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I saw on BoingBoing recently a harrowing blurb:
Phone texts in Nigeria urged mass murder"War, war, war. Stand up and defend yourselves. Kill before they kill you. Slaughter before they slaughter you. Dump them in a pit before they dump you." — One of many mass-text-messages sent last week in Nigeria, inciting people to murder. And they did: some 350 were killed in Christian/Muslim violence.
What was so particularly disturbing about this news was watching history repeat itself (albeit this time in Nigeria). In the 1994 Rwanda genocide cell phones weren't widely available, but there was the radio, and xenophobic Hutus used this media to convince ordinary Hutus to do their murderous bidding.
So what is the antidote for this sort of thing? To clamp down on free speech so no one may ever seek to inflame violent ethnic tensions? Hardly.
Mike Semple Piggot, aka "CharonQC" has a post on his blog critical of the legal logic employed by Scotland in releasing and repatriating convicted Pan Am 103 bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi far earlier than his sentence otherwise would have allowed for. Having invited comments, I posted the following (with a few edits), suggesting that the role of retribution in justice has been seriously overlooked in this matter, and thus explains why America and Americans are so upset:
From time to time the legal blogosphere erupts into discussion about contract lawyering, or, more specifically, contract document review. And this week seems one of those times.
In American litigation there's always a stage known as "discovery," where parties request documents from each other. In commercial litigation these requests often result in voluminous productions of documents, which require review at least twice: once before it's produced, to ensure that the documents being disclosed are responsive to those requests and also not privileged, and once when it is received by the requesting party to see if it is helpful to its case. Both reviews (though particularly the former) can be extremely labor intensive. While they used to be done in vast warehouses of bankers' boxes, thanks to advancements in technology the reviews can now be done electronically, by clicking through documents on a computer screen. (On the flip side, however, this same technological innovation has also increased the workload, as the ease of emailing and electronic document creation has vastly expanded the universe of documents that need to be reviewed.)
So to handle the workload, many law firms turn to contract lawyers to help them. As I've written before, I think contingency work should be a perfectly legitimate way for licensed attorneys to make a living. In fact, I think contingency work should be a legitimate way for nearly everyone to make a living. Instead of employers having to guess at their workloads and permanently staff up in order to cover the busier periods, bearing all that overhead for salaries and benefits, they can bring on people as needed, who get paid more cash for their time in lieu of the stability and benefits of a permanent position. As long as the contractor prefers this arrangement -- and many, for many reasons, do -- everyone wins.
Or can win. But clearly not everyone does, and a few blogs have sprouted to lament the plight of the contract doc reviewer.
As someone who has done contract document review I sometimes follow these blogs in order to keep abreast on the industry, but at the same time I'm often put off by the overwhelming bitterness they espouse. At the same time, underneath the anger I think they reveal some valid, and unfortunate, points about this aspect of the legal profession. So I was moved to answer some of the recent criticism of these blogs I saw on another.
This past week we celebrated an important anniversary. That's right: July 5 was Huey Lewis's birthday.
Though other 80s rock stars have been in the headlines of late, I've been plotting planning this Huey Lewis and the News-themed Blawg Review for quite some time now. People who know me know I'm a big fan of Huey Lewis and the News (hereinafter "HLN"). People who know me know their music has been a big part of my life, particularly in recent years as I've pursued my legal career.
But while I had the prescience to become a fan some 20+ years ago, obviously not everyone has been so fortunate. It would therefore be very wrong of me to waste this opportunity to share all the great things I know about this band and their music.
So join me in this week's Blawg Review as I share the latest in legal blogging along with this crash course in HLN appreciation.
On June 1, quite a few years ago, President Monroe asked Congress to declare war on England. "CharonQC" reminds us of this fact in this week's Blawg Review, along with many other facts surrounding this date in history.
In all seriousness, I find the history of US-UK relations to be a source of tremendous optimism about the world, showing how two enemies can eventually come to be close friends -- as governments, and as peoples. And people. This week's Blawg Review collects posts from lawyers on both shores (including my "Sticks and Stones" one).
Of course, given the state of UK politics -- with the predilection of its governing officials to underwrite, with the public fisc, their extensions of their homes to house their servants, the constructions of islands in their lakes to house their ducks, and the maintenance of their houses' moats -- it's probably just as well that the US went its separate way all those years ago...
