Looking Up Potential Jurors on Social Media

Last year, when teaching jury selection and thinking about the voir dire proceedings in our animal rescue cases, I came across a case in which the parties asked permission from the court to look up the social media profiles of potential jurors and the court refused. The appellate court thought this was proper. This seemed completely loony to me: why would you even ask permission to access publicly available information that people volunteer about themselves, let alone be rebuffed? I cannot find the original case, but I did find a useful summary of the law on the Bloomberg platform, which you can read here in full. Here is the summary they offer:

  1. Check to see if there is a court order or decisional law in your jurisdiction governing reviewing the social media of jurors, and review relevant bar association decisions.
  2. To the extent it is consistent with other obligations and there is sufficient time, trial lawyers should diligently learn what they can from public sources on the internet. Not doing so promptly risks waiving an objection to an unqualified juror. [THIS IS WHAT I WOULD HAVE EXPECTED. IT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE. H.A.]
  3. It should go without saying that trial lawyers should not violate the law by accessing private information on the internet.
  4. Trial lawyers may never misrepresent who they are or why they seek information. This goes for their agents as well.
  5. Trial lawyers should use great care to avoid doing any internet research that might be considered a communication with jurors. Communicating with jurors, even inadvertently, poses the risk of an ethical violation and is potentially offensive to jurors. This means not viewing a person’s LinkedIn profile unless the notification function is disabled. Great care should be taken not to visit other social media that sends an automatic notification regarding who has visited. If the trial lawyer does not understand the technology, he needs to hire somebody who does or forgo using the technology.
  6. Like almost everything that happens at trial, whether and how much to research jurors is ultimately a matter of judgment. A trial lawyer must balance her desire for information about jurors with competing priorities such as preparation of witness examinations and arguments. And a trial lawyer must balance her desire for information with the risk of offending a juror who may feel offended if the juror learns that the lawyer has accessed publicly available information that the juror nevertheless considered private.
  7. If a lawyer finds juror misconduct, he or she should consult the relevant ethics opinions of the jurisdiction. Given the other demands of trial, it probably makes sense to have the relevant ethical decisions on hand and at the ready in the event that juror misconduct is discovered.

Moreover, the ABA website points to several cases in which courts have recognized an affirmative duty to conduct social media research on potential jurors: in today’s world, it can offer an important corrective to things people choose not to disclose in open court. Why would someone divulge private information on Instagram but not in voir dire? Perhaps because people have a warped perception of their own privacy. My students, who have spent summers in lower courts, have told me of situations in which jurors are asked very personal questions (such as whether they were ever sexually assaulted) in open court, including in front of other jurors. I would never ask such a question of a stranger in public; that’s what jury questionnaires are for. But even for less egregious prying, there are ways in which one’s Insta or Facebook can reveal discrepancies and additional details to a degree that I would think essential for a competent lawyer.

Will the Protean Quality of Profiling Overcome Pretext Stop Reform?

In 2014, Chuck Epp, Steve Maynard-Moody and Don Haider-Markel published their wonderful book Pulled Over. The book is based on a survey of, and follow-up interviews with, more than 2,000 drivers in the tri-state Kansas City metropolitan area, about their experiences being stopped on the road. They learned important things about how the police use routine stops for trifling traffic offenses as fishing expeditions for other possible crimes.

The legal background is as follows: in order to search someone’s car, the police need probable cause that evidence of crime is in the car. The scope of the search has to follow the probable cause (e.g., if there is probable cause that the driver stole a baby elephant from the zoo, there is no permission to search the glove compartment.) Traffic offenses, with the notable exception of a DWI, do not usually encompass the possibility that there is something inside the car related to the offense. Therefore, suspicion of a traffic offense–even when the officer sees it happen–does not manufacture enough justification to search the inside of the car beyond a cursory inspection for weapons. It certainly does not permit the police to open containers within the car, where drugs might be found.

But a traffic offense does manufacture enough justification to conduct a quick stop of the car, and things can develop from there. While interacting with the driver, the officer might give the car a cursory look, to see if anything stands out; the officer might walk a narcotics dog around the vehicle; the officer might ask some questions (“where do you live?” “where are you going?”) to see if any further suspicion develops; and, most importantly, the officer might ask the driver for consent to search the car, which will grant permission for the search even if individualized suspicion is not present.

This, of course, creates a tempting incentive for police officers to stop vehicles for trifling traffic offenses, especially when they have a hunch (and no more than a hunch) that the driver is mixed up in something more serious. At worst, they haven’t broken the law; no harm, no foul. At best, the interaction during the stop could mushroom into justification to search the car, which might yield something. You might think that courts should inquire into whether the traffic violation was no more than a pretext for the stop, but courts do their very best to stop short of such inquiry. In Whren v. U.S. (1996), the Supreme Court held that inquiries into the subjective state of mind of police officers are out of bounds, and that the Fourth Amendment’s requirements are satisfied once there is an objective justification for the stop, no matter how trifling the offense is. Courts in some states, like Washington, have held such stops unlawful based on their state constitution–but even if you’re fortunate to live in such a state, you have to have solid proof that the stop was pretextual.

The problem is likely obvious to readers: without concrete evidence of, say, racial profiling based on how a driver looks or what kind of car they drive, which will be present only in rare cases, cops routinely lie on the stand that they have genuine and pressing concerns and a passion for traffic enforcement, and courts routinely maintain the pretense that these stops are earnest and genuine, which presumably holds up the legitimacy of the system. Pulled Over confirms that this indeed happens on a systematic level. Epp, Maynard-Moody and Haider-Markel found that drivers experience two different kinds of stops: traffic stops for legitimate offenses (“do you know why I stopped you?”) that end in a citation or a warning, and investigative stops (for things as minor as a broken taillight) that then lead to inquiries and fishing expeditions and end, at best, with a bitter, cynical, humiliated driver and at worst, if things escalate, in an arrest.

