On the one hand, progress to let people testify over Skype. That alone could save 1000s of police hours per month in Manhattan alone. On the other hand, all the trolling looks really bad.
Tag: laws
Laws a la carte
you can opt out of various laws for religious reasons. why not opting out of liquor laws by being born in a country with sane ones?
it’s ok officer, where i come from, i am old enough to drink
800 years of Grand Jury
The first instance of a grand jury can be traced back to the Assize of Clarendon, an 1166 act of Henry II of England.
this might make serving in a grand jury the oldest civic duty.
The Judicial Process
Peak lawyers
The era of 20-somethings blindly stampeding their way towards law school seems to be finally, mercifully drawing to a close.
if lawyers want to have a place in society that is not just leeches, they need to remove friction from transactions by automating contracts and thus lowering risk. law practice employs far too many humans and is far too manual.
ACTA crimes
what you get when your society is ruled by illiterates (read: lawyers)
One of the worst parts of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was its ridiculous secrecy, under which it was easy for negotiators and industry reps to see draft text, but impossible for the public to do so except through leaks. Thankfully, those leaks showed just how bad ACTA was going to be for the Internet, and public pressure helped remove the worst provisions.
Failed redactions
Timothy Lee has conducted a study of improper redaction in PACER, the US court records system. Sensitive information like social security numbers are redacted in these records, but sometimes the redaction is accomplished by drawing a black box over the text in the PDF; the text is still present in the PDF file, it’s just not displayed, and it’s easy to recover. Out of 1.8m PACER documents, there were ~2000 documents with redaction rectangles. Examining them by hand revealed 194 documents with failed redactions.
ah, the good old blackout doesn’t work with pdf, eh? and another story. this is why lawyers should not run governments: incompetent in the small, incompetent in the large.
We discovered this classified information by opening the slide “Award Actions Trend Data”, right clicking over the chart titled “Award $,” choosing “chart object,” and then clicking “open” to see the hard figures Everett used to create the graph.
heh. i thought that presentation was interesting for its geeky content. but now i guess i will take a closer look at the pdf.
Joost may have accidentally leaked 3 months’ worth of deal plans through hidden data in a PDF.
United States v. Tiede
germany ceding jurisdiction to the us, in 1978. fascinating legal hack.
Automatic Contracts
What if we had the ability to automatically negotiate agreements based on various context available when the transaction is being completed? What do I mean by “context?”. Here’s a few examples:
- because you’re a repeat customer I might offer an agreement without certain clauses that I would require of a new customer
- I might offer you a lower price if you choose to forego indemnification in certain situations
- based on the fact that you’re a male I don’t have to give you clauses regarding dangers to pregnancy
- customers might be able to shop based own agreement terms rather than just price, shipping cost, etc.
In short, agreements could be generally less complex because they would not have to cover every conceivable problem.
will contracts move from one size fits all (19th century) to the 21st?
Served via Facebook
A legal move believed to be a world first has opened the way for New Zealanders to be served legal documents through their Facebook sites. Canberra lawyer Mark McCormack expects other courts will follow his lead after he used the internet to find a couple who had defaulted on a loan and serve them with a default judgment.
ha. “LALawyer25 served you legal documents. Add Comment – Share”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 