The Sin of Boredom

After Ron Book (aka The Vinegar Man) of the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust announced to multiple national media outlets before Hurricane Irma that he would be "Baker Acting" all homeless people who refused to go into a shelter - that is, admitting them for an involuntary 72-hour mental health examination  - I sent him an email letting him know that my office wouldn't be tolerating such an abuse of the Florida Mental Health Act. You may know that one of the areas of law in which my firm specializes is wrongful Baker Acts. (He even invited several news outlets to witness people getting taken away under these unlawful Baker Acts, because what's a little more indignity on top of unconstitutional detainment. And yes, they take people away in handcuffs, even though they're not technically under arrest or going to jail).  Well, The Vinegar Man went full South Florida on me. If you don't know what that is, think "smug, oily, self-important asshole,...

( Let me preface all of this by noting that I am not saying that Vivitrol has never worked or could not possibly work for anyone. If you’ve found relief from addiction by way of Vivitrol, more power to you; nothing here is intended to rain on your sober parade. These are simply some observations about how the efficacy of the medication on any wide scale has simply not been demonstrated, and how each new bit of information that comes out seems to indicate that it’s simply not a good treatment for opioid and/or heroin addiction. Let me also point out that I would prefer kratom to be available as a first-line treatment for opioid abuse and dependence, but that’s another article entirely. ) Vivitrol is a once-a-month, extended-release shot of naltrexone, an opioid receptor antagonist that has been approved by the FDA since 2006 to treat alcohol dependence. As you probably know, opioid receptor antagonists block activity, while agonists activate receptors (buprenor...

Note: I wrote this back in January or February, when there was that big stink about Milo being invited to speak at Berkeley (this was before his pedophile-sympathizing implosion). I have to whip it out occasionally when a trans rights person claims I am being uncaring or a "bad ally" for rejecting some of the movement's language policing.... I just heard Troy’s interview on Here and Now. One would think that Berkeley would teach its students to think more logically and rationally than he is ostensibly capable of doing. At one point, after the interviewer played Milo’s statements personally and viciously attacking a transsexual student during a talk at another school, Troy essentially states that, well, Milo has been called names… so of course he’s going to call other people names! Firstly, what one person does never serves as an excuse for another person’s behavior. This is not a moral or ethical manner of thinking or behaving. Nobody else’s vitriol...

There is a thought experiment that is raised in virtually every Intro to Moral Philosophy course or other realm in which individual ethics are explored: the trolley problem. It has seen a resurgence in popular culture as it relates to artificial intelligence, particularly in the context of self-driving cars. You've likely heard it before, and the gist of it is often summarized as, "Would you kill one person to save several others?" (You can see how this would be raised in the self-driving car context. These vehicles are going to have to make "decisions" as to whether to kill the occupant(s) in order to save others on the street or in other nearby cars - and one can easily see why taking that decision out of the hands of the driver and putting it into the computer of an automaton makes many people queasy.) Here's the classical version of it: Question One : You are a railroad track operator and see that the the train is barreling down on a group ...

Why the trial courts must have discretion to deny appointment of a nominated  personal representative In Pontrello v. Estate of Kepler , 528 So.2d 441 (Fla. 2d DCA 1988) , the court made a rather overwrought proclamation: “A judge treads on sacred ground… when he overrides the testator's directions regarding the appointment of the person in whom the decedent placed his trust to administer his estate according to the powers given in the will.” Put less dramatically, the court is claiming that there is virtually no circumstance in which a trial court has discretion to refuse the appointment of a personal representative who has been named in a decedent’s will, as long as that person is technically qualified under the relevant Florida Statutes. This is an odd bright-line rule in an area of law that is generally governed by equitable considerations, a quirk which wasn’t lost on the well-spoken dissent: “[I]t would be an anomaly to hold that a probate court, which ha...