California is now trying a solution to this problem. Following reforms approved by police commissions in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the California legislature has enacted Senate Bill 50, which you can read verbatim here. The idea is this:

This bill would prohibit a peace officer from stopping or detaining the operator of a motor vehicle or bicycle for a low-level infraction, as defined, unless a separate, independent basis for a stop exists or more than one low-level infraction is observed. The bill would state that a violation of these provisions is not grounds for a defendant to move for return of property or to suppress evidence. The bill would authorize a peace officer who does not have grounds to stop a vehicle or bicycle, but can determine the identity of the owner, to send a citation or warning letter to the owner.

The bill would authorize local authorities to enforce a nonmoving or equipment violation of the Vehicle Code through government employees who are not peace officers.

I remember the jeremiads on Nextdoor when this was first proposed in San Francisco. The concern was that the city would completely give up on traffic enforcement, resulting in accidents and victims. As a two-wheeled vehicle rider (first a motorcycle and now a cargo e-bike) I’m very sensitive to traffic enforcement concerns. But it looks like the worries are overblown, because the low level offense list in the bill is as follows:

(A) A violation related to the registration of a vehicle or vehicle equipment in Sections 4000 and 5352.

(B) A violation related to the positioning or number of license plates when the rear license plate is clearly displayed, in Sections 5200, 5201, and 5204.

(C) A violation related to vehicle lighting equipment not illuminating, if the violation is limited to a single brake light, headlight, rear license plate, or running light, or a single bulb in a larger light of the same, in Sections 24252, 24400, 24600, 24601, and 24603.

(D) A violation related to vehicle bumper equipment in Section 28071.

(E) A violation related to bicycle equipment or operation in Sections 21201 and 21212.

Since the police can capture these minor violations through filming equipment and send citations to people, the bill strikes a good balance between traffic safety and civil rights preservation. It also reflects a clear-eyed perspective on the protean quality of race stops. Efforts to legislate against pretexts, as such, are bound to fail, as police departments will respond by getting cops to testify better on the stand about the reasons for the stops. Efforts to dig up evidence of pretexts via departmental emails will do no more than push these policies underground, into Snapchat and the like. But this effort curtails the use of minor traffic offenses at the root, by preventing these stops in the first place.

I’ve been trying to think how police officers might subvert the bill’s purpose, and the only loophole I can find is this: the bill does allow the stop if “there is a separate, independent basis to initiate the stop or more than one low-level infraction is observed.” We will have reduced the number of fishing expeditions originating with, say, a broken taillight, but such stops will still happen if, say, two of these minor traffic offenses are observed. I

I really hope that someone is doing evaluative research on this. If so, and if someone’s testing this using a survey instrument similar to the one in Pulled Over, the questions I’d be interested in are:

  1. Has the overall number of traffic stops declined?
  2. Has the racial composition of stopped drivers changed?
  3. Has the make and appearance of stopped cars changed?
  4. How many stops now begin with the cop asking the driver, “Do you know why I stopped you?”
  5. How many stops now result in car searches?
  6. How many stops now result in the arrest of the driver? In any violent incident between the cop and the driver?

If any readers are aware of a study currently being conducted, please let me know in the comments.

Prison Systems Still Making COVID19-Era Mistakes

The last chapter of our book FESTER, which is already out from University of California Press, is called “The Next Plague.” We wrote it to warn everyone in prison administration, prison litigation, and politics, that if considerable reforms are not sought–chief among which is an aggressive 50% reduction in prison population, which we believe is feasible without a corresponding rise in crime rates–the next plague will provoke calamities in the same way this one has.

Two new pieces of information suggest that things are going the same way they had pre- and during COVID19. The first has to do with prison overcrowding and comes to me from the ever-attentive prison conditions activist Allison Villegas (thanks, Allison!) who diligently follows up the periodic population counts. Take a look at the latest:

Not only is the total number back up to 109,000–more than before COVID–but some prisons are so overcrowded that it looks as if Plata (which required population reductions to 137.5% capacity) never happened. Norco is at 171% capacity; Avenal is at 162% capacity. If Plata applied per individual prison, rather than system-wide (which would make more sense, as we explain in ch1 of FESTER), six prisons would currently be in violation of that standard. The entire system is at 117% capacity (design capacity is fewer than 79,000 people), Plata-compliant but not by much. This should never be the case if we are to maintain minimal healthcare standards and in many ways is the root of much of the evil we saw in Spring 2020.

The second piece of information comes from my colleague Dorit Rubinstein-Reiss. It is a Ninth Circuit decision regarding government accountability for the COVID vaccination fiasco in Oregon prisons, which you can read verbatim here. The lawsuit was brought by people incarcerated in Oregon, and claims that, during COVID-19, they were categorically assigned to a lower priority vaccination tier than correctional officers. In FESTER, we document a similar struggle in California, where the California Department of Public Health initially scheduled incarcerated people to receive the vaccine in tier A2, and then scratched that, to everyone’s amazement. At work, as we explain in the book, and as I explained in this op-ed, was a misguided zero-sum mentality that vaccines in prison somehow come at the expense of vaccines to other people–when, in fact, prisons and other congregated facility acted as incubators and loci of superspreader events. But here in California, the struggle was that, though prison guards were prioritized for the vaccine, they refused to take it, and their union was willing to go all the way to the Supreme Court to fight against it, with Gov. Newsom and AG Bonta’s support. We lost that fight, which is shameful, and this Oregon case is yet more proof of how and why the house always wins these kinds of lawsuits, no matter how meritorious they are: in this case, it turns out that Governor Allen and other state officials have immunity against the lawsuit that stems from the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (“PREP”) Act.

