Tag: laws

Link Rot

I was able to analyze ~2m externally facing links found in NYT articles since its inception in 1996. We found that 25% of deep links have rotted. If you go back to 1998, 72% of the links are dead. More than 50% of all NYT articles that contain deep links have at least 1 rotted link. The benefits of the internet and web’s flexibility—including permitting the building of walled app gardens on top of them that reject the idea of a URL entirely—now come at great risk and cost to the larger tectonic enterprise to, in Google’s early words, “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” What are we going to do about the crisis we’re in? A complementary approach to “save everything” through independent scraping is for whoever is creating a link to make sure that a copy is saved at the time the link is made. Authors of enduring documents—including scholarly papers, newspaper articles, and judicial opinions—can ask Perma to convert the links included within them into permanent ones archived at perma.cc; participating libraries treat snapshots of what’s found at those links as accessions to their collections, and undertake to preserve them indefinitely. A technical infrastructure through which authors and publishers can preserve the links they draw on is a necessary start. But the problem of digital malleability extends beyond the technical. The law should hesitate before allowing the scope of remedies for claimed infringements of rights—whether economic ones like copyright or more personal, dignitary ones like defamation—to expand naturally as the ease of changing what’s already been published increases.

Indian Legalese

The modern form of Babu English turns up most frequently in the language of India’s legal system. Here’s a single sentence from an order from the Himachal Pradesh state high court issued in 2016: “However, the learned counsel appearing for the tenant/JD/petitioner herein cannot derive the fullest succour from the aforesaid acquiescence occurring in the testification of the GPA of the decree holder/landlord, given its sinew suffering partial dissipation from an imminent display occurring in the impugned pronouncement hereat wherewithin unravelments are held qua the rendition recorded by the learned Rent Controller in Rent Petition No. 1-2/1996 standing assailed before the learned Appellate Authority by the tenant/JD by the latter preferring an appeal therebefore whereat he under an application constituted under Section 5 of the Limitation Act sought extension of time for depositing his statutory liability qua the arrears of rent determined by the learned Rent Controller in a pronouncement made by the latter on 6.11.1999, wherefrom an inference spurs of the JD acquiescing qua his not making the relevant deposit qua his liability towards arrears of rent within the statutorily prescribed period, application whereof suffered the ill fate of its dismissal by the learned appellate Authority under the latter’s order recorded on 16.12 2000.” When the matter came up in appeal before the Supreme Court, the baffled judge sent it back to the high court, observing, “We will have to set it aside because one cannot understand this.” “It seems that some judges have unrealized literary dreams. Maybe it’s a colonial hangover, or the feeling that obfuscation is a sign of merit… It can then become a 300-page judgment, just pontificating” In October, Subhash Vijayran filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court, which is in the process of hearing his petition requesting that legal writing be simplified. “The writing of most lawyers is: (1) wordy, (2) unclear, (3) pompous and (4) dull,” his petition states. “We use 8 words to say what can be said in 2. We use arcane phrases to express commonplace ideas.”

See also the elements of bureaucratic style:

What became clear to me in this exchange is that the passive voice is itself unsuited for the lexical landscape of United’s email, which itself is part of a larger world we now find ourselves in, where corporate and government bureaucracies rely heavily on language to shape our perception. Munoz’s email relies heavily on the passive voice to evade culpability, but he also employs a host of other rhetorical moves that collude to put the blame on the man who was assaulted and carried out on a stretcher. Like a well-trained bureaucrat, Munoz used an array of syntactical choices in a predictable, quantifiable, and deliberate manner, and it’s time we recognize it for what it is.

Virtual Courts

In July the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators jointly endorsed a set of “Guiding Principles for Post-pandemic Court Technology” with a blunt message: The legal system should “move as many court processes as possible online,” and keep them there after the risk of infection passes. The pandemic, they wrote, “is not the disruption courts wanted, but it is the disruption that courts needed.”

Tenants facing eviction in Arizona and parents threatened with losing their children in Texas also proved much more likely to make their court dates when they could do so online. Likewise citizens summoned for jury duty: In Texas, 60-80% show up online. That’s 2x as many as formerly appeared in person. The trend bodes well for diversifying juries, which tend to skew white and affluent.

As these trade-offs become clearer, some initial consensus is emerging as to what virtual courts should and shouldn’t do post-pandemic. Just about everyone, even a skeptic like Douglas Hiatt, agrees that they should keep handling the routine business—from scheduling and settlement conferences to contested traffic tickets and uncontested divorces—that fills most court time.

