New Haven Independent

posted by: Jonathan Hopkins on January 22, 2010  6:32pm

Have the architectural renderings of the planned development been shown to the Pine Rock community?
A lawsuit seems like a perfect way to shut down communication and reasonable dialogue. If the plan is presented to Hamden and thoroughly discussed and the still oppose taking the fence down, then threaten proper legal action.
I think if the Pine Rock community is brought into the discussion, and given the opportunity to get some programmatic elements added to the development that they can use then their opinions may change. Pine Rock is a fairly wealthy community of middle class homeowners raising families-perhaps access to parks, sports fields and jungle gyms for kids, and cafes, retail shops, restaurants and office space for adults would connect the neighborhoods well enough that the arbitrary land division becomes blurred or nonexistent in 10 years.

posted by: Harry on January 23, 2010  10:51am

The property owners of the Hamden land have every right to put up whatever they damn well please.  If New Haven can’t get crime under control and ... from spilling over into Hamden, then the Hamden neighborhood has no other choice than to resort to their own means.  It’s sad, but true.

posted by: JO on January 23, 2010  11:47am

WHy doesn’t the NHI just disclose that it is the PR arm of HANH? These aren’t stories, they are dictation notes.

posted by: Ciarrai on January 23, 2010  2:40pm

Where does Darnell Goldson live?

posted by: Jo on January 23, 2010  3:06pm

Your bad headline on the last story is compounded. What makes Meyer a “top” lawyer?

He has impressive academic credentials, including clerkships, but he is an associate professor at a third tier law school after spending time as an assistant US attorney in a run-of-the-mill US attorney’s district, the connecticut district. Among his duties there, he oversaw civil rights litigation, known for years to be the DOJ’s bastard step child. The DOJ is one of the last agencies you would look to to protect your civil rights and I highly doubt Meyer bucked the trend and is any sort of “people’s hero” DOJ rebel on that score.

For financial crimes, it’s not exactly ground zero either.

His performane on the PERF committee following Billy White’s arrest was pretty ho-hum too.

Give me a break. Give yourself a break too, and try some “independent” journalism.

posted by: The Professor on January 23, 2010  6:13pm

Jo,

Saying that Prof. Meyer is anything BUT a top law professor is a bit of an understatement.  Not only is he an alum of Yale Law School, which is widely considered to be the best law school in the country, he is also one of a select few attorneys who have clerked for a Supreme Court Justice.  That’s beyond just “impressive”—if each Justice hires four clerks per year, you’re looking at maybe 36 clerks selected from the thousands of students graduating from law school.

It’s also unfortunate that you seek to denigrate QU Law as just a “third tier” school; this betrays a fundamental lack of knowledge about law school rankings.  US News’s classification of QU as “third tier” is based on many, many nonacademic factors.  In fact, Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Chicago, has demonstrated that 54% of the US News rankings are manipulable by individual schools (http://www.leiterrankings.com/usnews/guide.shtml).  QU Law has come a long, long way since Quinnipiac took it over from the University of Bridgeport in the ‘90s; its faculty is probably somewhere in the top third, especially if you look at them as teachers (versus just as researchers).

We might disagree on the merits of this strategy, but the fact of the matter is that Prof. Meyer is a serious, serious professor and an exceptionally qualified attorney.

posted by: Jo on January 23, 2010  8:46pm

Professor, please. the superlatives are at least as exaggerated as you think my opinions are. And pulled just out of the air.

The point is that the descriptor is too much opinion, not news, and one of those lazy ones on top of that,  pulled out of a hat all the time to slap on headlines at less diligent publications. So it’s cliche on top of that.

It touts Meyer, who though, as I said, has impressive academic credentials, is not David Boies or Kunstler or Michael Ratner for pete’s sake, he is someone who spent time in a run of the mill US attorney’s office where some of the sectons he ran were low priority. 

I also think his performance on PERF was far from memorable. 

You can’t go around touting everyone as top. He is a very very capable lawyer with a good academic background. But lets settle down here.

The Berlin Wall too is sensationalized, cliche and smears Hamden’s intent. And again, all unnecessary. The NHI would not desire this kind of headline if it cared about digging deeper and saying more.

And aside from that, the concern that NHI tends to create often is that it’s carrying someone’s water, It ends up being NH?, not NHI.

That’s what I am getting at, not the US News ‘ranklings,’ which, by your argument, raises questions about the No 1 ranking of that three years of thick, brainwashing, overweaning flattery the Yale law students are subjected to while they are there from their professors and every dean in contemporary memory. That’s on top of getting a good legal education. It’s a real flaw of the Yale law school education.

