Just what Maryland needs.

This arti­cle in the Washig­ton Post (h/t @marylandmoment) describes how the Mary­land House of Del­e­gates have passed a bill to allow Mary­lan­ders to cre­ate trusts for their pets.

This is truly a ground­break­ing piece of leg­is­la­tion; pre­cisely what Mary­land needs. Crime? Hous­ing slump? Unem­ploy­ment? Reces­sion? Death penalty? No, let’s focus our efforts on an impor­tant topic — pet trusts. I had dogs grow­ing up, and they were part of the fam­ily; I shed tears when they died. There was no bur­ial or memo­r­ial ser­vice for them.

Do peo­ple need trust accounts for their pets? Maybe — accord­ing to the arti­cle, 39 other states already allow their cit­i­zens to cre­ate trusts for their pets. How­ever, when our state Sen­ate decides to put the issue of repeal­ing the death penalty to rest for this ses­sion by not repeal­ing the death penalty, why is our leg­is­la­tion spend­ing the time on pet trust funds?

Published on 03/04/2009 10:47 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , , , , ,

A thoroughly useless bill.

The Mary­land State Sen­ate has voted to amend the death penalty bill. I guess at the last minute they decided that the bill, instead of repeal­ing the death penalty, should not repeal the death penalty.

I think Sen. Raskin said it best:

Amend­ments say­ing that the death penalty can be imposed only with DNA evi­dence and with more than just eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mony do not change cur­rent law but are merely “cam­ou­flage for the sta­tus quo.”

Why is our state leg­is­la­ture wast­ing everyone’s time mak­ing bills that serve absolutely no pur­pose whatsoever?

Published on 03/04/2009 10:26 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , ,

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin

Let me give you some back­ground about myself: I’m more attuned to absorb broad knowl­edge than deep under­stand­ing. I can work at truly inci­sive wis­dom about a topic, but my default mode is sound-bites and head­lines. What can I say, at least I rec­og­nize it. For that rea­son, I was aware of some Supreme Court nom­i­na­tions and cases that came and went, but I had no more than a vague aware­ness that they were there.

Jef­frey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court was a fas­ci­nat­ing read. It gave me his­tor­i­cal and legal back­ground about the major Supreme Court cases of my time. It gave me his­tor­i­cal and polit­i­cal back­ground about the Supreme Court jus­tices of my time. I found the style engag­ing and inter­est­ing, if a bit long winded. There were entirely too many occa­sions when I said to myself, “haven’t I read this before?” How­ever, Toobin repeated entire pas­sages for rea­sons — obvi­ously he didn’t repeat him­self by mis­take — and it’s a nit-pick when view­ing the entirety of the work.

There are crit­ics of Toobin who claim he is too par­ti­san one way or another; too pro or con one jus­tice or another. I know that the Volokh Con­spir­acy in par­tic­u­lar has issues with his views. They are prob­a­bly right, but I wasn’t expect­ing an eru­dite trea­tise on con­sti­tu­tional law; I was expect­ing a descrip­tion of the Supreme Court, and that’s exactly what I got.

Published on 02/19/2009 6:11 pm.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , , , , ,

Search Engine Optimization — what’s the point?

Let me be hon­est here: I know very lit­tle about SEO. I have vague ideas of links and head­ers, but I know that there are a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what-have-yous. (10 points to who gets the movie ref­er­ence) One thing that both­ers me about the SEO craze, how­ever, is that most peo­ple aren’t look­ing to gen­er­ate their rev­enue from the web.

If you have a web-based busi­ness or you’re specif­i­cally look­ing to get cus­tomers via the web, by all means, opti­mize to your heart’s con­tent. I would assume that most peo­ple, includ­ing law firms, are not look­ing at web surfers for the bulk of their busi­ness. If you’re in this cat­e­gory, why spend time, effort and pos­si­bly money on SEOiz­ing your site? (I know that’s con­ju­gated incor­rectly. I don’t care.) Every firm should have a web­site, but the web­site is some­thing you point poten­tial cus­tomers to rather than the site point­ing poten­tial cus­tomers to you.

Published on 02/06/2009 9:54 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , , , , , ,

Religion and personal privacy

Reli­gious insti­tu­tions hold a par­tic­u­lar niche in our soci­ety. After all, Amer­ica was founded on reli­gious free­dom (and turkey din­ners). We have to respect each other’s reli­gious beliefs, and a reli­gious insti­tu­tion — such as a school — has the right to fol­low its tenets even in the face of Con­sti­tu­tion­ally pro­tected rights. The ques­tion I find myself ask­ing is: how steep is that slope?

