Make No Law Episode Five is up! Listen to it at Legal Talk Network or stream right here:
Some resources from this episode:
United States v. Stevens, the subject of the episode
Miller v. California, the obscenity case discussed in the episode
New York v. Ferber, the child porn case mentioned in the episode
Put Bull Victory, Robert Stevens' site about his case and business.
Last 5 posts by Ken White
- Now Posting At Substack - August 27th, 2020
- The Fourth of July [rerun] - July 4th, 2020
- All The President's Lawyers: No Bill Thrill? - September 19th, 2019
- Over At Crime Story, A Post About the College Bribery Scandal - September 13th, 2019
- All The President's Lawyers: - September 11th, 2019


Ken FYI
When i click the link for the next article (Cohen raid) I gain the superpower of becoming Ken White in WordPress. WordPress logs me in as you, and gives me the ability to edit everyone's comments, seemingly. It's too much power for me to handle. You might want to look into that. Probably everyone else has the power, too. Even the evil ones.
I've been working on WordPress sites for ages, and I never saw that glitch before, Lagaya. However, I think it's deceptive: If you try to access the site as Ken, you'll still have to produce a password. At least, that's what it asked for from me. That might explain why the site's archives have not yet been replaced by offers for real Gucci handbags or cheap Viagra or help getting on the first page of Google.
I can't reproduce the behaviour Lagaya describes, but my best guess (having read about such things happening before, including a delightful time when it happened to Steam) is that it might be caused by a caching layer somewhere resulting in Lagaya getting served a cached version of the-page-as-Ken-saw-it. Without knowing much about Ken's server setup I can't say more than that. Perhaps after the recent outage, Ken (or whoever handles server administration for him) added a Varnish server or something similar to cache pages, in order to reduce load on the WordPress backend?
Can you please make the raw mp3 files available. It seems that the only way to play the links are via flash. Flash is not secure and I have removed it from my system.
As recently as yesterday:
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/04/11/3-critical-flash-vulnerabilities-patched-update-now/
Or cheap pony sales
Or just download the podcast on iTunes or stream it on Spotify or whatever.
Yes, there's something odd with site caching. Ken's post for his NYT op-ed keeps appearing and disappearing, and the prior article on the Cohen office raid keeps reverting to earlier times, i.e., several days of comments disappear and reappear.
Bruce Dubbs says April 12, 2018 at 12:15 pm:
I downloaded the mp3 file by right clicking on the player control image. This brought a dropdown menu which included "save audio as".
Left or Right click on "save audio as" brought a normal Windoze "save file as" menu for the mp3.
YMMV.
Kudos to Ken and LTN for yet another very engaging and informative podcast.
I especially like the intro / outro bumpers, which begin with a minor key rendition of "The Anacreontic Song", aka "The Star Spangled Banner".
I doubt that would work for someone who has disabled/uninstalled Flash Player. I doubt they'd even see the player control image.
I doubt that would work for someone who has disabled/uninstalled Flash Player. I doubt they'd even see the player control image.
Seems fixed now. I am no longer Ken White. Whew!
En Passant, Thank you, right clicking and save as works great. I do have to add that I do not use either Windows or Apple or Cell Phone, so some options are limited.
Richard says April 12, 2018 at 9:42 pm:
You are right. My bad. Forgot he disabled Flash.
With Flash disabled, it's easy enough to find and extract the URL for the mp3 file from the podcast link, At least in Firefox: Open podcast link in a new tab. View source. Find URL. Then download the file directly.
I won't give the mp3 file URL here, to avoid giving an alternate link to Ken's podcast link. But it's easy to find.
In the episode, you discussed the problem future school walk-outs for schools that allowed the recent one. Would a fairly simple fix for these schools to base the decision on the percentage of the student body that is in support of the issue? It's still kind of a hecklers veto but would they be able to argue that it is more about the disruption involved in allowing a walkout that is only supported by a small percentage of students vs disallowing one that is supported by most of them? All sort of issues around how you determine the threshold etc… but I'm also not sure it's unreasonable for a school to say that they won't shut down because you and three of your mates want to protest the existence of taxes or something.
I regret that you/whoever controls this chose not to release transcripts at the same time as the podcasts themselves. This puts deaf people at a disadvantage, among other things.
@Ken , did you remove the post linking to your NYT op-ed or is the site being weird again? It's vanished completely, for me at least
@Ken – There are claims that articles of impeachment for Rod Rosenstein have been drafted. Granted, this is a Fox tweet, I understand if you take it with Dead Sea levels of salt, but I didn't actually realize he could be impeached. In case that turns out to be real, can you tell us what it would mean / what the standards are? Or is this far too little to give us a meaningful analysis for?
By the way, there's a typo on Robert Stevens site: should be "pit" instead of "put".
(And I won't mention the fact that the podcast never mentions "Miller v California"… heh!)
What fascinated me about the Stevens case is that it throws into sharp relief the problem of unintended consequences. Before the Stevens decision, it seems to me that an organization like Greenpeace or PETA using video of (say) seal hunting, or an anti-dog-fighting site using video of dog fights, as part of a fundraiser would have potentially fallen foul of the law. In other words, the phrasing of the law was such that it could have swept up the very people attempting to stop the activity that the law purported to prevent…
@An
Impeachment applies to all civil officers of the United States, not just judges and Presidents. It’s not generally used in practice for lower-level people in the Executive Branch (IIRC it’s been used like once for a Cabinet secretary) because they could just be fired for serious misconduct, but it’s something Congress does have the power to do. The standard is the same “high crimes and misdemeanors” (as interpreted by Congress).
Still no transcript as of 23 April 2018.
Disappointing for us Deaf folks.
It's been nearly two weeks, and the transcripts for the others were up within a few days.
Is there no transcript forthcoming for this episode?
Transcript is there. Finally. Hopefully next time it won't take 2 weeks and change.
Just FYI, this episode isn't currently tagged as Make No Law Podcast like the other five.
Thanks!
–Person just now catching up on these.