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.

But they do have so much to overcome. Though often blessed with an abundance of natural resources, many African countries have generations-long histories of exploitation and heartache, either from external colonization forces or internal ethnic tensions, or some combination of the two.

Rwanda is no exception to this. This small but verdant country sits tucked away near the geographic crossroads of this vast continent: just below the Equator and wedged in between the large English-speaking East African countries of Uganda to the north and Tanzania to the east, and the French-speaking tiny Burundi to the south and enormous Democratic Republic of Congo to the west. Rwanda has no oceanfront; all connections to the world need to pass through at least one of its neighbors.

The upside to this situation is that Rwanda's geographic isolation protected it from some of the earlier ravages of colonization. But by the beginning of the 20th century colonization had begun to take hold, and by the end of World War I it was firmly under Belgian control.

Colonization can be something of a double-edged sword. While it often brings handy western technologies, it does so with the loss of local autonomy -- or worse. In Rwanda's case, what Belgium wrought was much worse, taking a largely stable society and turning its peoples against each other with the most catastrophic results. Thus Rwanda is not just a developing former colony struggling to attain its place among modern countries; it is also a young country struggling to heal a most grievous internal wound. By many accounts it has done remarkably well. But at the beginning of this decade Rwanda is at a crossroads: can it continue to progress towards prosperity and stability, or will it give in to the darker forces that have pulled it into pieces before?

I myself do use Facebook, albeit reluctantly. It seemed like something I needed to do if I wanted to have any credibility as a cyberlawyer, to go there and see how it worked and what the appeal of it was. Because its appeal wasn't at all obvious to me: there was nothing Facebook offered in its closed, proprietary way that basic Internet technologies didn't offer in their more open and flexible way. I've never understood the point of closed systems. I didn't get them back when AOL was the closed system of choice either. As an Internet user, why restrict yourself to the finite universe of content and users AOL or Facebook provides when there is an unlimited universe just beyond its borders in the Web at large?

But perhaps I'm not sufficiently crediting individual preference. Just as I preferred a large university to a small college, many others prefer the exact opposite. Small feels safe. Predictable. Knowable. Limited. So perhaps that's why so many people have liked Facebook, because it felt like a quiet cul-de-sac away from the tumult of the information superhighway. A quiet place for just you and your friends. But maybe it's not the quiet, out-of-the-way place people thought after all, thanks to Facebook's inadequate privacy model.

There are lots of horror stories about Facebook users being "outed" in some unfortunate way in their real lives by something seen on their Facebook pages, like people being denied insurance coverage for looking too healthy, or even fugitives ending up captured because they posted about where they were. But interesting as those stories may be, what I want to focus on is the illusion of privacy Facebook fosters for its users, which thus enables so many to later be blindsided when content they thought was private is later proved not to be. In particular, I want to focus on the weakest link: friends.

Rwanda's main tourist attractions lie outside the central capital, in the further corners of the country. To the east is Akagera, the portion of the country most similar to Kenya and Tanzania and home to the elephants, giraffes, hippos, crocodiles, et al. that one would expect to see on a safari. To the southwest is the lush rainforest of Nyungwe Forest, and to the northwest Parc National des Volcans, which is home to Rwanda's share of the volcanic range that runs through the Rift Valley section of middle Africa. (Rwanda's volcanoes are all extinct, but some of the ones on the other side of the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo remain active.) Meanwhile, running along much of the country's western border is Lake Kivu, a sizeable lake separating Rwanda from the DRC. Several cities and towns dot the Rwandan coastline, including Gisenyi to the north.

Unfortunately I never made it to Akagera. By the time my schedule settled down it was too late to research and organize affordable transportation. (Nothing in Rwanda is more than a few hours away from Kigali, but unless you are prepared to take local buses or matatus, which still requires figuring out, the other options are to take an organized tour or organize your own transport. I think the latter, especially if you join up with others, makes the most sense. Private car rental may be possible in Kigali, but for sanity's sake it probably is a better idea to hire a driver with a car.) But for the second weekend we headed to points west.

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.

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.

As a swimming teacher -- in fact, one who doesn't actually like her students to use goggles -- I feel competent, and confident, in saying this school is insane.

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...

"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.

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.

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.)

Of course, once I realized how many people from around the world I knew who would be there, there was no question.