Sure, a pri­vate, reli­gious school can only accept stu­dents of the same faith; that’s a given. What about if the stu­dents are doing things the reli­gion reviles? Can a Lutheran pri­vate school expel two girls for being sus­pected les­bians?
http://​www​.latimes​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​l​a​-​m​e​-​s​c​h​o​o​l​2​8​-​2​0​0​9​j​a​n​2​8​,​0​,​3​5​0​3​1​1​4​.​s​t​o​r​y​?​t​r​a​c​k​=​rss

The truth is, there are two dif­fer­ent issues at play here. One is the pri­vate own­er­ship of the insti­tu­tions; since the State is not offi­cially involved, there is no Con­sti­tu­tional pro­tec­tion. Now, there are all sorts of argu­ments that any school, pri­vate or oth­er­wise, should con­sti­tute “State actors”, but the cur­rent legal cli­mate is that pri­vate schools are not sub­ject to the State Action Doc­trine.
The other issue is that a reli­gious insti­tu­tion must be allowed to prac­tice and adhere to its faith. To para­phrase Bill Cosby, “I know reli­gion! I prac­tice reli­gion!” Are there aspects of most reli­gions that those not within the faith would take offense at? Yes; hell, I know peo­ple in my reli­gion who have a hard time with some of it.

Nor­mally I would view a case like the one linked to above as cor­rect since the per­son has two outs: she can choose to use a dif­fer­ent school and she can choose not to take part in the offend­ing reli­gious prac­tices (again by leav­ing the school by choice). How­ever, since this is a school sit­u­a­tion, and the stu­dent is notfree to make the choices I just men­tioned, this deci­sion does not sit soundly with me — but what are the alternatives?

Published on 01/29/2009 10:04 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , , ,

Oversharing on twitter

The most recent Lawyer2Lawyer pod­cast had guest appear­ances by @KevinOKeefe and @ScottGreenfield con­cern­ing the use of twit­ter by lawyers.

Kevin had requested ques­tions or con­cerns peo­ple had with twit­ter, and the first thing that popped into my mind was over­shar­ing. I’m obvi­ously not talk­ing about when you give too many graphic details at the din­ner table; rather, when you share infor­ma­tion regard­ing what you are work­ing on.

I recently vol­un­teered to help do research on a case. (As an aside, this is the first bit of prac­ti­cal legal expe­ri­ence I am get­ting. To give credit where due, I was referred to the attor­ney through my law school. One of my pro­fes­sors men­tioned — in pass­ing — that he knew some­one who was look­ing for help and I approached the pro­fes­sor after class to get the attorney’s con­tact infor­ma­tion.) In my excite­ment to be work­ing on some­thing real, I twit­ted the gen­eral issue I was research­ing. Before I hit the “tweet” but­ton, how­ever, I hes­i­tated. How much infor­ma­tion does some­one really need to piece together the rest of the picture?

That started me think­ing about the pos­si­ble pit­falls of twit­ter in gen­eral — the biggest one being the com­pla­cency we fall into when there is a per­cep­tion of secu­rity. Pass­word breaches aside, twitter’s “direct mes­sage” fea­ture poses a huge risk for peo­ple hop­ing to direct mes­sage sen­si­tive, con­fi­den­tial or pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions. If some­one uses the wrong for­mat in send­ing the mes­sage, even if it’s only a sin­gle char­ac­ter dis­crep­ancy, the pri­vate mes­sage is posted for the entire globe to read.

I hardly ever use the SMS func­tion­al­ity to update my twit­ter sta­tus, yet I still allow SMS noti­fi­ca­tion of direct mes­sages. When I tried to respond to some­one with my email address I com­pletely failed to pref­ace my mes­sage with a “d”, thereby pub­lish­ing my per­sonal email address for all to see. For­tu­nately I’m a nobody, so I’m safe and unhassled.

Pri­vacy Dis­as­ter At Twit­ter: Direct Mes­sages Exposed (Update: GroupTweet Is Likely Culprit)

dm fail!

There are a myr­iad of arti­cles on how to use twit­ter (some days it seems that’s all any­one ever writes about. And it’s not as if each arti­cle is chock-full of orig­i­nal infor­ma­tion…) and many of them sug­gest that you use the direct mes­sage func­tion rather than @replies so as not to over­bur­den the poor peo­ple who vol­un­tar­ily asked to be shown your every last fleet­ing thought. This the­ory works hand-in-hand with the the­ory that twit­ter is a use­ful way to com­mu­ni­cate with cowork­ers, as a sort of mass IM mech­a­nism. I think that it’s safe to assume that your com­mu­ni­ca­tions with your cowork­ers will include priv­i­leged infor­ma­tion. Try to remem­ber that unless you very, very care­fully direct mes­sage some­one, the infor­ma­tion is know­able to any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion. Or peo­ple sit­ting next to some­one with an inter­net connection.

I don’t mean to harp on twit­ter — the issue is the same with all social media:
Apple staffer’s online leak points to new iPhone proces­sor | Betanews
I sim­ply feel that the nature of twit­ter more eas­ily lends itself to be misused.

Published on 01/15/2009 2:13 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , , , , , , , ,

A nation founded on immorality

I read with inter­est the blawr­gu­ment (I might need an inter­ven­tion with all these pseudo-words) regard­ing whether break­ing the law is, in itself, an immoral act. The dis­cus­sion went from pros­e­cu­tor to defender, across the coun­try, and it cov­ered most of the issues, specif­i­cally revolv­ing around the moral­ity of plead­ing not guilty when the defen­dant did com­mit a crime.

