What legal stuff was totally made up in “Inventing Anna” ?

 

Print and online discussion of the Netflix limited series “Inventing Anna” is chiefly about the character of Anna Sorokin, alias Anna Delvey, of high society, high life, big lenders and their lawyers, splashy journalists and the doubtful judgment and ethics of all the above. In these respects the public has been eager to learn how much of “the whole story is completely true,” and what are the “parts that are totally made up.” I am here interested in these latter questions, but not much in the doings and sayings of Anna, her friends, and enablers, or the hotels, restaurants, and resorts of their cavorts. Instead, my interest is in the court case, its investigation, prosecution, and defense.

I was for a year an Assistant District Attorney in the Frauds Bureau of the Manhattan DA’s office, and before that a member of the Career Criminal Bureau where in my first court appearance I second seated our then Assistant Bureau Chief, Cy Vance. So my perspective might have some prosecution bias, although I subsequently defended cases against my old office and in between taught law for several years at NYU.

Travel to the Future

 

The usual way

We should feel some awe at our ability to travel in time, but we tend to take travel to the future for granted because we do it so well.

Is It Future Generations That Are Important?

 

Why Worry About Future Generations? is Samuel Scheffler’s small book from his Uehiro Lectures at Oxford in 2016. It is a philosophically sophisticated reflection on the temporal parochialism that has led to the world’s extraordinary under-response to such risks as climate change. Scheffler argues that our concern properly goes beyond obligations for doing good (avoiding harm) to future populations because they are, like us, people. There are additional normative vectors, which may or may not be matters of either obligation or morality.

Half formed intent, change of heart, assault, accident, and failure to rescue. Should Clyde Griffiths have been electrocuted?

QUESTION 

Should the protagonist have been found guilty, and if so of what, had justice prevailed in the fictional rural New York courtroom of Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel An American Tragedy?

Moral Obligations to the Future

Suppose that something like the classical utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, were true. I don’t think it is true. However, consequentialist reasoning dominates most policy analysis and discussion, and consequences must play some role in any plausible moral theory. That being so, it is useful to take an unflinching look at what a generalized version of utilitarianism would have to say about the duty of those of us now alive have towards future populations including those of the deep future.

How “So help me God” Is Becoming Constitutional

It is by subscribing to the inaugural oath, as set out in the Constitution, that the US president elect becomes the US president. It reads: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Article II, Sec. 1.

The Ferocity of U.S. Criminal Justice

Towards the end of a criminal trial in which a law partner of mine was defense counsel, he was approached by a journalist from a German newspaper who had been observing the trial. She asked him why American criminal justice was so ferocious towards defendants. The question is a good one. Our system is, in fact, anti-defendant to a degree perhaps unique in the civilized world. The German journalist’s question highlights a great divide in perception, for if you raised the subject of criminal justice with a random citizen of the United States, the question you might hear would be: “When are the courts going to close the loopholes and stop being revolving doors for criminals?”