Here’s how the parallel fight went down in Oregon:

The Oregon Health Authority then published guidance recommending phased allocation of the vaccines. In Phase 1A, healthcare personnel, residents in long-term care facilities, and corrections officers were eligible for vaccines. In Phase 1B, teachers, childcare workers, and persons age 65 or older were eligible. Neither phase categorically covered adults in custody (“AICs”), but AICs who met the eligibility criteria were prioritized for vaccination on the same terms as the general population. For example, all AICs who were 65 or older were eligible for vaccination in Phase 1B. The Governor’s initial rollout of the vaccines was consistent with OHA’s guidance.

In response, Plaintiffs amended their complaint to add class claims for injunctive relief and damages, alleging that the vaccine prioritization of corrections officers, but not all AICs, violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. On February 2, 2021, the district court certified a provisional class of all AICs who had not yet been offered a vaccine and granted Plaintiffs
preliminary injunctive relief, ordering the immediate prioritization of approximately 11,000 AICs for vaccination. Defendants complied with the court’s order.

In September 2021, when vaccines were no longer scarce, the district court dismissed as moot Plaintiffs’ claim for injunctive relief because all Oregonians (ages twelve and over) were eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine and vaccine supply in Oregon exceeded demand. Plaintiffs’ damages claims, however, remained.

Get it? After everyone got sick and died, then the vaccine was available, but by then, of course, the claim was moot. But even the revival of the case is of no avail, because the Ninth Circuit “conclude[s] that the vaccine
prioritization claim falls within the scope of covered claims because, under the PREP Act, “administration” of a covered countermeasure includes prioritization of that countermeasure when its supply is limited.”

This is exactly the point we make in FESTER. What with prevarications, immunities, and continuances, courts adjudicating prison health matters as such are the worst place to seek justice in a timely manner. And since politicians know that protecting incarcerated people, particularly those who are old and infirm, is never an electorally wise move, and that shortchanging and sandbagging the prison population can happen with immunity, how is there ever going to be motivation to vaccinate and decarcerate, the two things that must happen the next time a big one comes along?

The Zero-Sum Game of Epidemiology

One of the problems of siloed reporting is that, in times of serious conflict, each side can remain isolated from news of suffering and horror on the other side. It’s understandable that parties to the horrific war in the Middle East can’t muster the attention, let alone the compassion, to read news from the “other side,” which explains why a San Francisco man telling of the slaughter of five family members by Hamas was met with jeers, horns, and pig noises, and why Matt Dorsey’s request that the sexual violence against Israeli women be similarly denounced yielded yells “liar” from my fellow San Franciscans. In my very institution, an educated, erudite, well-dressed man, a former colleague of many years, stood before an audience of 200 and ascribed facts of the massacre to “disinformation.”

But the problem goes both ways, and the Israeli press is not reporting on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza (nor is it easy for international orgs to do so). The Israeli’s public’s attention and capacity to feel for Gazans is pretty low. And, as Itamar Mann explains, if there’s anything good about the Hague tribunal taking place as I write, it is that it airs some of these realities, which we ignore at everyone’s peril.

There’s one particular aspect to this disaster that we cannot and should not ignore, regardless of where one stand politically: the war is unearthing a serious public health crisis, including diseases. And as Chad Goerzen and I explain in our forthcoming book Fester, seeing disease through a siloed zero-sum game framework is a horrific mistake. Here’s NPR covering the WHO report about this public health crisis:

MARTÍNEZ: All right, wow, so really bad. How have things gotten so bad?

DANIEL: Well, Gaza’s health infrastructure has really crumbled amidst Israel’s bombardment and ground offensive. The WHO says more than half of Gaza’s hospitals are no longer functioning. And that’s because Israel has accused Hamas of harboring fighters and weapons in and around those hospitals and under them in tunnels, putting them in the line of fire [H.A.: this wording implies the accusations were not true; they were, of course]. Plus, the conditions inside Gaza are a perfect storm for the spread of infectious disease. There is intense overcrowding, colder winter weather and a lack of clean water, sanitation and proper nutrition, which are services that are difficult to secure under Israel’s near-total siege of Gaza. Here’s Amber Alayyan, deputy program manager for Doctors Without Borders in the Palestinian territories.

AMBER ALAYYAN: It’s just sort of a cauldron of possibility of infectious disease. This really just is an infectious disaster in waiting.

MARTÍNEZ: And that brings us back, I suppose, to the World Health Organization’s prediction that disease could endanger more lives than military action.

DANIEL: Exactly. And it’s why global health groups are racing to ramp up disease surveillance efforts.

Anyone getting sick and dying from a preventable disease in the shadow of conflict is a tragedy. There are heartbreaking reports of Gazan children suffering from horrendous diarrhea and infections. But when one is overwhelmed with grief and rage it’s hard to see that. What should not be hard to see, though, is that viruses and epidemics don’t take sides.

I’ve had plenty of opportunity to see the zero-sum game mentality in action. In Chapter 4 of Fester we recount the public debate about vaccination priority. You’ll be able to notice the same thinking error problem right away:

Advocates were trying to combat disturbing news: kowtowing to public pressure not to prioritize prisoners, CDPH removed prison populations from tier 1B of vaccination. This misguided zero-sum thinking—based, of course, on the myth of prison impermeability—reflected similarly worrisome developments nationwide. In Colorado, for example, the first draft of the vaccine distribution plan prioritized the prison population, but the governor later backtracked, “sa[ying] during a media briefing that prisoners would not get the vaccine before ‘free people.’” His response caused public uproar and was reported in national media outlets.