Randomize Judges Widely

But in fact it is common wisdom that if you have an important case in some area, you must hire not only a local lawyer but one from the top of that local pecking order. Getting an even better lawyer from elsewhere just won’t do. So these effects must be strong. But these 2 affects being strong seems quite a damning fact about the neutrality and fairness of our law. You should be able to get a fair trial without your lawyer pandering to individual judge biases, or having socialized with your judge for years. There seems to be an obvious fix: randomize judges over a wide area, perhaps even nationwide.

Peter Thiel & TechDirt

Problem was that now that Ayyadurai was armed with that settlement money, and saw that the strategy worked, and he now he had the tools to file more frivolous lawsuits against people who laughed at his claim of inventing e-Mail. One such target was TechDirt, a tech/civil rights blog published by Mike Masnik. I had not met Mike until after all of this, but his blog was very much liked at the EFF and in many other places, and a valuable service and resource for the community.

Suing trolls

When law enforcement won’t help, citizens always have another option: hit the bad guys in the wallet. But it’s not that easy. The forensic work of identifying anonymous online perpetrators is expensive, and many attorneys won’t take the cases because the individual trolls usually don’t have much money to cough up even if you can find them. It’s a powerful defense, invoking the First Amendment in a defamation case—and in this particular one, Gilmore’s opponents may hold additional firepower. Because he spoke to the media about the car attack, they say, the court should treat him not as a private citizen but as a “limited-purpose public figure.” That’s an important distinction because public figures face a much higher standard of proof. They must show not just that the statements about them were false and harmful but that the statements were made with “actual malice”—with full knowledge that they were false or with a reckless disregard for the truth. What would a ruling against Gilmore on this point mean? His lawyer worries that it would create a devastating precedent. “Every witness to a crime or a terrorist attack or anything else is a de facto public figure simply because they saw something horrible”. Just think about Gilmore’s fraught decision to tweet his video. “The consequences would be potentially dire because it would make people certainly think twice before sharing what they saw.”

Spinal Tap’s $400M Lawsuit

As Shearer fully appreciates, he and his bandmates may be the perfect plaintiffs for a case like this. Their original deal with Embassy dates from the period before the Buchwald suit motivated studios to find ways to make their contracts more lawsuit-proof, such as adding the mandatory arbitration and confidentiality clauses. The creators may qualify for copyright recapture, giving them even more leverage. And Shearer, at least, has a war chest filled with all that Simpsons money—and is famous enough to get lots of publicity and start shaming the studios right away. They’re not the first to go after Hollywood accounting, but they could be the loudest.

Elite Overproduction

law schools overproduce lawyers, which causes a glut of people wanting to enter politics.

I’ve just read 5 of Peter Turchin’s books: Historical Dynamics, War & Peace & War, Secular Cycles, Ultra Society, and Ages of Discord. I did this because I love careful big picture thinking, and Turchin is one of the few who does this now on the big question of historical cycles of conflict and empire. While historians today tend to dislike this sort of analysis, Turchin defies them, in part because he’s officially a biologist. Turchin collects much data to show that this is a robust pattern, even if there are many deviations. For example, in Europe, 33 of 43 frontier situations gave rise to big empires, yet only 4 of 57 of non-frontier situations did. “Secular cycles” vary in duration from 1 to 4 centuries; Western Europe saw 8 cycles in 22 centuries, while China saw 8 cycles in 21 centuries. During the low instability part of each cycle, instability shows a rough “alternating generations” 50 year cycle of conflict. Just as science fiction is often (usually?) an allegory about issues today, I suspect that historians who blame a particular fault for the fall of the Roman Empire tend to pick faults that they also want to warn against in their own era. Similarly, my main complain about Turchin is that he attributes falling cohesion mainly to increased inequality – an “overproduction” of elites who face “increased competition”. Yes, inequality is much talked about among elites today, but the (less-forager-like) ancients were less focused on it.

peter turchin’s theory of elite overproduction causing instability rings true. lots of people are pursuing dubious degrees, and then fail to find the kind of employment they imagined they would, while being saddled with debt. many of them would be far better off not going to college and learning a trade instead. the vilification of trades has led to skill gaps, and “send everyone to college” is one of the worst ideas in the context of this overproduction.