The Guardian reports that Townsville's mayor has  abeen  referred to the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission last week after allegations he embellished his military record by stating he spent five years in the army, including time with “SAS Swanbourne”.   In an interview with A Current Affair on Thursday night, Thompson conceded he had not spent five years in the service, as he claimed during his campaign, and blamed “100-plus” concussions and epilepsy on his poor recollection.  “Look, I honestly, hand-on-heart, thought it was five years,” he told Nine. “Thos ..read more

'Humans Outside the Loop' by Charlotte A Tschider in 26 Yale Journal of Law & Technology 324 comments  Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not all artificial. Despite the need for high-powered machines that can create complex algorithms and routinely improve them, humans are instrumental in every step used to create AI. From data selection, decisional design, training, testing, and tuning to managing AI’s development as it is used in the human world, humans exert agency and control over the choices and practices underlying AI products. AI is now ubiquitous: it is part of every sector of ..read more

'Do large language models have a legal duty to tell the truth?' by 2024 Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt and Chris Russell in (2024) Royal Society Open Science   Careless speech is a new type of harm created by large language models (LLM) that poses cumulative, long-term risks to science, education, and shared social truth in democratic societies. LLMs produce responses that are plausible, helpful, and confident, but that contain factual inaccuracies, misleading references, and biased information. These subtle mistruths are poised to cumulatively degrade and homogenise knowledge ov ..read more

'From Labor Sit-Downs to Civil Rights Sit-Ins: A Genealogy of Liberal Civil Disobedience' by William E. Scheuerman in (2024) The Review of Politics 1 - 25 comments  Addressing the twenty-fifth anniversary convention of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) on April 27, 1961, in Detroit, Dr. Martin Luther King drew a direct line from the militant auto worker sit-down strikes of the mid-1930s to the recent wave of civil rights sit-ins at southern lunch counters. King praised the young activists for their “nonviolent and courageous struggles” against racial segregation, underscoring the kins ..read more

The Tasmanian Law Reform Institute has released its Final Report on the Review  of Privacy Law in Tasmania, following  the  Issues Paper of March 2023. The Report makes 63 recommendations for reforms. The Institute comments that he Final Report  adopts a broad working definition of privacy ([2.2]) which covers the overlapping categories of information privacy, privacy of communications, bodily privacy, and territorial privacy. Bodily and territorial privacy are collectively known as ‘rights to seclusion’, which is the right to have one’s physical self and one’s environment ..read more

'The Invisible Cage: Workers’ Reactivity to Opaque Algorithmic Evaluations' by Hatim A. Rahman in (2021) 66(4) Administrative Science Quarterly comments   Existing research has shown that people experience third-party evaluations as a form of control because they try to align their behavior with evaluations’ criteria to secure more favorable resources, recognition, and opportunities from external audiences. Much of this research has focused on evaluations with transparent criteria, but increasingly, algorithmic evaluation systems are not transparent. Drawing on over three years of i ..read more

A useful discussion in Behr v Behr, 2024 ABKB 288 of some pseudolaw mechanisms  [8] Mr. Behr is employing two notorious pseudolaw strategies: “Strawman Theory”, and a “Three/Five Letters” process. In Mr. Behr’s case, the strange “i: man: Jason” language indicates he is using pseudolaw concepts taught by a US Sovereign Citizen promoter/guru Carl (Karl) Lentz. That predicts that Mr. Behr plans to initiate proceedings as a “Prosecutor”, against Justice Akgungor, the “Wrongdoer” in a fictitious “the Behr Court”.  [9] Communicating directly with a Justice of this Court outside litigati ..read more

'Navigating State Interventions: The Pivotal Role of PTAs in Modern Trade Conflicts' by Andrew D. Mitchell in (2024) 25(1) Chicago Journal of International Law 195-218   In international trade, State interventions often challenge the efficacy of traditional anti-dumping and countervailing measures under the World Trade Organization (WTO) framework. This article examines the limitations of the Anti-Dumping Agreement and the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM Agreement) in addressing State interventions, such as export taxes, export bans on raw materials, and non-comme ..read more

'Artificial intelligence, the common good, and the democratic deficit in AI governance' by Mark Coeckelbergh in (2024) AI and Ethics comments  There is a broad consensus that artificial intelligence should contribute to the common good, but it is not clear what is meant by that. This paper discusses this issue and uses it as a lens for analysing what it calls the “democracy deficit” in current AI governance, which includes a tendency to deny the inherently political character of the issue and to take a technocratic shortcut. It indicates what we may agree on and what is and should be up ..read more

'The Legal Realists on Political Economy' by Dan Priel in (2024) Law and Social Inquiry (forthcoming)   Alongside the well-known jurisprudential ideas associated with legal realism, some scholars have highlighted the realists’ political-economic ideas. Best known among them has been Morton Horwitz, who has argued that the realists launched an “attack on the legitimacy of the market.” Other scholars challenged this view and argued there was no significant connection between legal realism and political economic ideas. I offer a corrective to both views. I first consider the work of fi ..read more