The point I found myself pon­der­ing is this: When the found­ing fathers rebelled against the Eng­lish, break­ing the laws of their par­ent nation, did that make them immoral? Are we, as Amer­i­cans, a nation founded on immoral­ity? If not, where lies the difference?

Published on 01/08/2009 8:37 pm.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , , ,

I can quit anytime I want

Like most other twit­ter users, I have been afflicted recently by the slow­down and gen­eral wonk­i­ness of twit­ter. Where is this plague com­ing from? Who shall we blame? Well, we know who to blame… obvi­ously Israel.

I did notice, how­ever, that my behav­ior as a result of this twit­ter brown-out was wor­ry­ing, to say the least. My trusty Tweet­Deck was fail­ing me (ok, to be fair, it’s the twit­ter API that’s fail­ing) so I found myself refresh­ing the twit­ter home­page sev­eral times a minute. Why?

It would seem that I am addicted to twit­ter. This is not some­thing I am proud of, but I take solace in the knowl­edge that many of my fel­low twit­tites share my obses­sion. The num­ber of tweets refer­ring to how slowly twit­ter is updat­ing and how it is affect­ing them assures me of that.

I would go on, but I noticed that the main part of my post is just under 140 words. You understand…

Published on 01/08/2009 1:21 pm.
Filed under: WorkInProgress Tags: , ,

Quickie — Privacy issues

Great arti­cle I dis­cov­ered via Gideon (again): ‘I’ve Got Noth­ing to Hide’ and Other Mis­un­der­stand­ings of Pri­vacy . Excel­lent response to J. Posner’s attempts to mol­lify pri­vacy advocates.

Published on 01/05/2009 11:11 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , ,

Orphan Works Bill Solution?

I’m a mem­ber of Con​cep​tArt​.org. As an ama­teur artist, I found the forums to be incred­i­bly help­ful and the found­ing mem­bers to be gen­uinely inter­ested in cre­at­ing an envi­ron­ment that sup­ports and fos­ters the artis­tic growth of its mem­bers.
I received an email from the founder, Jason Man­ley, in which he describes his con­cerns with the Orphan Bill. (Links to the USCO and the actual Bill.)
For any­one who hasn’t been fol­low­ing it, the Orphan Works Bill is pro­posed leg­is­la­tion that attempts to deal with the “Orphan works” all over the inter­net. Almost any image that you received in a mass for­ward email whose ori­gin can be traced to 4chan is, in all like­li­hood, an orphan work. The bill pro­poses to require any­one who wants to use an image he or she has found to per­form a “rea­son­ably dili­gent” search for the copy­right holder — in most cases the artist.
The prob­lem that Jason raises is that com­pa­nies will begin to cre­ate paid reg­istries that artists will have to uti­lize to insure that their works are search­able. Jason raises the issue and intro­duces a semi-solution in his email:

Artists hav­ing to pay to be in search­able reg­istries is poten­tial prob­lem num­ber one. I believe this will be left to the pri­vate com­pa­nies based on my research into who is sup­port­ing this hor­ri­ble bill and what busi­nesses are open­ing prepar­ing for it. I went in and checked the domain reg­istry to search to see if peo­ple were buy­ing the domains (reg​is​termyart​.com, artreg​istry​.com, etc..etc…) and every one I searched was gone. This was the red flag that began the real push to solve this assault on artist rights. The cor­po­rate sharks are already prepar­ing to feed it seems.

Since the busi­ness world reads the laws and tries to cap­i­tal­ize on the loop­holes, it is obvi­ous to me that this would hap­pen. Money is already flow­ing that direc­tion. My guess is the art reg­istries will launch as soon as the law passes or shortly there­after, unless some mir­a­cle hap­pens. Smart bug­gers but not smart enough. Imag­ine the pho­tog­ra­phers who take five hun­dred images a day or more…ugh. Artists can­not pay for this service…at least those I know who pro­duce quan­ti­ties of work…and none should have to.
Any­way, that prob­lem is now solved in low tech fash­ion here: http://​www​.con​cep​tart​.org/​s​e​a​rch. Con​cep​tArt​.Org has cre­ated a search sys­tem for locat­ing art and artists, essen­tially cut­ting off the paid reg­istry indus­try before they can even get off the ground. Click the images and find the orig­i­nal thread. Click the artist name and con­tact them directly. This also keeps these ready­ing com­pa­nies from act­ing as mid­dle­men, between the searcher and the artist who they wish to hire. There is no room for that in our business.

While not per­fect, it is cer­tainly well-meaning and extremely use­ful for artists. The forums are already an excel­lent, usu­ally pro­fes­sional envi­ron­ment to both por­tray you work and to find help — this increases their worth.

Published on 01/05/2009 9:00 am.
Filed under: blawg Tags: , , , ,