(While the other 'elite' law professors were summarily shot down.)

From the NYT article:

On Monday, the best minds in the legal business struck out. The vote was 8-to-0 against them — a shutout, a rout, a humiliation. It is one thing for liberal academics to fail to persuade conservative justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. But the law professors did not produce so much as a sympathetic word from liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens. (The newest justice, Samuel A. Alito Jr., did not participate.)

And if the result was not embarrassing enough, there was also the tone of the court's unanimous decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. In patient cadences, the kind you use in addressing a slightly dull child ...."

Here is a piece by George Mason Law Professor David Bernstein on the matter, and his post on the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

Also, a piece in The Weekly Standard by Professor Peter Berkowitz, also of Mason.

The article talks about the conservative character of the school, and its rapid rise in quality, rankings, and reputation over recent years. From what I've heard, we should be ranked in the 30's in the upcoming U.S. News rankings, and are ranked much higher by other sources.

I've come to realize over my three years at the school, that although I had nary an inkling of it at the outset, I would likely have been much less happy at another law school. At Mason, economics is used as a tool and model for explaining not only the effects of law, but also the ex ante motivations for law. Although a few professors rely on classical moralistic or ethical bases for their reasoning about the law, most attempt to find less squishy principles to more firmly ground their reasoning.

This fits me well, as an erstwhile and still occasional software engineer; it also fits me as a rational, pragmatic, and economic conservative. I'm glad that I happened to stumble upon one of the few schools that could provide me with the mental tools to learn and think about the law in ways that I believe make much more sense than the approaches taken at most other law schools.

I believe that the upward trend of the school will continue, not least because there is a real need and desire for the more conservative approaches it fosters. There is a large body of smart people out there who are not hostile to capitalism, but find themselves somewhat unwelcome in much of academia, partly because their approaches make sense, but don't always make people feel warm and cuddly.

Good stuff. :)

The real lesson of BlackBerry

--George Bernard Shaw

I turned 30 on December 11. What can one say about this event? It certainly makes you think. It makes you think about everything you've done, everything you haven't done, everything you remember and have forgotten, how you have changed, and how long you have left.

At age 30, you're likely to live to be twice your age, but you'll be pushing it to reach three times your age. You start to notice the beginnings of physical changes that will eventually mark you as an old fogie.

Fortunately, I don't think my brain is going to change anymore, so I should end up being one eccentric old man. At least, that is my goal. ;)

And so, you have to start planning things. I think I will plan on dying by throwing myself off Iguasu falls. Or by flying into some war and going kamikaze or something. You know, old people would be a great supply of suicidal warriors.

I have been worried for a long time about the apparent naivete of the U.S. government and military regarding the Chinese.

The Chinese government and military are extremely savvy so long as they are not blinded by their communist dogma. When it comes to trade, information, spying, and weapons technology, they understand the reality that those who play fair lose.

If you are a businessman, have no illusions that your papers and files are safe in your hotel room in China. There have been documented cases of government-sponsored spies following businessmen and bugging or entering their hotel rooms to scour their belongings for useful trade secrets and intellectual property.

We can see clearly that they are pursuing a strategy of mercantilism in trade, to our great disadvantage, thanks to the cluelessness of free-traders in Congress and the White House.

Who can doubt that the same issues exist with regard to sensitive military information? The Chinese sponsor students to come to the U.S. with the express goal sometimes of infiltrating research staffs and supplying tech info back to China. The same surely occurs with U.S. government and military employees, although the screening is more thorough.

In my opinion, the Chinese government would see hacking U.S. government or military sites as a requirement for successful international competition. Hopefully, the NSA and others like them are on top of the problem. I don't doubt, though, that they have gained access to lots of systems on the lower end of the confidentiality spectrum.

It needs to be impressed on people in government, military, and intelligence work, that the Chinese are playing one mean game of chess in everything they do vis-a-vis the U.S. Their sense of time spans centuries and millennia rather than decades. Any suspicious activity on their part needs to be treated with the greatest skepticism by our guys, rather than with apathy or giving them the benefit of the doubt...

I should note that I love the Chinese language and culture, and the country itself is extremely interesting. There is a great deal the West can learn from the Chinese. But international competition is cut-throat. I want my country to be aware of the capabilities and inclinations of all its potential competitors, in order that we not end up losing our shirts, or a lot more...