Brian Cuban has been in the news a lot lately for spearheading a campaign to get FaceBook to ban groups of Holocaust deniers. I fear I may have inadvertently picked a fight with him on Twitter however when I recently tweeted:
"Can't support (@bcuban's efforts to force FBook to purge Holocaust deniers. Suppressing those who were X in '30s enabled what happened in 40s."
Of course, as I also tweeted later, "Nothing like tweeting about the Holocaust 140 characters at a time..." While I know what I meant by my tweet, so compressed my meaning might not be clear to others. So I'll elaborate here.
One of the most interesting courses I took in law school was on comparative constitutional law, which I took during my semester in Germany. I think as Americans we tend to take for granted our federal constitution: that it exists, and how it exists. No matter what the school of thought behind how it should be interpreted, there's a reverence towards it that percolates through all of them. We therefore tend to expect that other modern democracies have their own constitutional equivalents -- an expectation that in reality is rarely met. Many democracies have no constitutions at all, or when they do, they don't necessarily map to our own.
Of course, we needn't look abroad to see these other examples of constitutions. Within our own borders each state bears its own constitution, which may greatly differ in form and substance from the one tying our nation together. Case in point: California.
It's Blawg Review, and once again I've been organized enough to contribute to it. Kevin Thompson at Cyberlaw Central is hosting and has composed his Blawg Review in honor of Towel Day, a day of tribute to Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That guide is known for its helpful travel tips, including that one must always be sure to have their towel.
Speaking of travel, my post about going to INTA is linked to this Blawg Review, but without the picture my friend took of me there holding a Travelodge towel due to some concern on my part that given the angle, lighting, and wardrobe choices (or lack thereof) I ended up looking too much like an artichoke in said picture. So instead I sent in a different one, one where there's no danger of me being confused for being a vegetable of any kind. (At least none known in this part of the galaxy.)
I suppose I have Jeremy Phillips, aka @ipkat, to blame. One of the legal folks I met in England earlier this year, it was he who first suggested I attend the annual INTA conference this year. INTA is an international trademark organization, and thus I might not have thought to attend given that I've typically focused more on copyright than trademark in my cyberlaw work. But cyberlaw is rife with trademark issues, and, like, copyright, trademark law deals with regulating expression -- which is what fascinates me about these areas of law generally. So perhaps it would be worth attending?
Of course, once I realized how many people from around the world I knew who would be there, there was no question.
Toymaker Ty has apparently started marketing dolls named "Sasha" and "Melia." I saw a quote by Ty saying that it was a complete coincidence that those happen to also be the names of President Obama's daughters, but I don't think anyone's buying that story.
On the other hand, I can't get behind the analyses laying out the causes of actions the Obama's could raise in suing to stop the dolls. Even if the dolls portrayed more of a likeness of the girls, the free speech angle still seems too blithely dismissed. As I commented on the PatentlyO site's post, while Ty's marketing of the dolls may be unseemly, we are much better off being a country where this kind of thing is allowed to happen than a country where it is not.
Every so often the legal blogosphere erupts in conversation about the plight of contract attorneys. As it really should, because the plight of contract attorneys can often be pretty grim and looks to becoming even more so. It can be feast-or-famine, unstable, life-sucking, dead-end work that also seems to be getting less and less economically viable.
What a waste of an education. What a waste of a profession. Contract lawyering need be none of these things, but a few things will need to change in the legal industry to make it viable, or else it will just cripple the careers of more and more law graduates.
Below I suggest what those changes need to be, and, taking a page from the technology sector, propose better models for how contingent law work can be better leveraged to everyone's benefit.
The New York Times is reporting on the status of lawsuits to stop the repeal of New York City's mayoral term limits, a repeal undertaken at the urging of current Mayor Bloomberg, who otherwise would be forced out at the end of his term.
I hate term limits on principle. I understand that that they are intended to help break the chokehold that connected incumbents can have over seats, but I find it too imprecise a remedy because it forces out from office those who are capable and accountable as much as it forces out those who are not.
That said, I find myself rooting for the lawsuits, because if there's anything I hate more than term limits it's the changing of the political rules to advance an individual's own political career.
