2023 Aid to Ukraine Through Aug 3. This year the US promises about six times more than last year. The Ukraine Aid bill appropriates $61 billion, a very large portion of which will actually be spent in the US to pay US arms makers to replace the stockpiled weapons we will be sending abroad.  That number, however is both too large for me to grasp, and lacks context.  So here goes. There are about 340 million US persons, making each person’s share of the bill for Ukraine aid about $170.41.  But maybe you don’t want to count babies?  The IRS processes about 169 million income ..read more

Today’s long-delayed House vote on aid to Ukraine reminds me of a line that I was sorry to discover Churchill may not have said, “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possiblities have been exhausted.” The post Aid for Ukraine appeared first on Discourse.net ..read more

Binar Kurnia Prahani Elly Matul Imah Irena Yolanita Maureen Lusia Rakhmawati Hanandita Veda Saphira,Copyright: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 I thought it might be of general interest to post my Spring 2024 syllabus for my AI & Law class.  I regret that many of the hyperlinks to the assigned readings won’t work because they are to internal copies I made, which I can’t share directly for copyright reasons, but I’ve provided citations so it should be easy to find them online.  Links to the optional readings generally should work. I’d welcome comments on overall organization, and also on what I ..read more

JOTWELL, the online journal of reviews of recent faculty scholarship relating to the law, needs a MiamiLaw rising 2L to join our editorial team for the summer. The workload typically runs about 30 hours per week, and is paid at the law school’s research assistant scale, which in most cases is $15/hr.  The student editor supports faculty editors both at UM and elsewhere, and has a role that is a blend of a substantive editor and a managing editor.  All work will be carried out remotely.s The ideal candidate will be sensitive to nuance and a careful editor, organized, and will enjoy re ..read more

Time for another quiz.  Real or Onion: “GOP Stunned To Discover It’s Not Running Against A Cadaver In 2024”? Answer below. Quite real: GOP Stunned To Discover It’s Not Running Against A Cadaver In 2024 The post Real or Onion? appeared first on Discourse.net ..read more

I thought the Lincoln Project kinda lost its mojo after the 2020 election, and the major staff changes.  But this under-2-minute montage of all the highlights from the weekend is vintage stuff. Now if only they’d post their latest videos on their website instead of ex-Twitter. The post Lincoln Project Had a Good Weekend appeared first on Discourse.net ..read more

Published on dead trees at last! David B. Froomkin & A. Michael Froomkin, Saving Democracy from the Senate, 2024 Utah Law Review 397 (2024). Here’s the abstract: It should not be surprising that Americans say they are frustrated with their national institutions. Congress, particularly the Senate, responds poorly to the public’s needs and wants because it is increasingly unrepresentative of the electorate. Reform is difficult, however, because each state’s “equal Suffrage” in the Senate is protected by a unique constitutional entrenchment clause. The Entrenchment Clause creates a genuine b ..read more

Although in past years handicapping the Veepstakes has been one of my favorite pastimes, I find that this year I don’t much care who Trump’s running mate might turn out to be. I suppose it’s because they vary from quite bad to horrible, or because I think that, barring one of the candidates having a medical crisis, the election will be decided either in court or via Trump’s self-destruction as he says increasingly bizarre things and people start to focus on them. But that doesn’t stop other people, and Trump added fuel to the flames today by naming six people he thought might be potential runn ..read more

As an immunocompromised person, I thought that this was interesting: The standard line is that under 3% of the U.S. population is immunocompromised either due to disease, to antirejection drugs associated with transplants, or to (frequently cancer) medical treatment.  But Melissa L. Martinson, Jessica Lapham, Prevalence of Immunosuppression Among US Adults (Feb. 15, 2024) suggests that the real number today — due to more immunosuppresive medical treatments? — actually may be over 6.6%: Of the 29 164 (unweighted) eligible adults, 6.6% (95% CI, 6.2%-6.9%) (weighted) had current immuno ..read more

Thanks to the kindness of others, I now have my own Wiki page. (Strangely, MiamiLaw doesn’t routinely make them for any of its faculty, which I suppose is consistent with our  ahem, rather quiet media strategy.) It feels quite petty of me, but I’ve actually been bothered for some time that nothing I did ever prompted anyone to make one; the norm is that you don’t make them for yourself. So I am chuffed about this. Thank you to the authors! The post Proof that I Exist? appeared first on Discourse.net ..read more