Show #19: The Economics Of Fraternity Rape: Who pays when your frat becomes your co-defendant?
Litigation is a machine you enter as a pig and come out as a sausage. Imagine you want to open a frat house: (a) Where do you get insurance? (b) Who pays the premium? (c) Who pays the claim when Junior steps on his dick? (d) Why does your alma mater secretly love fraternities? Against the backdrop of the ongoing national discussion about rape and leveraging personal stories related to my own experience with the Federal criminal justice system, today we spin another great monologue. And in the course of identifying economic winners and losers, I go off on an epic rant about my love/hate relationship with the law and explain why nobody -- and I mean nobody -- really knows what the law is.
Enter your email address:Delivered by FeedBurner
QUOTABLE
"If you are a drunk driver and you run somebody down and kill them, the fact that you were drunk is not a defense. You can't say, 'I was drunk, your Honor. Let me go home!' Because then everyone would be getting drunk before they killed the person they hated."
"The fact that a woman is drunk is not consent to sex. The fact that she squeezes her ass into some hot jeans, puts on a tube top, and shows up 18 years old, at a frat house, on Friday night, and gets drunk -- is not consent. It is not implied; it's nothing. It's just not. If she gets so drunk she's unable to consent one way or the other, that's rape."
"When The Virginia Gentlemen sing: 'Don't ever let a Virginia Man an inch above your knee. He'll take you to his fraternity house and fill you full of beer and soon you'll be the mother of a bastard Cavalier' -- that's rape in 50 states." (See, e.g. Code of Virginia § 18.2-61. Rape. "If any person has sexual intercourse through the use of the complaining witness's mental incapacity or physical helplessness he or she shall be guilty of rape.") (emphasis added)
"The People actually got to see Eric Garner die. The people are not as innocent as they were even 10 years ago. And that's a good thing."
"If you black people weren't there, white cops wouldn't have to shoot you. That's Rudy Guiliani."
"The difference between civil litigation and criminal litigation? Civil litigation is about money. Criminal litigation is about time."
Caitlin Flanagan, The Dark Power of Fraternities
"One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powe