Like everyone else, I was surprised by the news that South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem boasts in her forthcoming autobiography about shooting Cricket, her 14-months-old wirehair pointer, due to Cricket’s “aggressive personality”.  Political commentators seem to think that she did this to show her toughness, with a particular eye, perhaps, to signalling to Donald Trump that she’d be a fine Vice Presidential candidate. What surprised me more than the cruelty of the act — we’re talking about a modern Republican Governor after all — was that Noem seemed ignorant of the role of dogs in modern ..read more

Dear Times subscriber, Due to distribution changes in your area, Saturday delivery will no longer be available beginning May 11, 2024. As a result, your Saturday New York Times will be delivered on Sundays. We realize this change isn’t ideal, and we apologize for the inconvenience. As a Home Delivery subscriber, you also have All Access — The Times’s full digital experience — which is available to you for free. It includes News, plus Games, Cooking, Audio, Wirecutter and The Athletic. With All Access you can continue to stay on top of all timely news every day of the week. If you haven’t alr ..read more

Inspired by Kevin Drum I decided to ask Groq (“on a mission to set the standard for GenAI inference speed, helping real-time AI applications come to life today”) what it knows about me. Here’s a copy of our chat with a small annotation. Tell me about Michael Froomkin Michael Froomkin is a prominent American lawyer, academic, and blogger. He is a professor of law at the University of Miami School of Law, where he has taught since 1994. Froomkin is known for his expertise in the areas of constitutional law, administrative law, and internet law. He has written extensively on these topics and has ..read more

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