NHI should just be more diligent, that’s all. They should care a little more about what they say.

posted by: angelo on January 24, 2010  9:59am

JO - Do you hate Yale Law School because you went there or because you didn’t?

posted by: Jo on January 24, 2010  1:19pm

Uh huh, here we go.

Meyer’s academic credentials are good.

I don’t think federal agencies in Connecticut are scrutinized at all.

There was so little coverage of Nora Dannehy or John Durham here over many years that when the national press looked to years of local coverage in Connecticut for clues, it had nothing to go on when they were respectively assigned high profile DOJ investigations (On the US Attorney firings and CIA tapes, respectively)

Zilch—nada, nothing, zip. No analysis, no scrutiny, just spot news coverage of criminal cases they might have happened to oversee and smarmy profiles about how one run marathons and the other loves god and his country. Oh, and how little we know about them (The press’s mea culpa)

Not a single reporter had covered those agencies enough to write intelligent, indepth accounts of theirs or their offices’ challenges, limitations, philosophies, tendencies,  loyalties, conflicts, nothing.

That’s pathetic sorry.

Say what you like, but the press gives everyone hall passes. Even when clues are thrown to them in open court,as recently they were about John Durham for example, nothing reported.

The press doesn’t have the privilege to blithly call someone a “top lawyer” based on his credentials alone when his career has been here on their Connecticut beat for years, in the public eye and the press failed its duties and responsibilities.

Two of his positions in Connecticut were public ones where he should expect to answer hard questions and be accountable.

The press was obligated to cover his PERF performance and the issues raised by the events that prompted the PERF review and his performance and issues inherent in his work assigned to certain kinds of litigation at the US Attorney’s office.

Having utterly failed to do that, for Meyer and just about every other federal official in Connecticut, it turns around and calls him a “top lawyer.”

I don’t want to press down on Meyer too much, he is afterall generally capable and well-educated. That doesn’t mean he was a dynamic prosecutor of civil rights violations at the US Attorney’s office or that he was proactive and charismatic on the PERF board.

No one even bothered to report when Meyer was assigned to PERF whether he was employed by the US Attorney’s office when Billy White was assigned to a federal task force.

I mean, how many Chinese Walls can these figures expect us to believe they can build? Apparently, with the press in the palm of their hands, endless numbers of overlapping downright illogical ones without a chink in the public perception of their untouchable honor. In other words, they run the show.

Meyer is just one example of how the press has failed.

Meyer is more than capable of pursuing any legal action the fence might present. That’s not the point. I am a reader with a legitimate beef, there’s no doubt about that and there should be more like me. It is not my job to be a cheerleading squad for the press, right or wrong, or for public officials.

My comments about Yale were mixed—it was a mixed review and not the main point. Also, what I said about Yale is a common assessment of Yale, both that it is a good law school and that it has that particular incredibly annoying flaw that I described. I am not alone in that and it’s not new.It is very much a distinct and prominent feature of the school’s psyche. 

I didn’t come on this board to post about Yale law school.

posted by: Jo on January 24, 2010  1:31pm

I mean, let’s go back to my first post:

“He has impressive academic credentials, including clerkships, but he is an associate professor at a third tier law school after spending time as an assistant US attorney in a run-of-the-mill US attorney’s district, the connecticut district. Among his duties there, he oversaw civil rights litigation, known for years to be the DOJ’s bastard step child. The DOJ is one of the last agencies you would look to to protect your civil rights and I highly doubt Meyer bucked the trend and is any sort of “people’s hero” DOJ rebel on that score.”

And we put him on a PERF committee that among other things was tasked with figuring out how these cops managed to violate New Haveners’ civil rights in one case for decades.

Well, what if part of the answer to that was the fact that Meyer for part of that time was overseeing civil rights enforcement in Connecticut at an agency that likely, even if he were motivated heavily to do more with it, wouldn’t have let him?

And from his PERF performance, I most definitely did not get the impression the DOJ had been stifling his zeal for civil rights.

Give me a break. We don’t know because the press, like the rest of Connecticut seems content to bask like a child in the motherly embrace of these “top” federal demi-gods.

Gawd awful sorry.

posted by: angelo on January 24, 2010  6:42pm

Jo - I guess you didn’t go to Quinippiac Law School.

posted by: Jo on January 25, 2010  12:27am

Yahoo News aggregated the NHI’s Berlin Wall story under ‘Gated Communities.’

That’s a good one.