Bong Hits 4 Jesus: My Blackout Lifted
Though Rob touched on the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case, and Jacob Sullum has a nearly flawless take on it today, I thought I'd share my thoughts. I've been silent on it because... well, because I had to. Two weeks ago, as part of the competitive audition process involved in writing for a law journal at school, I (and probably 150 or so of my classmates) each paid $25 to pick up a brutal, 400-page stack of Bong Hits 4 Jesus case history and other related cases, law review articles, news clippings, and assorted nasty bits.
The very severe rules for the competition, which involved writing a case note (which is pretty much a 50/50 text/endnote law article), were pretty much like those imposed on someone serving on a jury in a high profile case -- we were prohibited from looking for, looking at, listening to, talking about, overhearing, or even sniffing any outside sources, including classmates. Thus, I've been on a strict news blackout -- at least as pertains the BH4J -- for two weeks. That all changed last night when, bleary-eyed, I turned in my paper at 9:47pm, thirteen minutes before the deadline.
Since I've determined that the footnote-heavy paper is good enough to post at a blog, possibly good enough to get me on one of my school's four law reviews, and absolutely not good enough to appear in a real law review, and since I'd feel like a douche if the work I put in didn't see the light of day somewhere, I'm posting it here. Feel free to ignore it. And, frankly, the Klosterman piece I linked to earlier today is way better reading.
One final note that I didn't get to work in to my case note, and which I was a little bummed the 9th Circuit had dismissed so easily and that Jacob Sullum failed to note in his piece today -- but which lawyers for the Drug Policy Alliance [disclosure: my former employer] should be commended for including in their amicus filing in the BH4J 9th Circuit Court case four years ago -- is that the plaintiff, Joseph Frederick, was standing on a public street when his principal ripped the BH4J banner from his hands. He hadn't even been in school that day. Apart from the free-speech-in-school angle everyone's rightly taking here, if it's OK for some blowhard school principal to accost students peacefully standing on a public street, I'd really like some justification from the Supreme Court. Seriously.
The very severe rules for the competition, which involved writing a case note (which is pretty much a 50/50 text/endnote law article), were pretty much like those imposed on someone serving on a jury in a high profile case -- we were prohibited from looking for, looking at, listening to, talking about, overhearing, or even sniffing any outside sources, including classmates. Thus, I've been on a strict news blackout -- at least as pertains the BH4J -- for two weeks. That all changed last night when, bleary-eyed, I turned in my paper at 9:47pm, thirteen minutes before the deadline.
Since I've determined that the footnote-heavy paper is good enough to post at a blog, possibly good enough to get me on one of my school's four law reviews, and absolutely not good enough to appear in a real law review, and since I'd feel like a douche if the work I put in didn't see the light of day somewhere, I'm posting it here. Feel free to ignore it. And, frankly, the Klosterman piece I linked to earlier today is way better reading.
One final note that I didn't get to work in to my case note, and which I was a little bummed the 9th Circuit had dismissed so easily and that Jacob Sullum failed to note in his piece today -- but which lawyers for the Drug Policy Alliance [disclosure: my former employer] should be commended for including in their amicus filing in the BH4J 9th Circuit Court case four years ago -- is that the plaintiff, Joseph Frederick, was standing on a public street when his principal ripped the BH4J banner from his hands. He hadn't even been in school that day. Apart from the free-speech-in-school angle everyone's rightly taking here, if it's OK for some blowhard school principal to accost students peacefully standing on a public street, I'd really like some justification from the Supreme Court. Seriously.
Labels: Drug War
posted by TtP Staff @ 3/21/2007
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