Similarly, in Wisconsin, parroting the old law-and-order playbook, assemblymember Mark Born tweeted, “The committee that advises @GovEvers and his department tasked with leading during this pandemic is recommend- ing allowing prisoners to receive the vaccine before 65 year old grandma?”

And, in Tennessee, health officials placed the state’s prison population last in line, because a state advisory panel tasked with vaccine prioritization, which acknowledged that prison populations were high-risk, concluded that prioritizing them could be a “public relations nightmare.” Documents reported that the panel understood the problem: “If we get hit hard in jails it affects the whole community. Disease leaves corrections facilities and reenters general society as inmates cycle out of their sentencing,” the document read, adding that when inmates get the disease, “it is the taxpayers that have to absorb the bill for treatment.” But while corrections workers were bumped up to one of the earliest slots, incarcerated people—including those who met the state’s age qualifications for earlier vaccinations—were relegated to the last eligible group.

I knew this was public health idiocy even as it was happening, and wrote an op-ed about that for the Chron. In addition to the heightened mortality and supbpar healthcare in prisons, there was another important consideration that should have led everyone, bleeding-heart liberals and hard-line law-and-order folks alike, to clamor for prison vaccines:

Second, prisons must be prioritized because vaccinating behind bars protects everyone in the state. It is imperative to understand the role that prison outbreaks play in the overall COVID picture of the state. As of today, all but two CDCR facilities have COVID-19 outbreaks, and numerous prisons have suffered serious outbreaks with hundreds of cases. Months of analysis I have conducted, superimposing the CDCR infection rates onto the infection in California counties at large, show correlations between pandemic spikes in prison and in the surrounding and neighboring counties. Vaccinating people behind bars protects not only them, but also you and yours.

The result was disastrous but predictable. In Chapter 5 of Fester we show how prison outbreaks impacted the overall COVID-19 picture in California. Our epidemiological analysis, which relies on the Bradford Hill criteria, included a counterfactual model in which the outbreaks in prison were controlled. The results were striking:

Together, these show that due to the extraordinarily high prevalence of COVID-19 cases inside CDCR facilities, particularly during the year 2020, these facilities had a large influence on their regions, far more than their rela- tively small population and isolation would suggest. Note the difference between the total casualties in Marin County with and without the counter- factual—58 deaths, 22 percent of the COVID-19 deaths in Marin for this period—and the difference between the total casualties in California with- out CDCR facilities—11,974 deaths, or 18.5 percent of the COVID-19 deaths in California for this period. Furthermore, the outbreaks in San Quentin and CDCR occurred before vaccinations were publicly available and before effective treatments for COVID-19 were developed, making them particularly high impact on mortality.

That’s close to 12,000 preventable deaths in the state of California–outside prisons–that are causally attributable to the outbreaks in prisons. We point this out because even people who can’t find compassion for their fellow Californians behind bars should wake up to the fact that, if the incarcerated population ails, all of us are put at risk.

Israeli newspaper coverage does not feature the dire epidemiological threat, because people’s attention is focused on the more direct existential risk from the war (especially with the possibility of a northern front becoming more and more real every day.) In the overall noise of political partisanship we could forget how densely populated the Middle East is, and how soldiers go in and out of Gaza. We also forget how easily epidemics travel the world and could quickly spread beyond the Middle East. I realize I’m speaking to a wall of partisanship, rage, and fear. I worry that the halt in the process of releasing hostages and prisoners is going to make this as much of a quickening sand situation as Lebanon was, and that eventually the public health outcomes will decide this conflict, to the detriment of everyone.

BREAKING NEWS: In Blow to Netanyahu Government Agenda, Israeli High Court of Justice Restores Reasonableness Ground for Judicial Review

Today, the High Court of Justice published its 697-page decision (!), in which it granted the Movement for Quality Government and numerous other civil rights organizations a resounding victory against the Knesset and, especially, the Netanyahu government’s agenda to curb judicial review. By a 8-7 majority, the Court found that the amendment to the Basic Law, canceling the reasonableness ground for judicial review (a powerful tool for curbing government behavior that is technically lawful but makes no sense or excessively infringes on people’s rights), is invalid.

In a couple of days, I promise to provide a précis of the decision in English. For now, you can peruse the entire decision verbatim below.

Malcolm Feeley on the Universities’ Stammering on Antisemitism

(pictured above: architect Shari Mendes assisting military troops in handling female genocide victims.)

Prof. Malcolm Feeley, my legendary PhD supervisor and, for the last 25 years, my mentor, coauthor, and good friend, is one of the pioneering giants of the law and society field. He is universally admired and loved, and for good reason. Amidst the many characteristics that make him an outstanding researcher and thinker is his almost mythical ability to make sharp and revealing analogies across space and time. For example, in his amazingly creative address upon receiving the Paul Tappan prize, he compared convict transportation in the Early Modern era to electronic monitoring (I commented about it here). In his work on guilty pleas (Malcolm is the granddaddy of lower criminal court research) he made the paradigm-generating analogy between the prosecutor-driven generation of plea bargains to the transition from bazaars to supermarkets.

