U.S. footballers celebrate equal pay settlement

Alex Morgan
(Jamie Smed CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

I was elated in April to hear of a proposed $24m settlement in the equal pay dispute brought by U.S. Women's Soccer.

I wrote about the matter in April 2021 and May 2020. There were ups and downs, and, frankly, things were not looking good for the plaintiffs.

However, the case is a lesson in persistence and the value of a public relations campaign running alongside a litigation. U.S. Soccer had the upper hand in the court of law, but was taking it on the chin in court of public opinion.

The case is Morgan v. U.S. Soccer Federation (C.D. Cal. filed Mar. 8, 2019). A June 22 motion seeks court approval of the class action settlement. Named plaintiff Alex Morgan talked to MSNBC about the settlement last week.

UPDATE, July 4, at 1934 EDT: Watch today's CONCACAF match and tell me Alex Morgan should not be US Soccer's highest paid player!

Fourth of July, or day 131 of war in Ukraine

As we celebrate Fourth of July in the United States, let's remember that a war for freedom and autonomy carries on in Ukraine. I photographed this vista of the Dnieper in Kyiv in peaceful times, on June 12, 2013, eight months before the Euro-Maidan Revolution and subsequent invasion of Crimea.  (RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

Descendants of slaves imaged in daguerreotypes may sue Harvard for emotional distress, high court rules

Harvard Yard
(Daderot. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

The Lanier family, whose enslaved ancestors were stripped and forcibly photographed in 1850, may allege reckless infliction of emotional distress against Harvard, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in June.

I wrote about this case and its heated oral argument in November, with links to sources elucidating the context. The court's decision to allow an emotional distress claim is momentous, even while the court dismissed claims in property law and tortious conversion.

Read more about the latest disposition at The Harvard Crimson and CBS News.

The case is Lanier v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, No. SJC-13138 (Mass. June 23, 2022). Justice Scott Kafker wrote the opinion of the court.

Chief Justice Kimberly S. Budd wrote separately in concurrence "to emphasize that the alleged conduct of the defendants (collectively, Harvard) here clearly transgressed moral standards broadly adopted by archival institutions."

Justice Elspeth B. Cypher wrote an intriguing additional concurrence in which she proposed that the plaintiffs should be afforded a novel common law cause of action, besides infliction of emotional distress, upon the unprecedented facts of the instant case.

Miami Beach looks like a police state; Ocean Avenue shootings happened anyway

In March, I visited Miami Beach and found it to have the feel of a police state.

Uvalde and the shortly subsequent widely reported shootings happened while I was away from the United States, which was something of a mercy. I didn't have to live through the immediate trauma of it all happening again. But thinking about what happened and what could or should be done, including John Oliver's apt skepticism of the perennial calls to harden school security, caused me to remember my experience in March.

I've always liked Miami Beach. The art deco aesthetic combines with Latin-flavored food, drink, and entertainment and incomparable people watching to provide a unique and memorable experience every time. I had not been there, though, in many years, and I was anxious to see how it emerged from the pandemic.

I had a good time revisiting old haunts, but I found the nighttime police presence downright oppressive. Countless cop cars sat with their blue and red lights illuminated all along Ocean Drive and in Lummus Park. Bright spotlights made artificial daylight in the park and on the beach inside the dunes; paths to the ocean were closed. Surveillance cameras were everywhere, perched upon lamppost after lamppost. It was a police state on steroids. (All photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

I could not imagine what had happened that precipitated such security, and I was inclined to be critical. Then, shortly after I returned home and despite what I'd witnessed, news broke of five separate shootings during the main week of spring break. Authorities declared a state of emergency and imposed a midnight curfew to quell further violence, NPR reported.

I have no great insights as to what is going on at Miami Beach. I can only say that one of my favorite places, a vacation destination in the United States, looks more like a police state than actual police states I've visited abroad. And that didn't avert five shootings.

I don't have the answers, but making more places look like what Miami Beach has become doesn't seem to be one.

