bye, Jack
“I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”
–Jack Valenti, dead at 85.
[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] bye, Jack
“I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”
–Jack Valenti, dead at 85.
footnote of the day
“I had never heard of Morton Downey, Jr., but I’m told he is sort of like Rush Limbaugh, but not as shy.”
– Judge Kozinski, in his excellent dissent in White v. Samsung.
it is unlikely Kool-Aid relished being connected with LSD…”
[Yes, at this point in the studying, I’m desperate to laugh at anything. Also, I had no idea that Vanna White was a contestant on Price is Right before she was famous. Yay for the internet.]
quick notes
On the advice of someone from counseling services here, I’ve been studying for 20 minutes on, 10 minutes off. This has greatly reduced my study anxiety, since if I get distracted, I just write it down and say ‘will do it at the next break.’ And then I get back to being focused. This has been tremendous; the last week or so has been one of the most productive I can remember- low stress, high focus.
Anyway, that means I’ve been doing some web surfing in the breaks- some quick thoughts from those periods:
emanuel speech calls it like it is- “ask what your country can do for our party”
I almost never blog about political issues, but I saw this this morning and was thrilled- a politician coming out and putting all the pieces together to demonstrate how thoroughly corrupt and incompetent the Bush administration has been. Lots of other people have done this, so it isn’t exactly new. But the Democrats were (for some reason, probably their own general incompetence) unable to put together the narrative in the last campaign, even though all the pieces were there.
I’m not terribly excited about the Democrats coming back to power- the last 6 years have made many in the party incredibly reactionary and swing further left than I’m comfortable with, and their incompetence at what should be a core skill (campaigning) does not bode well for their competence at government. And frankly, I’m sure they’ll repeat many of the patterns of the Republicans (even more pork and more money from lobbyists), having had a chance to learn from them for a dozen years.
But god… as unexcited as I am for a Democratic ascendancy, I can’t wait until more of the current crop of Republicans aren’t just out of office, but go to jail.
[Picture courtesy flickr user merfam under CC-BY.]
mental health break
This mental health break brought to you by the last day of classes, Morningside Park, warmth and sunshine, and a Canon.
the class I’d really like to take.
For class today we had to listen to this recording of Moglen and Lessig at Wikimania last summer. Sigh. My IP class has generally been good, but man… I would love to take a class which consisted of ‘understand everything touched on in that lecture.’ You could squeeze in deep philosophy of copyright; the relationships between engineering and license-writing; sociology and mechanics of lawyering; anthropology and politics of copyright-based social movements; wiki-production; the long tail (specifically Benkler’s twist on it)… lots to deconstruct and to study. Class list for next year comes out in a couple weeks; hopefully Prof. Moglen will be teaching something like this :)
(And you get to hear Lessig make fun of Zittrain (the panel moderator) for being about 12 years old. What could be more fun/inside baseball!)
(Last day of classes… “only” exams to go, and then a week in North Carolina relaxing before work starts.)
pathetic commentary on computers, from my new cable box
This is what the world has come to expect from computers:
“Keep in mind that your DVR will act like the computer it really is, and as such, may reboot occassionally or the screen may momentarily freeze.”
– from the ‘quick tips’ for my new cable box
No wonder everyone wants to move to web apps.
A Musing on the Constitution and Windows
[Comments turned off here; if you want to comment, head to the copy of the post at First Movers.]
Over the run of the semester, I’ve often been struck by how the US Constitution is like Windows. This seems like such a trite and obvious observation (at least to any software-engineer-turned-lawyer) that I have (mostly) resisted blogging it, but I can’t resist it any more.
The final straw that caused me to muse publicly was that today was my last day of Con Law, and try as I might, I was struggling to pick out any coherent themes which ran throughout the course.
The theme that finally jumped out, of course, was the lack of consistency. By necessarily being all things to all people, the Constitution has done a remarkable job of adapting and meeting the needs of a changing society. Yet, at the same time, the requirement of meeting the new challenges without much changing the underlying text, and doing that by layering together 200 years of constantly-shifting precedents overtop of the basic, underlying core, have left Constitutional law in a fairly precarious position. Because new changes are only tenuously linked to the core underlying concepts, they are unstable and susceptible to attack on similarly tenuous grounds. And as soon as you get off the well-documented paths, forget trying to make sense of the results you’re going to get from the court- give them A and you might get back X, Y, or π.
So too with Windows. As this Times article attempts to explain, by being all things to all people, Windows has become massively successful. But that same pandering has left the code in a precarious state- with security holes, instability, and serious usability problems. Microsoft ended up rewriting much of it in order to release Vista, and it still isn’t where it should be on any of those counts.
The analogy could be extended for literally dozens of pages (which I’ll spare everyone :), but unfortunately I’m not sure it has any practical implications. Software engineering has developed some techniques to deal with complexity, and many of them have analogues in the legal world. But unfortunately they often wouldn’t apply to the Constitution. For example, engineers often speak of ‘refactoring’ code- looking at a code base that has emerged over many years in order to draw out the common principles, and then reorganizing and simplifying. This will be familiar to any first year law student as a Restatement, and many commercial parties have been trying to follow suit by clarifying their contracts. Unfortunately, restating the Constitution would be impossible, as far as I can see- the political implications would stall any such effort dead in its tracks. Similarly, as any engineer will tell you, better engineering has costs- ‘doing things the right way’ often means saying no to customers now in order to better protect everyone’s long term interests. To anyone who has ever read a Scalia dissent, this will no doubt sound familiar, so this approach certainly can be tried in law. But it often isn’t clear whether this is good engineering or good jurisprudence.
And so we soldier on, precariously balanced between getting lots of things done and occasionally wanting to scream at our computers and our Con Law professors (not to mention our Supreme Court Justices.)
If any wiser, sager scholars of either legal code or software code care to share how this could have practical implications, or ask me questions about the other side, or wants to point me at where this has been said before and better, or just wish me desperately needed luck on my Con Law exam, fire away :)
[Image of the Constitution window from the National Cathedral, courtesy of dbking and his excellent collection of CC-BY Washington DC pictures. Image of a real Vista error message via the very cool
Jeremiah Palecek
.]
turning off my mail/contacting me for the next month
I’ve just unsubscribed or turned off mail delivery from a pile of mailing lists; virtually every high volume list I’m on. If you need information from me, do not expect to get it from a list- please mail me directly. I’ll continue to try to respond promptly, though I make no promises.
I don’t like to shut myself off from the world, but it has been a very rough semester for a variety of reasons, and so I’m in pretty full blown crisis mode in prep for exams.
I expect I’ll resubscribe to most of these (but not all) after exams.
[Note: searching for ‘exam’ on google images yields… unexpected results. Don’t try that at home, kids! :) flickr for ‘don’t panic’ works much better; image under BY-SA with thanks to dougward. Am trying to follow the enclosed advice with mixed results.]
ouch
classmate: “If you have any advice on what not to do during our summer jobs, we’d appreciate that.”
legal practice instructor: “Well, I can tell you what I did at my summer job.”
“I worked at a firm in Seattle. One day one of the senior partners asked if I wanted to come to a shareholder’s meeting. I said sure. We went to lunch, where he told me that the company was founded by his son, who had dropped out of school to start the company. The father thought that dropping out was a terrible idea, but he thought it would be a good experience for me to come to the shareholder’s meeting and see what went on.”
“When I graduated, the son’s company offered me a job in their new legal department. I said no.”
“The partner was Bill Gates, Sr.”
The instructor seems like a pretty happy, successful guy, which is good, because I’m sure otherwise he’d be kicking himself at night, every night…
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