In an excellent opinion piece in The Hill, Prof. Feeley, who taught and researched at elite universities for fifty years (including a long stretch at Berkeley and respectable stints in academic administration, including as the President of the Law & Society Association and the Chair of the JSP program at Berkeley), draws on his formidable analogy powers to diagnose the reason for the stuttering university responses to the eruption of antisemitism on campus. It is a bitter, cutting analogy between the decisions faced by the university presidents and those faced by President Roosevelt during World War II not to save the Jews from the concentration camps. He explains:

Early in World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt learned of Nazi plans to systematically murder European Jews. Later, advisors urged him to order the bombing rail lines leading to Auschwitz. He rejected their pleas. Actions to prevent these murders, he responded, would turn the war into a campaign to save Jews, and in so doing undermine American’s support for the war.

And now?

On Oct. 7, we witnessed the most deadly pogrom, excepting the Holocaust, against Jews in modern history, and thousands of people danced in the streets, not only in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran, but also on campuses in Philadelphia, New York, Cambridge, Ithaca, and Berkeley. At the time, no university official on a major U.S. campus that I know of unequivocally denounced this action as a pogrom against Jews and excoriated their students and faculty for celebrating the occasion.

Two months later, on Dec. 5, presidents of three major universities at which celebrations of the pogroms took place — Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania — were questioned at a hearing of the House Education and Workforce Committee. Their collective responses were even feebler than those issued immediately after the pogrom. When called upon to say that the calls for the support of the pogrom of Oct. 7 were antithetical to Harvard’s institutional values, President Claudine Gay could only say, “I personally oppose this,” and then parse the speech/action distinction, defend speech, and announce that Harvard had beefed up security for its Jewish students. Nowhere did she say such views had no place on Harvard’s campus, and that she was ashamed to have such students and faculty at Harvard. President Sally Kornbluth of MIT and President Elizabeth Magill of Penn, fared only slightly better. All reacted defensively. None showed moral clarity, or demonstrated leadership. All obfuscated. At best, they seemed managers trying to cope rather than inspired leaders of noble institutions. At these universities, where almost all the students receive A’s, these educators failed.

This is not because they are anti-Semites or embrace the cause of Hamas. Rather, I think it is because they face the FDR dilemma: If they single out, and in no uncertain terms condemn, anti-Semites on their campuses, they run the risk of alienating a significant portion of the social justice constituency that they have helped to create and in part to whom they owe their positions.

You should read the piece in its entirety.

Malcolm also includes a factual tidbit I was unaware adds a piece of information that I didn’t know, but which doesn’t surprise me: a colleague of ours hired a survey firm to do a poll at Berkeley, and it turns out that 53% of the students enthusiastically shouting “from the river to the sea”–folks enrolled at the best public university in the United States–don’t know which river and which sea, along with much other breathtaking ignorance.

I deeply and fervently hope that the many thousands of academics around the world who admire and respect Malcolm will take the time to read his opinion piece and consider where they stand vis-á-vis the poison on campus. I also hope that they read the heartbreaking article in the New York Times about the horrific and systematic rapes perpetuated by Hamas terrorists during the October 7 massacre.

If Someone Says, “Thanks for a Great Semester!” Give Them a Turing Test

Happy Christmas to those who celebrate the birth of their Savior, and a Happy Jewish Carpenter day to those who eat Chinese food! In lieu of Frankincense and Myrhh, I bring to you today a higher(?) ed story to gladden (or besmirch) your Yuletide.

Because working full time at UC Law SF and studying full time at the GTU (and parenting full time, of course) was apparently not enough, this fall I taught, via Zoom, an undergraduate course at UC Berkeley which, last I checked, was the highest ranked public university in the nation. I kept most of my tales of woe about this experience off the socials and this blog, though a handful of regular readers (specifically, those who had professional dealings with me that were related to said class) got a running commentary of my experiences with our bright young minds (perhaps more of a running commentary than they would wish for). I may some day share more about this peculiar adventure and what it taught me about the future of humanity. Today, however, offered such a remarkable coda to the experience that it’s just too good not to share.

This morning at 9:35am, I received an email notification that “Melany’s OtterPilot Has Joined Your Meeting.” Seeing as my usual class time was Tuesday at 9:40am, this would appear to be a praiseworthy and timely log-in, except for two facts: (1) the entire semester–including the final exam–ended weeks ago; and (2) today is the day after Xmas which, even if you were spectacularly obtuse and spent your semester under a rock, would have clued you in to the fact that no class would be taking place.

I was ablaze with curiosity, so I logged on as well, to see who I would encounter there. And, indeed, right there in the Zoom room was a black rectangle representing Melany–no different than the one that represented Melany all semester long–waiting for me. I popped on my camera and said, “well, hello there,” and the rectangle disappeared.

A brief Internet search explained that OtterPilot is an AI thingy that essentially attends virtual classes for you so that you don’t have to. It is quite possible that this was in wide use throughout the semester, i.e., for all I know, you guys, I spent the last four months of my one wild and precious life lecturing to 180 bots.

If that was the case, it would certainly explain (1) the turned-off cameras (“respect people’s privacy/trauma/inconvenience/camera shyness”); (2) the lack of participation (“take into account that they’ve been through a pandemic”) and (3) the, how shall we say, lackluster executive function, general knowledge, and communication skills that were in evidence throughout.

Joyeux Noel to all!

AJS Annual Meeting, Day 3

What a wonderful day I’ve had at the AJS meeting today! I highly recommend that every academic attend an annual meeting as if they were attending a science fiction or anime conference, and go to panels that strike their fancy and are interesting to them. Today I gave myself license to attend panels on topics that interest me deeply, including art and music, and learned a lot.