UMass Law Federalist Society talks speech, SCOTUS

Regular blog readers will soon recognize that I am playing catch-up, sharing items that I stockpiled for the better part of the spring semester.

Indeed, I was overwhelmed this spring by a number of great opportunities to speak, teach, learn, and share, all unplanned when the calendar turned to 2022. The blog had to take a back seat.

This overdue thanks harkens back to winter, circa Valentine's Day.  A very fun thing I did was speak to my own law school's student chapter of the Federalist Society about cases with free speech implications—and some related stuff that interests me—in the 2021-2022 term of the U.S. Supreme Court. These are the cases I chose on which to focus our attention (with links here to SCOTUSblog).

• Access: Project Veritas Action Fund v. Rollins,  cert. denied. (U.S. Nov. 22, 2021) (1st Cir. having struck Mass. wiretap statute as applied).
  
• Voir dire: U.S. v. Tsarnaev (U.S. Mar. 4, 2022) (reversing vacatur of death sentence in re pretrial publicity).
• Speech/retaliation: Houston Cmty. Coll. Sys. v. Wilson (U.S. Mar. 24, 2022) (allowing First Amendment claim for verbal censure of public board member by board).
• Forum/gov't speech & establishment: Shurtleff v. City of Boston (U.S. May 2, 2022) (faulting city for refusal to fly ecumenical flag).
• Campaign finance: FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate (U.S. May 16, 2022) (striking limit on candidate's ability to repay himself for loan to campaign).
• Bivens: Egbert v. Boule (U.S. June 8, 2022) (refusing to recognize implied constitutional causes of action for Fourth Amendment excessive force and First Amendment retaliation in context of immigration enforcement at border).
• Religious exercise and establishment: Kennedy v. Bremerton Sch. Dist. (U.S. June 27, 2022) (siding with high school football coach who prayed on field).

We furthermore talked and speculated about "the actual malice question" raised by Palin v. New York Times (e.g., NPR), a pet favorite topic of mine at the intersection of tort law and free speech.

The students offered insightful questions and commentary. I am grateful to them for lending me a soapbox.

Good riddance, covid immigration testing

I took this photo in Swansea, Mass., back in January 2022 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 RJ Peltz-Steele).

The sign well summed up how I was feeling about the chaotic guidance coming from the federal government at the time.

I never posted the photo, but figured I'd pull it out now to celebrate the dropping of the test requirement for immigration.

Of course, I now have about $300 worth of unused tele-medicine test kits I no longer need. Incidentally, apparently, my pharmacy insurer is not obligated to reimburse me for those, despite the President's promises. Promises, promises, Joe. But that's another story.

Museveni still holds reins in Uganda after 35 years, rebuffs allegations of human rights abuses

At age 77, Yoweri Museveni maintains his grip on power in Uganda and yesterday rebuffed criticism by Human Rights Watch.

In 2016, I presented a work-in-progress research paper on history and human rights in Uganda at a regional law-and-society conference at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. I never published the paper; it's a project that I back-burnered and have yearned to return to. At that time, I was nervous about the presentation, because I had never actually been to Uganda; only read about it. There were academics from Uganda in the audience. I was relieved afterward when they said I got it right; I hoped they weren't just being nice.

The impression left on me by my research was that Uganda was, sadly, kind of a backward place. Museveni had, and has, held the presidency since 1986, not long after the Idi Amin regime collapsed. (If you haven't seen The Last King of Scotland (2006), watch it now.)  Museveni is one of those leaders who wins reelection by just too large a margin, and laws have to be changed to allow him to run again. One can't help but lament that Uganda's story is no more than a series of authoritarian regimes exploiting people and resources since the British brought the political entity into existence in the 19th century.

Selfie at a roadside fruit-and-veg stand in Fort Portal, Uganda
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 RJ Peltz-Steele

So winging into Entebbe in June, I expected to find in Uganda a bleak economic picture: a dilapidated infrastructure built on empty promises and crushed by poverty—maybe like the development-run-out-of-gas picture I found, literally, in Harare in 2020, just before the pandemic savaged what sanctions had not.