I do really like my Palm Treo (700p). It does almost everything I want, although not necessarily as well as later devices do. The web browser, for instance, can't view pages without heavily adapting them, and I can't see attachments or Flash. (Note to restaurateurs who insist on building their websites with Flash: hungry people out and about will not go to your restaurant unless you provide a text-based alternative they can see on their phones.) It also, as I long ago lamented, doesn't have WiFi, which, after my recent trip to London where I had the use of a phone that did, is a conspicuous oversight.
But it does have certain advantages over other, even newer devices. The PalmOS, which has an API others can develop for, is a nice non-Microsoft alternative. The phone I recently got to use in the UK provided my first experience with Windows Mobile, and while it wasn't awful, it wasn't as smooth. I can pretty much drive my Treo without the stylus, but even with relatively small fingers that wasn't always possible on this other phone. Also, unlike an iPhone, Palm supports cut and paste, and it, too, offers a fairly elegant and hardy hardware design not overly encumbered with extraneous buttons that can fail.
But nice as the Treos are, they are getting long in the tooth and iPhones and Androids and Blackberries are saturating the market Palm had once pioneered. The company is in desperate need to make a possibly last stand with a new product that is everything the old Palms were and more, and, by many accounts, the Pre is unveiled at CES this month may just be that.
But its launch announcement declares it to be tied to Sprint, whom is not at present my carrier in either the US or UK, and thus, despite the phone appearing to technically sate all my cell phone needs, it won't. And were it to hit the market right now, I would likely not be a customer.
There is something very wrong with the cell phone industry when building better products won't guarantee you business. While it may be true that if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door, it will not be true if it is locked to a single exterminating service. For the sake of the cell phone industry and consumers, this situation needs to change.
"It's funny," I twittered to @CharonQC recently, "That you are developing an interest in US law just as I'm developing an interest in UK law."
"CharonQC," the nom de plume for an inimitable London legal figure, has taken to blogs and twitters with incomparable relish and purpose, using them as effective tools to stoke his developing interest in the American legal terrain. Towards that end he's composed a "pageflake" of US blogs, and this week hosts the latest Blawg Review (that happily includes my law and technology post).
Meanwhile I, for my part, am also using these technology tools to stoke my ever-burgeoning interest in UK law, an interest that has me once again making my way across the pond.
While I normally don't telegraph where I'm going to be, in this case I'm making an exception because I would very much welcome meeting with my UK legal compatriots. I'll be there the 6th through 11th, and apart from trying to gatecrash the RSC production of Hamlet to satisfy my traditional theater requirement, my schedule is fairly open. Please drop me a line and let's see if we can arrange a rendezvous. I still don't have a UK cell phone, but the hotel promises free WiFi, so hopefully my trip won't be the information technology nightmare the last one was...
At the Copyright History conference I attended in London last March I had the extraordinary privilege of seeing with my own eyes, mere inches away, the original copy of the Statute of Anne.
The Statute of Anne is one of the founding pillars of modern US and UK copyright law, reflecting a sea change in attitude about how the copy right should be handled. Before it came along, English law (not to be confused with Scottish law, whose own system already bore modern copyright features) granted monopoly in the copy right to a printing monopoly. It was fitting, in fact, that the Copyright History symposium took place in a hall of the Stationers' Company, a powerful company of the 17th century that then had near-exclusive license to print.
But it wasn't just that there was a printing monopoly: it was that this monopoly was granted by the government. Consequently the government could impose a kind of censorship by controlling, through the printing license, what ideas could be published. Naturally such control limited discourse, and by 1695, under political pressure, it finally gave way for good. In 1710 the Statute of Anne came into being instead, which, while preserving a few characteristics of the earlier licensing system, mostly turned it entirely on its head. Now, instead of using printing licenses as a means of controlling discourse, by its very design the Statute of Anne was meant to stimulate it.
And it did. Right away newspapers proliferated, public houses exploded with popularity (as they had during earlier periods when licensing statutes had lapsed) and democratic ideals flourished as tight government control over ideas yielded. But while the structure of modern copyright law today looks much as it did following the Statute of Anne, its limiting effects on discourse now seem more similar to the period that preceded it.