I arrived late this morning for the Jews Imagining Empire panel, and so missed Yaniv Feller’s presentation, in which he proposed to frame early modern Germany as a real or (after Anderson) imagined empire. I did, however, enjoy the Q&A, in which people asked whether there were features that distinguished empires from nation states, and in what ways are there empires without colonies. Yaniv said something interesting: empires support the nation state by defining the “other”.

Then, Roger Lernon talked about Franz Kafka’s writing about imperial scenarios from faraway lands (“The Great Wall of China,” “The New Advocate” about Grece, and “The Hunter Gracchus” about Rome), to express his ambivalence toward the Habsburg empire, as a Jew in the crux of emancipation and nationalism. Finally, Katalin Rac introduced us to two people I had never heard of before: the Turkologist Ármin Vámbéry (1832–1913) and the Islamicist Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), both of whom were Jewish and whose travels and studies raise interesting questions about the relative liberalism of different empires.

The next panel, Jewish Art and Architecture, opened with Daniel Stein Kokin’s presentation about Perli Pelzig‘s prolific artistic career. Pelzig was a sculptor and muralist, whose work can be seen all over Israel. I’ve seen his gorgeous mosaics in kibbutzim and also at the Dan Acadia hotel in Herzliya and it was so well integrated into the space that it didn’t occur to me to inquire after the artist! But it turns out that Pelzig also designed the wonderful Holocaust Memorial Wall at Los Angeles’s Temple Beth Am, which looks like thousands of fingers scratching, and its complement–Pelzig’s evocative sculpture for Yad VaShem, which features hands reaching upward.

This was followed by Carolyn Beard’s presentation about the crucifixion as a motif in Mark Chagall’s paintings. White Crucifixion (1938) is the most famous among Chagall’s 80 (!) crucifixion paintings and, interestingly, eight of them are self-portraits depicting Chagall alongside a Jewish Jesus, wearing a tallit and sometimes tefillin, and images of suffering Jews. Chagall’s Artist with Yellow Christ is a reference to Paul Gauguin’s picture of the same name (1890), and in Christ with the Artist (1951) he depicts angels on the left of Jesus and Chagall on the right. The cross bursts out of the canvas. In another image, Chagall depicted Jesus’ head as a clock, and replaced the INRI script with his own signature.

Then, Fani Gargova introduced a new framework for analyzing women’s contributions to European Synagogue Design. The tendency among scholars of historical architecture is to regard women’s contribution to synagogue architecture as marginal, considering their location (separate and removed) in the synagogue itself. But it turns out that women played an important role contributing essential artifacts, such as menorot and parokhot, to the synagogues, which have been (mis)analyzed as Judaica objects, rather than as what they are: part of what makes the synagogue a synagogue.

After lunch, I went to a fantastic musicology panel. Gordeon Dale introduced the emerging and wildly successful genre of “Pop Emuni,” presenting artists who are and present as Orthodox and engage openly with biblical themes. We listened to, and analyzed, four songs: Ishay Ribo’s Hine Yamim Baim , Akiva (Turgeman)’s Lekh Lekha, Hanan ben Ari’s Holem Kemo Yosef, and Narkis’ Avi Lo. Despite the sharp polarization in Israel, these artists have been able to break boundaries and enjoy wide public appeal.

Then, Ann Glazer Niren exposed the liturgical roots of Leonard Bernstein’s psalms work. Ann hypothesizes that Bernstein was deeply influenced by Solomon Braslavsky, a gifted musician, who was the cantor and musical director at Bernstein’s home temple Mishkan Tefila. Indeed, Bernstein returned to religious themes in many of his compositions, including Jeremiah, Haskiveinu, Mass, and Kadish. We got to hear excerpts from his Psalms–Psalm 148 (1935) and his Chichester Psalms–and learn about some of the wonderful musical devices he used: echoes of Beethoven’s Pathetique and text pairing (which is a huge part of Bernstein’s genius and which I’ve appreciated every time I’ve sung or listened to his work.)

Finally, Amanda Ruppenthal-Stein introduced us to the Abayudaya Jewish community in Uganda, sharing and analyzing the wonderful polyphonic interpretation of “Ha’Azinu” (Deuteronomy 32).

A great coda to the conference was a panel about gender and queerness in Jewish ritual spaces, which opened with Morey Lipsett’s analysis of the “Agaddic element” in the liturgy at my local synagogue, Congregation Sha’ar Zahav (CSZ). I’m an occasional visitor there (one of my goals in the new year will be to become a more regular attendee) but Morey grew up in the congregation and, relying on Walter Benjamin and Judith Butler, he looks at how the synagogue’s founders and leaders have transformed the Kabbalat Shabbat ritual to encompass dynamic ideas of gender and sexuality, beyond just pointing out the patriarchal aspect of orthodox tradition, and toward creating an affirming and accepting space.

Then, Shlomo Gleibman led us through an investigation of the havruta (a long-term committed religious study partnership) as a queer space, starting with one of my favorite pair: Rabi Yohanan and Resh Lakish, from their erotically charged encounter in the river to what is arguably the most epic, dramatic breakup ever. We followed other havruta queer pairings, in the literature of S. An-sky, I. B. Singer, S. Y. Agnon, Tony Kushner, Michael Lowenthal, and Evan Fallenberg.

Finally, Isabel-Marie Johnston surveyed and interviewed Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews about their mikvah immersion practices. Her data indicates that the Mikvah offers relief and healing properties to many of the respondents, but especially to those with complicated micro-minority identities: people in intermarriages, people of color, people of complex sexuality, etc. But it turns out that exclusive practices in many Orthodox-run mikvaoth, including innocuous-seeming screening practices, are a real turn-off to these people.

