Comments and Corrections: Additional thoughts on Prof. Nancy Leong's Leiteresque Smear Artistry.

I had hoped to conclude my internet sparring with law Prof. Nancy Leong. However her recent, and most inventive, piece of smear-artistry requires some comments and corrections. 

The primary flaw in Leong’s five-post series at Feminist Law Professors, especially her concluding post, is her deliberate failure to consistently distinguish between harassment and criticism, which allows her to describe critics of her work as harassers, of whom I am deemed “the most persistent.”  

Google's online dictionary provides workable thumbnail definitions of the terms "harassment" and "criticism." Harassment is defined as "aggressive pressure or intimidation." Criticism is defined as "the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes" and as "the analysis and judgment of the merits and faults of a literary or artistic work."

I assert that legitimate criticism includes expressing the view that a particular law review article is meritless or absurd. And few are as meritless and absurd as Nancy Leong's remarkable law review article entitled The Open Road and the Traffic Stop: Narratives and Counter-Narratives of the American Dream," 64 Fla L.Rev. 305 (2012) (complaining that Fourth Amendment caselaw is "dry," "mundane," and "focused on minutiae" in contrast to the "poetry or magic" of her fave movies and songs, those that feature the open road as a narrative motif). Likewise, it is criticism, rather than harassment, to note the irony that the author of this nonsense is a stalwart proponent of the view that legal scholarship holds immense value for law students and the profession, and to note the further irony that the author has zero practice experience in the field she is paid so well to profess: criminal law. 

The category of harassment, by contrast, includes Professor Leong's behavior in snooping the identity of a pseudonymous critic and then sending that critic a stalker email containing false accusations of racism and sexism, and a demand for a discussion via a medium (telephone) specified by her and by a deadline imposed by her, under the threat of outing. Nancy Leong is my harasser, not the other way around. In the classic fashion of smear artists, such as Brian Leiter, she projects her behavior on to others. I appreciate that Leong does not know much about criminal law, which she has never practiced. Therefore, she may find it instructive to look up the statutory definition of intimidation in my jurisdiction. 

In her efforts to portray me as obsessed, Leong asserts that I have posted approximately 70 comments about her under the pseudonym "dybbuk" and that it "would not surprise" her to learn that some offensive anonymous comments about her were also authored by me. Contrary to this claim, if you tally up my posts and comments referencing Leong, the number is around 25. Furthermore, I have not commented on Leong under any other screen name, or as an anonymous poster--and will say so in an affidavit, if it comes to that.

I believe that all of my posts and comments regarding Leong, with the exception of a single wisecrack, pertain either to her article Open Road, or to her utter lack of practice experience in the field of criminal law. I am especially proud of this short satiric piece about Open Road, which Leong describes as a "lengthy play[ ] about me." It is telling that, throughout Leong's truly lengthy series of blog posts about her alleged harassment at the cyber-hands of me and other scambloggers, she does not once acknowledge the existence of Open Road, let alone that is is the target of much of the scamblogger criticism, especially my own. Perhaps, she is ashamed of the article. If so, that is to her credit -- she should be ashamed of it.  

The only example Leong offers to substantiate her contention that I made numerous racist posts is particularly ludicrous. In a comment on a JD Underground (JDU) thread last year, I referred to a law professor conference in Hawaii, where Leong was one of the speakers, as "a gravy train, or shall I say, a luau train." "Gravy train" was a reference to the free vacations masquerading as scholarly conferences that law professors routinely hold for themselves, vacations ultimately paid for by their massively indebted students. "Luau train" was my reference to the fact that this particular law professor conference was held at a Waikiki beach resort, where they stage starlight luaus for the pampered resort guests. 

Leong described my joke about a "luau train" as an effort to disparage her Native Hawaiian ancestry, something I had no idea she possessed. Personally, I doubt that Leong herself believes that that comment was racist. It is yet another irony that a lawprof, who blogs in an authoritative tone about the proper way to converse about race, grants herself permission to defend her wounded pride with false accusations of racism.

I addressed Leong's creative interpretation of "luau train" in my response to the first post in Leong's series. In her subsequent four posts, Leong did not repeat the claim that my joke about "luau train" was a racist slur, even though it was the entire basis of her accusation of racism. Having thus implicitly abandoned her contention that my joke about "luau train," was racist, she tries to paper over the resulting evidentiary vacuum with another smear--namely, that all but one of my profiles of lawprofs involved a female lawprof or a lawprof of color. False, too, and as an assiduous reader of my posts and comments, she knows it. 

I do not know what constitutes a full profile, but I certainly have commented and posted extensively about many scamming lawprofs of the white male variety. Just ask white male lawprofs such as Brian Leiter, Kaimipono Wenger, Adam Lamparello, Mark Sundahl, Ian Farrell, Larry Sager, Gabe Feldman, Paul Horwitz, andre douglas pond cummings, Douglas O. Linder, Roderick ("Rick") Hills Jr., David Yellen, Alfred C. Aman, John O'Brien, and several others. In fact, Nancy has given me the idea of doing a retrospective post, which I will call "Stupid White Male Lawprofs" or "A Trip Down Scammery Lane."

So Nancy is reduced to posting and reposting a screenshot of that single wisecrack. Oh, wait, she also throws in a screenshot of an over-the-top joke I made over two years ago on JD Underground (a forum where over-the-top humor is routine) about spanking a right-wing anti-Occupy Wall Street protestor who held up a sign bragging that she regarded no job as too degrading to service her vast law school debts. Leong suggests that these two comments are the tip of the iceberg of my alleged racism, sexism, bigotry, identity-based online harassment, obsession, and derangement, but that she "is making no effort to publicize [it] all." What she means is that she has no evidence to offer, but she hopes that you believe her when she says that it exists.  

Leong wonders why I refused to hold a conversation with her as she demanded in her stalker email. First, because she attempted to procure the conversation through intimidation and smears. Second, because she specified that the conversation be conducted by telephone -- meaning there would be no written record of its contents, which would allow a dishonest person like herself to characterize the substance and tone of the conversation in any way she liked. Third, though she prudently refuses to acknowledge this in her series, I already did have a direct exchange with Leong in a thread on JD Underground. (below) During that exchange, which occurred two days before she phoned me and four days before she sent her stalker email, she did not accuse me of "identity-based harassment" or bigotry, but correctly acknowledged that the focus of my critique was her law review article. 

A concluding personal note on a post that is already far too long. I am a lefty myself, just like so many lawprofs.  But unlike them, I am not a hypocrite about it. What Leong and many oh-so-progressive lawprofs fail to understand is that we scambloggers, whatever one may think of our individual focuses and tones, are human rights activists. We are fighting a terrible institutional scam perpetuated by rich and privileged academics. This scam has ruined the lives of tens of thousands of bright but naive kids who are guilty of the sole, though grievous, offense of having trusted lawprofs and lawdeans.

I have practiced law for a long time, and I like it. It is no pleasure to observe the deterioration of opportunities for new law grads, and most other lawyers, which is largely due to the behavior of law schools in pumping out way too many law grads than the market can sustain, year after year. Furthermore, as the son of an ex-teacher, it is no pleasure to observe the arrogance, deceit, and willful self-serving ignorance displayed by the alleged teachers of my profession, as they enrich themselves off the likely future suffering of their own students. However, I take solace in the fact that the law school scam is crashing, and in a minuscule way, perhaps I am making a contribution to that. Hey, lawprofs, how is this for economic and social justice: As your recent grads are now, so shall you be.