A couple of aspects of this are interesting to note. First, such education is a form of inalienable property. One is unable to divest themselves of their education after they've obtained it. They can effectively rent out their education by becoming an employee, but they can't sell it. You could imagine someone attempting to sell the right to their lifetime earnings in exchange for a lump sum, but this would most likely be unconstitutional, as it comes too close to indentured servitude.

Since there is no market for buying and selling the educations that people have obtained, it seems likely that there are some large inefficiencies in this area. There are likely to be many people either over- or under-educated for their jobs, or people unable to properly utilize their education, while there may be many others who would like to put someone else's skills or education to work, but are unable to do so for a variety of reasons. Of course, an even simpler place to see inefficiencies is in the decisions of people as to the subjects and extent of their studies before they embark upon them -- it's clear that we can't properly predict how to make those choices, because we can't properly predict the need for skills by future employers.

In recent years, we've seen software systems slowly encroaching on various low-skill industries, and more recently, on higher-skill industries. Many have noted that some people will be displaced in this process. But I haven't heard anyone talk about the theory I present here.

What will be the effect of this use of skilled software? I think that possibly, it will be to begin to detach education from people. What I mean by that is that as software becomes more and more sophisticated and capable, it may be possible that it could serve as a replacement for human education to a large extent.

The principal advantage of this is that whereas there is no market for received education, there is a market for software. Not only a regular market, but a market in which transactions can often be performed online, further reducing transaction costs even below the level of real-world markets in goods. This could allow businesses to avoid the great inherent inefficiencies of the market in employees (i.e. education rental), and effectively buy and sell skills in the form of software, to the exact extent required.

This change may allow many people to avoid the extensive education we undergo now, and instead operate software. This makes people below the skill level of software mostly fungible, and mostly obviates the need for education below that level.

What sorts of social changes could this lead to? I think it's clear that this could create a much greater divergence in education and wealth between those below the skill level of software, and those above it. Let's call this line the software line. Those who thought they could hack the education required to get above the software line would work hard to get it, and those who thought they couldn't would avoid any excess education.

I expect that this could lead to a discontinuity in the continuum of wealth and education across our society. If those below the software line aren't found to be completely useless, they will still gain little benefit from rising above their peers. On the other hand, those above the line will feel the same incentives to improve their education as all of us do now. In the end, we may return to a completely bifurcated society of upper and lower classes with a complete inability to understand and empathize with each other...

My reaction over the last few hours has been vacillating between "cool" and "meh." Why? Because I can't imagine actually using a music player without a remote. Every MD player or CD player or walkman I've had since the late 80's has had some sort of remote. I just couldn't use my iPod without its remote.

Can you imagine having to take your iPod out of your pocket every single time you want to skip forward a song, in order to turn off the hold button, push 'forward', set hold again, and put it back? Maybe some people could deal with this, but I can't.

Especially now that we have podcasts. I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately because it allows me to multitask, but many of them are either random people droning on for an hour about nothing, or 10-minute news segments. A remote with a song-skip function is essential in both cases.

As for the video functionality, I think it is going to be revolutionary. The experience of viewing video on the iPod is only so-so, but the entire model it portends for video distribution, I believe, is going to change our world. Within 5-10 years, I predict that we'll be getting most of our TV via RSS feeds, downloading it with swarming protocols like bittorrent, and watching it whenever the heck we want, either on a portable device like an iPod, or on a computer or a TV hooked up to an iPod.

The thing of it is, I would much rather have 40 gigs of 320x240 TV shows and movies on an iPod that I could take with me wherever I go, than have them on DVDs that are higher quality, but always left at home. The vast majority of what Americans watch is not movies anyway; it's TV. We watch orders of magnitude more TV than movies, and PVR devices have shown people what it's like to be able to store it for later. The iPod, or something similar, is going to be the next PVR.

Why? Firstly, I can't stand it. Secondly, it's homophonous with "blog," making it useless in actual English speech. Finally, it looks ugly. "Legal blog" sounds much more elegant, but is two words rather than one. I think I still prefer this, though, until a more palatable option surfaces...

A prolix complaint larded with conclusory language, like the Complaint here, does not comply with these fundamental pleading mandates.
. . .
This Complaint, which is a blunderbuss of mostly conclusory pleading, does not meet that burden, and it was properly dismissed.

