Jacob Ben-David Linker 🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸✡️🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸

I’m running to be the first Palestinian Muslim woman elected in New York State. That’s making the right wing very angry.  Before you hear their Islamophobic, bad faith attacks against me, know the facts.

I’m running to be the first Palestinian Muslim woman elected in New York State. That’s making the right wing very angry.  Before you hear their Islamophobic, bad faith attacks against me, know the facts.

Congratulations India for throwing the communists out of all state governments for the first time in 59 years. As votes are counted today, it has become apparent that the communists will lose power in Kerala. The commies are out of power across India for the 1st time since 1967

I sometimes read that the Supreme Court dramatically expanded police power by inventing stop and frisk law in Terry v. Ohio. But it seems to me you can't talk about stop and frisk without discussing the decline of arrests for vagrancy—and the invalidation of traditional vagrancy laws—at just about the same time as the creation of stop and frisk law. As Risa Golubuff explains in her excellent book Vagrant Nation, for most of American history people acting suspiciously could just be arrested under the vagrancy laws. And they could be fully searched then, as part of the arrest. The relationship between vagrancy enforcement and Fourth Amendment law is complicated. But one simplified version of it is that the Court blocked the greater police power of arrests and complete searches under vagrancy laws and then created a narrower version of the authority, less subject to abuses because it had more of a certain standard, under stop and frisk law. In the present day, a lot of people tend to look back on this history from the perspective that it's obvious that of course there's no power to arrest under vagrancy laws, and of course temporary stops are seizures and of course frisks are searches, such that the big change is seen to be reasonableness balancing and the reasonable suspicion standard—a balance that is seen to lessen Fourth Amendment protections by having a standard for searches and seizures less than probable cause. I think that's how Terry is usually taught: The Fourth Amendment used to prevent stop and frisk, and the Supreme Court gutted them. But it seems to me that view incorporates a lot of modern assumptions that the history doesn't support. My sense, at least.