on this in a big way.  Fifty years ago that would have happened.

Not today.  The difference is probably worthy of another post.  But not today.

Bitcoin (Updated)

Suffice it to say, for now, that I have my doubts about any ‘virtual’ currency.  At some point, for some things, bricks and mortar are indispensable.  And I think money is one of them.

That said, I don’t think the idea of a virtual currency is worthy of mockery.  The nature of money is poorly understood by just about everyone:  politicians, journalists, lawyers, and even economists at the Fed. 

It’s easy to naysay after the fact:

The uncomfortable fact for Bitcoin believers is that every major prediction they’ve made has yet to come true. And as time passes and the inevitable fizzle-out of Bitcoin becomes visible, those believers will splinter. More will drop out of the cult. And the ones who remain will only grow more convinced, more zealous, more eager to share the good news.

Well, this is what happens with all kinds of investments.  Investing is an interesting business.  Commitment is an important part of any successful venture.  At what point does commitment become folly, more of a cult-like devotion than a rational appraisal of the merits of an idea or product?  There is no really good answer to that question.  It depends on too many things.  There are ideas that turn out spectacularly after decades of seeming failure; more often, there are seeming successes that blow to smithereens because there was never anything there in the first place.

The article appears in the New York Magazine.  New York qua New York has a personal stake in quashing economic and particularly monetary innovation, and most particularly anything that threatens to decentralize and fragment the financial “industry”, over which New York currently has a monopoly.

New York Magazine is pretentiously protecting its turf, in other words.

But that doesn’t mean I think Bitcoin is going anywhere.  In fact I don’t.

Update:  This is terribly sad, a 28 year old woman dead.  Or maybe it’s suspicious.  But I don’t want to go there this morning.

Thoughtful

Norm Pattis on privately operated drones, the FAA, negligence law, technological advances, and so on.

Highly recommended.

A Note On The Profession

Two seemingly unrelated pieces from legal blogs I follow:  this one from Scott Greenfield and this one from The Irreverent Lawyer. 

Of course I gave it away by writing “seemingly”.  Obviously, I’m now going to tell you how they are related, at least in my mind they are.

Greenfield is critiquing the latest gimmick proposal by Chief Judge Lippman to coerce require pro bono services out of would be lawyers.  That is, people who are not lawyers yet.  Law students, say.

Greenfield, as is so often the case, is both right and wrong:

The provision of legal representation to the poor is not a lawyer problem. It’s not a judge problem. And it’s most assuredly not a law student problem. It’s a societal problem, and each effort to tweak the system to alleviate the building pressure saves society, and its elected representatives, from the nasty duty to deal with it.

But let’s come back to that quote.

Irreverent is pointing out that it’s an absurd devaluation of what remains a fairly vigorous vetting process to behave as if anyone, vetted or no, can basically practice law without consequence.  Yet that is how things are, almost everywhere.  He quotes attorney Karyl Krug:

“Foolishly, I thought I would have to have a license in Arizona to call myself a lawyer in Arizona state court. I paid in excess of $2000 and went through a rigorous criminal and character background investigation lasting 6 months to get my Arizona law license. But it turns out that everybody, including the trial courts in the county with the biggest glut of death penalty cases Arizona has ever seen, can and did call whoever they wanted to a lawyer, with no criminal or other penalty whatsoever.

Now, I suppose there are big problems with enforcing the prohibitions on the unauthorized practice of law.  The libertarian in me abhors the idea of more criminal prosecutions.  I mean, enough already.  On the other hand with  civil litigation (private) enforcement you’re just going to wind up suing the judgment proof which, you know, nobody does.  Ugh. 

Regulatory enforcement?  Take a look at how attorney grievance committees work and let me know what you think.

But let’s not kid ourselves that there isn’t a real problem.  I have found myself on more than one occasion “competing” with “legal advice” from laymen to clients or prospective clients that is utterly bizarre, along the lines of taking the position that outcomes would be different if you just spoke the magic words to the court.  Something to do with the Queen of England and gold fringes on the flag in the courtroom.  Others have had similar experiences.  But I attribute this to too many – far too many – outcomes that make no sense and can’t be explained rationally other than to say that the courts favor the powerful.  People quite understandably will not accept such an explanation, and when they get done with their increasingly bizarre and insane explanations they will turn to violence.  If nothing changes, that is.

And how are things going to change?  Well, the profession has to do it.  There isn’t anyone else.  And it’s only reasonable to expect that those on the receiving end will have to lead the way.  That means criminal defense lawyers.  And personal injury Plaintiff lawyers.  When the judge denies your criminal defendant’s well-reasoned motion to dismiss for no good reason in the face of some garbage form opposition from the DA’s office; or when the judge grants insurance defense counsel’s motion for summary judgment for no good reason other than that he thinks no one will make a fuss…..well, make a fuss.  A big one.

So here’s where Greenfield is wrong.  The gap in legal service to the poor is a lawyer problem and very much a “judge problem”.  A lawyer, almost any lawyer, would be able to make a living or even do quite well if judges actually followed the law and applied it even-handedly.  Because if they did that, the little guy would win with some frequency,* whereas as things stand now a judge might pay lip service to how valuable your services are by tossing off a phrase or two about it when he screws over you and your client (that’s a common practice), but he’s still screwing over you and your client and rendering your knowledge of the law and your skill in using it and arguing it worthless.

And this change in judicial behavior would also have the salutary effect of doing justice, righting wrongs and making adjustments in wealth from those who have cheated or lied or worse, to those who have been victimized by that – and their lawyers, too.

This is what the rule of law is supposed to accomplish.  When you have it.

And then the pro bono thing tends to take care of itself.  And the citizenry is less liable to be taken in by charlatans that claim to be lawyers but aren’t.  And the citizenry recovers at least some modicum of respect for lawyers and the legal profession because things work a little bit more like they are supposed to, because when they don’t people tend to blame lawyers even though judges are the real problem.

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*  There’s a whole legal industry to be made opposing foreclosures and evictions.  Without making the case in this post, it seems to me none of the big banks should be entitled to foreclose on anyone; and that people being evicted for non-payment are being denied equal protection of the laws.  The arguments in support of both propositions are sound and not difficult.  What’s difficult is getting judges to yield to sound arguments when that means they’d have to tell the powers that be:  “You lose.”

Quick Political Note – GOP And The Debt Ceiling

The Republicans in the US House of Representatives are so pathetic at this point that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has to tell her troops not to “gloat” about their latest tactical victory.  No kidding.

I don’t know what is worse:  that the GOP threatened to refuse to raise the debt limit (you know, “government shut down” time again) unless some goodies would be dispensed to one of their core constitutencies (military pensioners); or that when they were called on it they caved.  Both are so miserably inept.  The GOP shows you craven, unprincipled pandering competing with despicable cowardice – a complete and almost nauseating lack of character or fortitude – and asks people for their votes.  It would be funny.  Maybe it is anyway.

Ugh.

The Woody Allen Case (Updated)

I do not know the parties at all.  I am not a big Woody Allen fan.  I am not a big Mia Farrow fan.

One way or another, Dylan Farrow has been through hell.  Either because Woody Allen did to her what she says, or because her mother has made her believe that he did that even though it didn’t happen.  I mean, those are the only two alternatives here, so that much is certain.

If I had to pick a side it would be Allen, for two very basic reasons:  no previous or subsequent similar allegations; and the fact (which I am trying to verify) that the allegations of abuse were not made until after Allen had started an affair with his current wife (Soon-Yi), which understandably greatly upset Mia Farrow for a lot of reasons.

I wouldn’t accuse anyone of “lying” here.  All parties may believe what they are saying even though they can’t all be right.  But this is a very good example of a case where you cannot be certain and you have to be comfortable with being uncertain.  When defense lawyers are asked:  how do you defend those you know are guilty? – this kind of situation is one very good answer.  Most of the time you don’t know.

Update:  Well, no wonder I was having trouble nailing down the timing of the first emergence of these allegations that Woody Allen sexually abused Dylan Farrow.  Look at the NYS Supreme Court opinion from 1993.  It bounces around from time to time and person to person in a somewhat chaotic fashion as it recites “fact findings”, which, in a case like this, it’s extremely important to get right.  There are some places in the opinion where the only time frame referred to for an important development or even is “…in 1990″.  Ugh.

In any case, it’s apparent that Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi began developing in 1990 when he started taking her to Knicks games.  The first independently verifiable* indication that Mia Farrow had concerns about Allen’s relationship with Dylan occurred in the fall of that year, with a therapist named Coates who opined:

I understood why she [Mia Farrow - ed.] was worried because it [Mr. Allen's relationship with Dylan] was intense, …I did not see it as sexual, but I saw it as inappropriately intense because it excluded everybody else and it placed a demand on a child for a kind of acknowledgment that I felt should not be placed on a child…

 

So by the fall of 1990 Mia Farrow is expressing concerns to a therapist about Allen’s conduct with Dylan.  Whether the concern was that this conduct was of a sexual nature is not clear, at least from the opinion, though the possibility was considered and rejected by the therapist herself.  At roughly the same time a relationship is beginning between Allen and Soon-Yi, which apparently developed into something romantic no later than fall of 1991.  Again, during roughly this same time period, Dylan enters therapy with a Dr. Schultz in April of 1991, and was formally adopted by Allen, finalized by December, 1991.  It was just a few weeks later in the following month - January 13 of 1992 – that Mia Farrow learned that Allen had been romantically involved with Soon-Yi.

This led to a lot of strife in the Farrow-Allen-Polyglot household(s), obviously.

The molestation incident described in Dylan’s open letter allegedly occurred in early August of 1992, more than 7 months after Mia Farrow had definitively learned of Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi.  August 4th, I believe is the exact date but the opinion is frustratingly vague about it.  Dylan is alleged to have told her mother about it on August 5, the next day.  On August 6th Dylan saw a doctor and the report was made and presumably all hell broke loose.  On August 9th Dylan was examined and no evidence of sexual abuse was found.

The timeline undercuts (Doesn’t rule it out entirely, but undercuts it) the case against Allen, for two reasons:  

1)  He was openly involved with Soon-Yi and had been romantically involved with her for at least a year, probably longer.  He was in an acrimonious dispute with Mia Farrow for months.  It would seem bizarre beyond description that he would pick a time like that to molest his adopted 7 year old daughter.  

2)  Mia Farrow’s anger at Allen that had begun in earnest in January showed no signs of abating, and every indication of hardening and deepening by then.  This doesn’t mean she is “lying”, but it does make it more likely that she’s looking for horrible things to think and say about Allen.

Bottom line is, the allegations don’t add up. They’re not impossible, but they are very, very unlikely to be true.