Brehm v. Eisner, 746 A.2d 244 (Del. 2000)

This is a very interesting article, arguing that although software patents may not be helpful to early-stage startups, they are likely quite helpful to slightly more mature startups, probably even moreso than for large and established firms.

Science continues to challenge the cultural assumptions of humans about their centrality in the vast scheme of nature. Although some long ago realized that we are but a small part of a massive evolutionary phenomenon, some will continue to cling to the uniqueness of man's sentience on Earth as proof that man must always hold that claim; such a belief is unwarranted.

We ourselves are beginning to create our own versions of 'life', in artificial intelligence, and in the biological sciences. This article talks about animals that combine human and other-than-human cells in one organism, and their ethical implications.

Although we can't deny or stop such progress, we must consider how to properly fit it in to our ethical frameworks. The following quote from the above article strikes me as a slightly less-than-optimal way to handle the problem of sentient mice...

Stanford law professor Hank Greely, who chaired the ethics committee, said the board was satisfied that the size and shape of the mouse brain would prevent the human cells from creating any traits of humanity. Just in case, Greely said, the committee recommended closely monitoring the mice’s behavior and immediately killing any that display human-like behavior. (emphasis added.)

Larry Page of Google gave a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, and Adam Herscher recorded the whole thing.

"The United States of America is on the verge of losing its competitive advantage," economist Richard Florida wrote last fall in a Harvard Business Review article based on his new book, "The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent." "It is facing perhaps its greatest economic challenge since the dawn of the industrial revolution." Even more provocatively, he later declared that "Terrorism is less a threat to the U.S. than the possibility that creative and talented people will stop wanting to live within its borders."

Lots of interesting stuff at Salon lately. This book by Richard Florida, "The Flight of the Creative Class," is about the most fundamental motivator of our economy in the U.S., the coalescence and utilization of smart and creative people.

Cities and States need to think not just about how much their services and infrastructure benefit their people, but how those things will impact the decision of someone somewhere else when he considers where he wants to live and work. People only make this decision a few times in their life. Once before college, once after college, and maybe a few more times throughout life as their career or the economy of their particular location changes.

So cities and States should create infrastructures and promote, or at least create tax incentives and reduce regulatory hurdles to those activities that bring in smart and creative people.

I really don't think it would take too long for a city to become cool, if it really wanted to. It would be difficult politically to get support from locals, but in the end it would be much better for them. Some of this backward mentality can be seen in Georgetown, in Washington D.C., where locals have prevented the establishment of a subway station for years. Out of the three biggest 'cool' areas of D.C., Georgetown, Adams Morgan, and Dupont Circle, only Dupont is easily reached by the subway. Makes for a pretty un-cool city, in my opinion...

This also touches on the national aspect of the problem -- we need to continue bringing in the smartest people from overseas. First we got the German physicists because of the Nazis, and kept up the flow by having the best universities and the most open society. Now, even if it's a necessity, a stricter immigration policy threatens to derail that flow. This should be a critical issue on the minds of every person involved in immigration policy, and it should be recognized that it may even be in the best interests of the U.S. to allow a terrorist in rather than to deny a scientist.

The scientist may create hundreds of thousands of jobs, bring new products, and improve our standard of living, whereas the terrorist will have a hard time even killing even a few thousand people. (To keep this in perspective, 31,904 people died in passenger car crashes in 2003.)

Here is a great interview on Salon of Richard Dawkins, author of many books on evolution and the problems with religion. I agree with the vast majority of his statements, but do disagree that religion serves no good -- it has served as an important social support and has provided a means to channel some people into more productive pursuits than they would otherwise have entered into. I have not read his works, but now I plan to...

Nonetheless, these functions could and should be provided by a philosophy with scientific foundations rather than by faith in things that have no scientific foundation. In other words, these functions should be provided by philosophical frameworks that, even if they take advantage of similar methodologies, such as self-hypnosis or faith, do so consciously and openly, and promote an evolutionary and science-based understanding of life.

I also disagree with his seeming belief that without religion, most disputes would be amicably disposed of. Although many disputes are caused by or exacerbated by dogmatic faith, there are other reasons, rational reasons, to fight and have wars as well.

A quote from the article, noting the obvious:

Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter.