In 1963, Martin Luther King proclaimed “I have a dream” in Washington D.C., giving one of the most famous speeches of all time. Before uttering those four famous words, he said: “Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.” Yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote a moving essay on equality, published in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, in which he announced publicly for the first time that he is gay. He said “I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me” because of how it shaped him as a person. Cook is a famously private person, but he thought that his coming out might help others. “So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.” Cook concluded his essay: “When I arrive in my office each morning, I’m greeted by framed photos of Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy. I don’t pretend that writing this puts me in their league. All it does is allow me to look at those pictures and know that I’m doing my part, however small, to help others. We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.” It is a beautiful, moving essay and I encourage you to read it.
As a lawyer, I am both fascinated and inspired to be alive during a time when marriage equality is becoming the law across the nation. We’re not reading about landmark opinions in a law school casebook; we are living through the process of watching the courts make groundbreaking law on almost a daily basis. It’s a gradual process, and as a proud New Orleanian, I’m embarrassed that one of the most recent unfortunate opinions came from the Eastern District of Louisiana. But by the time that my kids are adults, I suspect that they and their peers will consider discrimination based upon sexual orientation as obviously wrong as we today consider the notion that some people once had to sit in a different section of a bus or restaurant (or not be served at all) simply because of the color of their skin. During this historic time when we are watching public opinion and jurisprudence evolve, I’m proud of Tim Cook for sacrificing his privacy to add one more brick to the path, and it makes me even happier to use Apple products. The Apple logo may no longer sport the six colors that it once did, but I love that the company and its leaders embrace the principles of equality that the rainbow colors often represent.
And now, off the soapbox, and on to the news of note from the past week:
- New York attorney Nicole Black talks about how Judge Janet Neff (W.D. Mich.) uses two iPads and other technology while she is on the bench in an article on Above the Law.
- Clio CEO Jack Newton announced at MILOfest last Friday that you can now use TouchID to authenticate yourself with the Clio app.
- When I reviewed the iPad Air 2, I didn’t discuss the camera because my guess is that most attorneys would not use it much, except perhaps to scan a document. But if you are interested in the camera, Allyson Kazmucha of iMore compares it to the camera on the iPhone 6, with lots of side-by-side pictures. The iPhone 6 camera is better overall, but the iPad Air 2 camera more than holds its own.
- If you want to read a comprehensive review of the iPad Air 2, Rene Ritchie and Serenity Caldwell of iMore wrote a good one.
- If you want some good examples for why you shouldn’t use public WiFi in a cafe without using VPN to protect your traffic (such as Cloak), read this article by Maurits Martijn, originally written in Dutch for De Correspondent and translated into English by Jona Meijers.
- There were tons of interesting articles written this week about the new Apple Pay system and a consortium of retailers, led by WalMart, who don’t want to implement Apple Pay because they are working on their own system that bypasses credit cards (and credit card fees). Glenn Fleishman wrote an excellent article on the situation on Six Colors…
- …and Security expert Rich Mogull wrote this article for TidBITS…
- …and Kirk Lennon wrote this good article…
- …and Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote this article.
- Microsoft announced on its OneDrive blog that Office 365 customers now get unlimited OneDrive storage at no extra cost.
- And finally, if you want your iPhone and iPad to look extra spooky for Halloween, or any other occasion, you can get the $6.99 iPrank Cracked Screen Sticker Pack from ThinkGeek:
What an intro! Well written, well done.
What a great comment about marriage equality. Thank you.
“[w]e are living through the process of watching the courts make groundbreaking law on almost a daily basis.” Irrespective of how anyone feels about the issue of same sex marriage, the above statement is true and the greatest threat to our nation’s form of representative government. The Courts have now, unfortunately, set a precedent of making groundbreaking law that can easily be invoked to impose a mandate that you and a majority of your friends may not enjoy.
I’m tempted to use that cracked screen prank on my wife. However, I’m scared, too. She’s ex-Army and has a temper.
Also, @Charles Jannace — it’s a little late in the game to be overly concerned about courts making laws that do away with things like bans against same sex marriage. The notion of the advantages of avoiding the dreaded “tyranny by the majority” demands that the courts come in and strike down laws which exist solely to oppress a minority.
Please don’t take that as a defense to the idea of same-sex marriage. In some instances, you may be right and the courts may be overreaching by taking it upon themselves to legislate. If that is the case, then that is where the discussion should lie. But whether courts have the authority to roll back oppressive laws? They’ve been doing just that for centuries.