Feb

17

Does Google Buzz Violate COPPA?

Posted by: | February 17, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Danielle Citron over at Concurring Opinions invited me to write a guest post expanding on a comment I wrote yesterday on her post on the Google Buzz story. I’m reposting it here with more of the links enabled, which got lost in translation: Google’s new social networking service, Google Buzz, has obviously been all over [...]

Feb

17

Judge Posner’s Argument Concerning “A Failure of Capitalism”

Posted by: | February 17, 2010 | 5 Comments

Surely there are more pressing things to do at this hour than scan my Google Reader headlines (well, actually, I’ve become a Feedly user, but the Feedly feed comes from Reader, mostly). Nonetheless,  I couldn’t pass up today’s essay by Seventh Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner, on Foreign Policy’s website.   Titled “The Real Danger of [...]

Feb

16

Fair Judges or Judge Shopping?

Posted by: | February 16, 2010 | 1 Comment

I had a couple of writing deadlines so I’m a bit late to the game on the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s extraordinary decision (or, more accurately, nondecision) in Allen v. State.  The Court was not split on whether Justice Gableman should recuse himself in all criminal cases. No Justice held that he should. Three did not [...]

Feb

16

Train…

Posted by: | February 16, 2010 | 8 Comments

Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it. Proverbs 22:6 Serena Williams, Justin Timberlake, Yo-Yo Ma, Shirley Temple, Tiger Woods, the Olsen Twins, Michael Jackson, and many others are all examples of people who have done noteworthy things in their lives. They were [...]

Feb

15

Water and People Conference

Posted by: | February 15, 2010 | 1 Comment

On Friday, February 26, 2010, Marquette University Law School (MULS) will hold its annual Public Service Conference at the Alumni Memorial Union on the Marquette University campus on the increasingly important topic of water law.  The conference, entitled “Water and People,” will address water issues in Wisconsin (as well as nationally and internationally), development and [...]

Feb

14

Imagine this…

Posted by: | February 14, 2010 | 3 Comments

You wake up in the morning and look out your window at the snow. You go to your inventory and pick out a nice outfit and shoes. Then go into appearance and, after wearing your clothes and shoes, you quickly take off all your hair; you need to look sophisticated today. You attach a new ‘do. On second thought…

…a bit frustrated [you] remind yourself that you just won a lot of money and some fun stuff. You send a message to the coordinator, but he isn’t online. Slightly frustrated you log early that day.
A week passes. You find a new home on Sunny Paradise the sim that your neighbor moved to; she was a good neighbor before and is a good neighbor now. You find out that the sim on which you were living was reposessed because the owner was not paying the tier (taxes) on the land. Wondering where the 5,000 bucks that you paid the owner to rent your space went, you are glad that you will be getting some money coming in once you receive the contest prize.

[But you never get the money...]

[i]n real life, they would seek legal assistance, attempt to negotiate, and failing that file suit against both the real estate company and the contest coordinators, but in SL there is no law.

The tension between the realities of life and the law and the entire absence of law in the life of an avatar is what changed my mind about the law.

Feb

12

Seventh Circuit Weighs in on Bankruptcy Fraud

Posted by: | February 12, 2010 | Leave a Comment

In the wake of a surge in bankruptcies, can a boom in bankruptcy fraud prosecutions be far behind?  If so, district court judges will benefit from the Seventh Circuit’s opinion today in United States v. Peel (No. 07-3933), which addressed a number of unsettled legal questions. The facts in Peel were unusually lurid for a [...]

Feb

12

Day to Oppose the Use of Child Soldiers

Posted by: | February 12, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Today, February 12, marks the eighth anniversary of the entry into force of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict.  As IntLawGrrls points out, the U.S. is a party to the protocol (even though it remains one of the only two countries in [...]

Feb

11

Langdell’s Curse and Transactional Lawyers

Posted by: | February 11, 2010 | 5 Comments

In a prior post, I criticized law schools’ heavy reliance on the case-method as a way to prepare lawyers for practice. As I argued in that post, the case method, which primarily teaches students the law through an analysis of the legal reasoning in appellate cases while ignoring most of the factual context for those [...]

Feb

11

The Legacy of the Little Rock Crucible

Posted by: | February 11, 2010 | 1 Comment

“That crucible moment” – that’s a phrase Ernest Green used to describe the period when he and eight other African American students enrolled in and attended Little Rock Center High School in 1957. It took the president of the United States and 10,000 soldiers to help them get in the door in deeply segregationist Arkansas. [...]

Feb

10

Desparate Times and Desperate Measures: Public Employment in San Francisco

Posted by: | February 10, 2010 | Leave a Comment

The recession might not be as bad as it was, but tell that to all those people out there who can’t find jobs or are facing this type of government action (in the most progressive of all cities).  From Heather Knight of the San Francisco Chronicle: More than 10,000 San Francisco city workers — from [...]

Feb

7

“Law Lords” to JFS: You’re Not So Free

Posted by: | February 7, 2010 | 2 Comments

There has been a fair amount of commentary regarding a decision of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (formerly the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary and part of the House of Lords) in a matter called R (on application of E) v. Governing Board of JFS.  The case involved the desire of a man referred [...]

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