I learned a lot and have tons of wonderful ideas for future research, and feel professionally energized for the first time in many months.





AJS Annual Meeting: Day 2

Another fascinating day at the AJS Annual Meeting, in which I learned a lot – including about issues surprisingly close to home.

The first panel, Holocaust in Art and Literature, opened with Roy Holler’s talk about Yoram Kaniuk’s book Adam ben Kelev and its film adaptation starring Jeff Goldblum. Of all Israeli authors, Kaniuk is one of the most difficult and least accessible for me, so I was grateful for Roy’s take: rather than seeing the book as a story of human-animal transition, he reads it as a story of “passing” across species and of a commitment to avoid joining a species capable of atrocities. As Roy said, “Instead of ‘God created man’, it’s ‘man created himself in the image of a dog.'”

Next, we heard from Angelica Maria Gutierrez  Ravanelli, who studies Argentinian holocaust remembrance and spoke of a graphic anthology called Camino a Auschwitz y Otras Historias de Resistencia. It’s a controversial, edgy, and sometimes queer take on holocaust survival, which draws inspiration from both Maus and Fun Home: the story of a prostitute who dies in the gas chambers; the exploits of a gay partisan and his sexual escapades in the forest; and an ambivalent, conflicted story about Eichmann’s capture. Angelica walked us through the timeline and plot of the stories, the graphic motifs, and the controversy that their publication stirred in Argentina.

The panel ended Anne Rothfeld’s talk about a fascinating investigation conducted by Evelyn Tucker into several wonderful paintings by Egon Schiele. It turned out that Egon Schiele was treated by a dentist called Rieger and, short on cash, paid him in fantastic paintings, including Wayside Shrine, Cardinal and Nun, and Harbor of Trieste (all of which can be found now in the Dorotheum). Welz, a member of the Nazi party, got the paintings from Rieger. Tucker suspected that Welz had flourished by spreading a tale of benefitting from American looters. Welz’s version was that he helped Rieger escape (he had not; Rieger died in Theresienstadt.) Eventually, Tucker was relieved of her position after a conflict with the army. The whole thing was fascinating.

The second panel, Negotiating Danger, Difference, and Death, had assorted rabbinical commentary that I found interesting. The highlight for me was Mika Ahuvia’s talk about Angels in Late Antique Conceptions of Death, because some of the images she analyzed came from sarcophagi in Bet Shearim, which is right next to my home town and where I run when I visit my mom. While rabbinic texts identify only male angels (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Bney ha-Helohim from Enochic texts), piyyut and midrash (Bereshit Raba) identify some feminine angels. And, a sarcophagus image depicts a winged female figure. In addition, murals in the Dura synagogue depict a similar figure descending to the underworld.. Where did it come from? Mika identifies the similarities between the figure and the Greek figure of Psyche (Suke in Greek) and investigates artistic copying and common influences.

Shulamit Shinaar uses lenses from critical and queer disability studies, as well as from medical sociology, to examine biblical and rabbinic prohibitions on, and dispensations for, people with disabilities and their caregivers. She relies on Mike Bury’s concept of “biographical disruption”–the impact of a diagnosis on the person’s now threatened identity, their plans for the future, and their daily life. In light o this framework, Rabbinnical literature views people’s lives as disrupted, including their ability to work, dependency on others, and illness impacting witnesses and legal proxies. This lens explains the exemptions for sick people and for their caregivers: Sabbath, Yom Kippur, and seeking healing using objects that are prohibited (except for the “big three”: avodah zarah, incest, and bloodshed).

Finally, Gal Sela turns to Ta’anit 24a-b to discuss theurgic perceptions in the Babylonian Talmud. The story has to do with Rava, who unsuccessfully tries to bring rain through a fast, and when people complain that in the days of Rabbi Yehuda this was easily done, recurs to explain that the more rigorous learning of this generation is insufficient and that the previous generation had a more direct connection to the divine. We talked about the power of the sage, through the ritualistic act of removing his shoes.

The methodologies that were most familiar to me were in full display at the Haredi sociology panel. I learned a lot! First we heard from Dikla Yogev and Nomi Levenkron, who have studied the Meron disaster using information from government meetings, observations and interviews with the police and the public, and an “urgent ethnography” of online data collection (WhatsApp groups and a website.). The Meron celebration, which became Haredi-dominated from around 2000, raises various problems involving transportation, site management, lost children, and the like. Social network analysis shows that the most prominent people to discuss and address the event were the haredim themselves, including the Meron Committee head and the Holy Sites CTO. Dikla and Nomi conclude that Meron suffers from government instability; the police struggle to establish public safety, which is low on the priority list and managed through a network of informal connections that prioritize Haredi brokers and deprioritize the police.

It was interesting to see this unfold in light of Nomi’s other paper on the panel, hilariously titled “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” and recounting the regulation of the 1956 Meron celebration. Her point of departure is that police work in holy places calls for negotiation, which has both symbolic and practical aspects. The three parties to the negotiation wanted different things out of it. The father was Ben Gurion, the prime minister, whose establishment of Israel was accomplished through difficult compromises with the Haredim, and therefore needed to give in to them on the celebration; his son, Amos Ben-Gurion, who was a senior police officer, was concerned about the site’s safety risks and demanded to cancel the event; and the Holy Spirit, the Ministry of Religion, needed the Ultra-Orthodox as part of the coalition. To some extent, the 1956 paper provides an omen/explainer of the 2020 paper.