I was surprised, then, not to find that at all. To the contrary, there was ample evidence of economic prosperity in the tile-roofed residential and commercial buildings that filled the terraced hills between Entebbe and Kampala. I found a reasonably well outfitted capital in Kampala. The streets were no worse than the dirt-guttered throughways I had navigated in Nairobi. There were decent restaurants; I found a good gym. Subsequently, traveling in the countryside, sure, I saw plenty of poverty and subsistence living. But the picture was no more bleak than supposedly-more-faithfully democratic Kenya with its nearly triple the GDP.

Museveni overlooks street traffic in Kabale, in the Western Region of Uganda.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 RJ Peltz-Steele

Museveni-for-President posters are plastered everywhere, from the city to the villages. It's good to be king. But the gentle face that looks out from the posters harbors grim secrets.

What attracted me to research on Uganda in the first place was having learned of the terrifying plight of the LGBTQ population there. In the 2010s, Massachusetts pastor and one-time gubernatorial candidate Scott Lively traveled to Uganda to warn lawmakers of a homosexual menace—practically the same cabal that waged World War II against the world through the secretly homosexual leadership of the Nazi Party, as Lively had recounted in his 1995 book, The Pink Swastika. 

What influence Lively had on the Ugandan Parliament is as unknown as why he had any at all, but the Parliament subsequently enacted the infamous 2014 Anti-Homosexuality Act, which criminalized same-sex relations on pain of life imprisonment, thanks to late amendment, rather than the death penalty, as legislators had first proposed.

The law in Uganda was enjoined by the courts, but it was never the law that was really the problem. The mentality that the law represented justified a regime of brutal abuse and oppression of the gay community, including murder, whether at the hands of public authorities or while authorities stood idle. As a Christian, a Massachusetts scholar, and an Africaphile in comparative law, I was aghast at what Lively seemed to have wrought—though it must be said, for his part, that Lively never countenanced violence.

You can learn more about the matter from many sources, including what is probably my all-time number-one-favorite documentary film, Call Me Kuchu (2012); human rights activist Pepe Julian Onziema's part 1 and part 2 appearances on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (2014); and documents in the unsuccessful U.S. federal lawsuit, Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) v. Lively (1st Cir. 2018) (at the Center for Constitutional Rights, though don't misread CCR's rosy spin to misunderstand: Lively prevailed, just not as much as he wanted to).

This particular background certainly did nothing to raise my expectations for Uganda. Happily, though, I found in Uganda nothing like the senselessness I had read about. For the most part, I met happy, hard-working people. I found observance of faith, Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim, no different from other parts of East Africa. I saw nothing like a dogmatic mob stirred to feverish rage, like I had seen in a video of a Lively public appearance.

The fault is mine. I gave into stereotypes, because it was easy to generalize "backward" from Uganda's democratic deficit. But that deficit is the aftermath of colonialism, corruption, and the related ills that afflict so much of Africa, not an ailment of ordinary people. I failed to consider that generalizing from the crowd of believers in Lively's audience is about as fair to Uganda as assuming that the January 6 rioters, pictured relentlessly on TV, are representative of all Americans.

Museveni's and other political posters adorn a chai shop in a rural village of the Kabale District.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 RJ Peltz-Steele

Yesterday, according to the Uganda Monitor, at a Makerere University law school program on human rights accountability, Human Rights Watch CEO Kenneth Roth confronted Museveni with a report (this one, I assume) detailing unlawful detention and horrific physical abuses of civilians by Ugandan security forces. Roth described the president's dismissive response: "The President said Africa has lived through colonialism, it has lived through slavery, and it has lived through various exploitations by Europeans. He overthrew Idi Amin. Don't talk to him about human rights."

The HRW report doesn't even mention the LGBTQ community. It seems that official disregard for human rights is not so narrow a problem. Anyone who doesn't toe the line with the regime is at risk. 

I loved Uganda. It disappointed only my foolish suspicion that it might be a place beyond redemption. No place is. Certainly no people are.

Ugandans deserve better.