Professor Todd Henderson (U. Chicago Law School) has posted an interesting article on SSRN, Citing Fiction, 11 Green Bag 2d 171 (2008). He provides many illuminating facts about judges citing literary works:
My short essay, Data Mining and the Security-Liberty Debate, 74 U. Chi. L. Rev. 343 (2008) has just been published. I’ve posted the final version on SSRN. You can find the abstract and more information about the essay in a previous post I wrote about the subject here.
The essay critiques arguments by Richard Posner and William Stuntz, as well as Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule’s Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts.
Originally Posted at Concurring Opinions
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This post was authored by Professor Daniel J. Solove, who through TeachPrivacy develops computer-based privacy training, data security training, HIPAA training, and many other forms of awareness training on privacy and security topics. Professor Solove also posts at his blog at LinkedIn. His blog has more than 1 million followers.
Professor Solove is the organizer, along with Paul Schwartz, of the Privacy + Security Forum and International Privacy + Security Forum, annual events designed for seasoned professionals.
If you are interested in privacy and data security issues, there are many great ways Professor Solove can help you stay informed:
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A recent NY Times article discusses how the police are increasingly collecting DNA samples from suspects — not with warrants or probable cause — they are gathering it surreptitiously from the abandoned DNA that people leave behind:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (en banc) has just issued a very interesting opinion interpreting a federal law providing immunity from liability for online speech — the Communications Decency Act (CDA), 47 U.S.C. § 230. The case is Fair Housing Council v. Roommates.com, LLC, 2008 WL 879293 (9th Cir. April 3, 2008) (en banc).
As usual, a ton of blogospheric attention has been devoted to the US News law school rankings. Over at PrawfsBlawg, Geoffrey Rapp has found a way to get the numerical rankings of law schools in the Third and Fourth Tiers. At TaxProf, Paul Caron ranks the law schools by reputation score. At Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports, Brian Leiter offers suggestions for improving the rankings. At Law Librarian Blog, Joe Hodnicki tracks law school rankings from 1996-present. I, too, have posted about the US News Rankings.
A new article in the ABA Journal profiles Bob Morse, the US News & World Report “rankings czar.” I recently corresponded with Bob when he wrote to me about my parody of the rankings. He took my humor in good spirit. According to the ABA Journal article:
Remember when, about five years ago, a program called Total Information Awareness (TIA) came to light. TIA was a plan to create a massive government database of personal information which would then be data mined. The program led to a public outcry, with William Safire writing a blistering op-ed in the New York Times attacking TIA. In 2003, Congress voted to deny it funding.
I’ve got the scoop of the year! An anonymous source from US News & World Report leaked this memo to me. It is a memo written by the magazine’s “law school ranking executive” describing how the magazine arrived at this year’s official rankings.
See below for a sneak peak at this year’s rankings as well as some amazing secrets about how US News ranks law schools.
Recently, I was talking with David Lat, author of the blog Above the Law, and he was complaining about being banished from Facebook. David was an active user of Facebook, and he suddenly and inexplicably found himself banned from the site. Facebook didn’t supply him with any reason.
This post contains Parts II and III of the transcript of our interview with Ron Moore and David Eick, the creators, producers, and writers of the TV show Battlestar Galactica. Joe Beaudoin, Jr., the project leader of the Battlestar Wiki, transcribed the interview for us. We edited the transcript, but the bulk of the work was done by Joe. The transcript is also posted at the Battlestar Wiki, which has a ton of great information for fans of the show. In editing the transcript, we took the liberty of cleaning up grammatical errors and eliminating “ums” and other distractions in order to make it more readable.