Miriam Moster talked about the ocioeconomics of Haredi Divorce in New York, which used to be fairly common but is now extremely rare. By contrast to divorcées in the general population, among Hasidim, education and home ownership actually make leaving the marriage easier. Miriam also pointed out that finances tied to the husband, especially in cases where the whole extended family is financially entangled–and especially in illegal/under the table dealings–make leaving more difficult. The fallout of divorce can be harsh from an informal social control standpoint.

Finally, Hannah Lebovits discussed the housing patterns of Haredim in American municipalities, showing how leadership deals with housing and contrasting two models: “housing at all costs” (cutting corners, informal economic workarounds) versus “pragmatic skepticism” (representation, legal cases, civil rights action, etc.) She used the term “ritual urbanism” to describe, among other factors, how some spiritual leaders (“rebs”) of the community present themselves as messengers of God when advocating for spatial design or land use.

I was going to stay for more, but instead opted for catching up with Dikla and Nomi and then had to replace all my bicycle gear, which was filched from my pannier by someone who probably needed raingear and a Narcan kit more than I did (but did he really have to steal my helmet and gloves, too? Grrrr.) Very eager to return to the conference tomorrow!

Association of Jewish Studies, Day 1: Dreyfus Postcards, DEI and Antisemitism, and Daughters’ Inheritance

As hinted in various posts, my big professional pivot has been in the works for a while. This year I started my rabbinical studies at the International Institute of Secular Humanistic Judaism (IISHJ). IISHJ requires all its rabbis to complete an advanced degree in Jewish Studies, which brought me to the Graduate Theological Union’s Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies. In addition to my full-time work, I’m studying full time for a masters degree, and this week I finished the first semester. My plan is to pivot my scholarship at UC Law SF toward Jewish law and Jewish studies, and I have big plans for fostering and encouraging a vibrant academic Jewish legal experience on campus. After retirement from legal academia, I plan to turn to rabbinical work full time.

Today marks an important milestone: I attended my first-ever annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies which, conveniently, is being held in San Francisco. I’m not presenting anything–my two brand-new papers haven’t been submitted for publication yet–and it’s been a great experience to listen, rather than talk! Getting into a new field requires quite a bit of humility, and I confess to being overwhelmed when I visited the huge book exhibit and saw the vast wealth of knowledge and original research. It’s daunting and, at the same time, exciting to join such a prolific enterprise, and I wonder what I can contribute to this flourishing field.

I started my day with a panel on visual representations of violence, in which Louis Kaplan introduced us to the work of photographer John Guttman. Trained as an expressionist painter, Guttman switched to photography when he figured that he would not be able to leave Berlin with money, but would be allowed to take expensive equipment out of the country. He bought a wonderful camera and somehow persuaded a German news agency to be their foreign correspondent in San Francisco… and ended up in a gorgeous apartment in Russian Hill. From Tara Kohn we learned about how archival gaps and absences affect our ability to learn about photography–in this case the work of Alter Kacyzne, who documented Jewish life in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s. Only 700 of Alter’s many photographs are in existence–but evidence of their existence exists in copies and references, as if they were fossils. But the most interesting bit, to me, was Karine Macarez’s presentation of… postcards, posters, and trading cards about the Dreyfus Affair! In my work on true crime podcasts, I always think about Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Message reminder, but here is proof that participatory, sensationalist true crime engagement–complete with wrongful conviction activism–existed through the creation, sale, and exchange of these postcards, which are rife not only with antisemitic tropes (used both straightforwardly, as in the case of Dreyfus’s maligners, and ironically, by the Dreyfusards) but also with actual forensic evidence: people would buy and collect postcards bearing Dreyfus and Esterhazy’s handwriting.

After lunch, I attended a panel in which Amy Simon (Michigan State), Greg Drinkwater (Berkeley), Nathan Paradise (Minnesota), and Lauren Strauss (American) spoke of their activism–unpaid, emotionally taxing, and exhausting work–to include Jewish concerns and marginalization in the academic curriculum, especially after the Hamas massacre and the eruption of the war. The session was very well attended–standing room only–and offered some thoughts about whether, and to what extent, Jewish issues (including antisemitism) can and should fit in a DEI framework. Lots of useful takeaways, including the huge variation among campuses not only in policies and curricula but also in the interpersonal relationships between the different personages: campus administration, ethnic studies folks (often, but not always, a department devoid of Jewish voices), Jewish studies departments (which are not supposed to be advocacy centers but sometimes become such), Islamic studies departments and colleagues (who sometimes form great coalitions) and the student body (including a big conversation about the extent to which TikTok and the like shape young minds before they even come to college.) It was a great conversation which, while not offering a ton of hope, offered some interesting perspectives and ideas to try, and made me feel a lot less alone than before. I also plan to read Kenneth Stern’s The Conflict Over the Conflict (and will post a review soon.)

I then got to hear a fabulous roundtable about women and biblical law, featuring several interesting projects. Yael Landman, who uses a law-and-literature lens, discussed women’s property rights, especially regarding daughters’ dowries and inheritance; Samantha Rainford, who also studies inheritance roles, highlighted how the the daughters of Zelophechad had to be legally “made into men” in order for their inheritance to fit into the patriarchal lens. GTU’s very own Jennifer Lehmann studies maleness and masculinity in the Bible; as she explains, while men have been the focus of Biblical literature, only recently have they been studied through a gendered lens. She discussed two fascinating examples: Jacob’s sexuality in the Leah/Rachel bait-and-switch, and Joseph’s sexual victimization at Potiphar’s house (including issues of sexual servitude–and comparisons with Hagar.) And Sarah Shechtman discussed embodiment in biblical ritual.

I learned a ton, bought a heavily discounted set of the Bavli with English translation, and I hope made some new friends. Back tomorrow for more!