How to Write a Book Review and Refute Textualism, All At Once

My blogging has been slow lately, but I’d be remiss not to point readers to Judge Richard Posner’s review of Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner’s new book, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. It is a terrific piece of writing and it is an utter evisceration of the book. In the review, Posner does [...]

Parsing the Commerce Clause

NFIB v. Sebelius, the 2012 Supreme Court decision rejecting nearly all of the constitutional challenges to the Affordable Care Act, has (at least) two bits of interest to infolaw folks. First, the majority opinion finds that the ACA‘s individual mandate cannot be sustained under the Commerce Clause. Congress regulates all manner of infolaw issues under [...]

The Obama Administration and Chutzpah

I’ve posted a new essay, titled Chutzpah, to SSRN. It’s forthcoming in the peer-reviewed Journal of National Security Law and Policy. Here’s the abstract: President Barack Obama campaigned on a platform of governmental transparency. This Essay examines how his administration has implemented this commitment in two policy areas: Internet communication, and intellectual property. It finds [...]

When Cybersecurity Makes Things Worse

Adam Dachis has an interesting and worrisome post up at Lifehacker. (Disclosure: he kindly asked me for input into the post.) It thinks about a post-CISPA world, where privacy exists only at the behest of companies who hold our information. CISPA would immunize these firms for sharing information with the federal government, so long as [...]

Hollywood Comes to Brooklyn

Catchy title, no? Today, Al Perry, Vice President of Worldwide Content Protection and Outreach at Paramount Pictures, came to BLS to talk about movies, piracy, and the Internet. He spoke for about 40 minutes, and then Jason Mazzone offered comments. Next, we had about 30 minutes of spirited discussion with BLS students. I’m writing up [...]

Pangloss’s Copyright

Further proof that, from an IP perspective, we do not live in the best of all possible worlds… My Essay “Pangloss’s Copyright” in the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, in response to Peter Yu’s excellent “Region Codes and the Territorial Mess,” is now available. Feedback welcomed!

Wired, and Threatened

I have a short op-ed on how technology provides both power and peril for journalists over at JURIST. Here’s the lede: Journalists have never been more empowered, or more threatened. Information technology offers journalists potent tools to gather, report and disseminate information — from satellite phones to pocket video cameras to social networks. Technological advances have [...]

Do Reactions To Drug-Sniffing Dogs Say More About Drug Policy Than Privacy?

In Florida v. Jardines, the U.S. Supreme Court will determine whether the sniff of a trained narcotics dog at the front door of a person’s home constitutes a Fourth Amendment search. This is very exciting for privacy scholars because it presents two possible shifts in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. First, the court might further expand Justice [...]

Pakistan Scrubs the Net

Pakistan, which has long censored the Internet, has decided to upgrade its cybersieves. And, like all good bureaucracies, the government has put the initiative out for bid. According to the New York Times, Pakistan wants to spend $10 million on a system that can block up to 50 million URLs concurrently, with minimal effect on [...]

Santorum: Please Don’t Google

If you Google “Santorum,” you’ll find that two of the top three search results take an unusual angle on the Republican candidate, thanks to sex columnist Dan Savage. (I very nearly used “Santorum” as a Google example in class last semester, and only just thought better of it.) Santorum’s supporters want Google to push the, [...]