The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

Next Mob: Monday, November 14, 2005

Next Monday, November 14^th, we will start our next version of the Picker MobBlog (located at picker.typepad.com) . When we did our first version of this last June in connection with the release of the Supreme Court’s opinions in Grokster and Brand X, I described what we were doing:

Think of this as a “smart mob” blog (or not so smart, you tell me). The idea is to bring together a group of interested people to blog on a particular topic, do so, and disband. I will post on the blog intermittently between mobs, but the mobs will be the heart of the blog. I think of this as an online reading group or an online workshop.

On Monday, Julie Cohen of Georgetown Law School will present her new paper “The Place of the User in Copyright Law.” Julie will do an initial post on the paper and then participants in the mob will comment on it. The mobblog will run Monday through Wednesday or so.

This mob will consist of Ed Felten (Princeton, Freedom to Tinker blog); Wendy Gordon (Boston University); Doug Lichtman (Chicago); Jessica Litman (Wayne State); Joseph Liu (Boston College); Lydia Loren (Lewis & Clark); Michael Madison (Pittsburgh, madisonian.net blog); Bill Patry (Thelen Reid, The Patry Copyright blog); Larry Solum (Illinois, Legal Theory blog); Jim Speta (Northwestern); Rebecca Tushnet (Georgetown, her blog); Fred Von Lohmann (Electronic Frontier Foundation); and Phil Weiser (Colorado).

 

We hope that readers of this blog may find the focused discussion interesting and we invite readers and comments.

The Wisdom of Groups and the Use of Experts

On September 29, 2005, Dean Saul Levmore delivered a lunchtime talk to the students entitled "The Wisdom of Groups and the Use of Experts." (Click on the link to listen.) Dean Levmore blurbed his talk as follows: "A growing literature (much of it from Chicago) shows the power of markets, votes, and internet sites to capture and then aggregate the knowledge of large numbers of participants. How do we know when to rely on this wisdom of groups?  And to the extent that this means that "experts" will become relatively less useful in the future, what does it say about the development of legal practice and institutions?" Readers of Dean Levmore's previous posts on this topic know how rich it is. Dean Levmore is a runner and we can only assume he does some of his best academic thinking while enjoying Chicago's lakefront paths. For maximum verisimilitude, we recommend downloading this talk and listening to it while jogging. For instructions on downloading, please click here.

Dean Levmore's talk was part of the Chicago's Best Ideas series, an annual series of lectures originally created in honor of the Law School's Centennial in 2002-03. Three lectures (with free lunch, of course) are given each quarter by our faculty on topics related to the intellectual life and history of the Law School.  We intend to post mp3s of many of these lectures here.

India: A Democracy’s Near Collapse into Religious Terror, Part V

One way of understanding the choices before India today is to think of the nation’s choice of national anthems.  At the time of Independence, and ever since, two different poems have been competing for this coveted spot.  The losing candidate in 1947, now vociferously championed, once again, by the Hindu Right, is a song known as “Bande Mataram,” “Hail Motherland,” written by the Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chatterjee.  Chatterjee himself was a complex figure, and he may or may not be endorsing the sentiments of his song, which occurred in one of his novels.  But the song, quickly taken up by the nationalist movement of the early twentieth century, portrays Indian identity in a manner strongly influenced by Western romantic European patriotism, as a matter of adoring the motherland, and being prepared to shed one’s blood in her cause:

To Confirm or Not To Confirm?

If you were a United States senator, would you vote to confirm Samuel A. Alito, Jr. to be a justice of the Supreme Court? There are really two questions: First, what type of justice will he be? Second, what is the proper role of the Senate?

With respect to the first question, the president touts Judge Alito as a “strict constructionist” who is in favor of “judicial restraint” and will “interpret rather than make the law.” This sounds good. But these are empty phrases in the context of contemporary debates about judicial philosophy. The terms “strict construction” and “interpret rather than make the law” are political slogans without substantive content. What does it mean to “strictly construe” the First Amendment, which provides that Congress “shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech,” or the Due Process Clause, which provides that “no person may be deprived of law, liberty, or property without due process of law”?

Buy the Book, Get the Search Service

The digitized book market exploded this week. Google Print went live and Amazon, Microsoft and Random-House each announced new programs. The copyright issues in the lawsuits against Google Print are worth separate attention, but I want to focus on the interesting aspects of Amazon’s announcement. It says a great deal about the important issue of how we will sell digital texts and what that means for copyright law.

 

Amazon announced Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade. Pages is a pay-per-page model. Want to read only the juicy parts of the latest tell-all? You could go to the bookstore and stand there flipping through the book with a clerk looking over your shoulder, but now, with Pages you can go legit: you can just search for “Monica Lewinsky,” pay for the two pages you really want to see and be done with it.

 

The Week in Law and Technology

I guess when you are interested in something, everything looks interesting, but this seems like an especially interesting week at the intersection of law and technology. I posted yesterday on the telcom mergers approved by the FCC on Monday.

 

Here is my list; add yours in the comments.

 

Merck Dodges (One) Bullet

Yesterday’s verdict from a New Jersey jury that exonerated Merck from any liability to Frederick Humeston marks a welcome change of course from the earlier decision of a Texas jury that held Merck liable (before reductions) for a quarter of a billion dollars in damages.  The obvious first response to this difference in outcomes is to chalk up the differences to the relative strengths of the two cases.  Frederick Humeston, the New Jersey plaintiff, was alive and well enough so that he could not convince any jury that his multiple health problems were attributable to the short period in which he took Vioxx.  Hence the jury is (or 10,000 juries are) still out on the question of whether Vioxx will weather the long term storm.

A Grotian Moment?

Is Saddam's trial a "Grotian Moment" -- an event likely to alter the development of international law?  Yes, says the blog of that name.  Here's an alternative view.

Imagine that Saddam’s trial proceeds quickly and smoothly.  The lawyers and judges comport themselves with dignity.  Saddam does not grandstand but answers the charges.  Witnesses testify credibly; documents confirm their testimony.  No one doubts the evidence that Saddam and his codefendants are legally and morally responsible for the atrocities at Dujail, or for any of the other crimes Saddam is eventually charged with.  The trial does not exacerbate sectarian tensions or interfere with constitutional politics in Iraq.  Saddam is duly convicted and executed.

SBC and Verizon: Judgment Day

On Monday, the Federal Communications Commission approved the merger of SBC and AT&T and of Verizon and MCI. Last week, the Department of Justice completed its parallel review process under the antitrust laws and also greenlighted the mergers, subject to a handful of modifications.

Telecommunications mergers always give me a hankering to watch the second of the Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator movies, known to its fans as T2: Judgment Day.

India: A Democracy’s Near Collapse into Religious Terror, Part IV

Anyone who wants to understand today’s India needs to approach the nation with open eyes and curiosity, looking to see the variety that is there, rather than to judge prematurely that a given custom or idea is the “real” India and another one less “authentic.”   Such artificial ideas of purity and authenticity are not only misleading, they are also the very ideas that have been exploited politically by the Hindu right in trying to cast non-Hindus as alien polluters of the national fabric.  They know that they find a receptive audience in America, since Americans (in addition to their widespread suspiciousness about Muslims) are currently very guilty about the legacy of colonialism, and thus all too inclined to accept the fiction of a pure unsullied “other” that was polluted by external forces.   Usually such fictions mask a history that was always divided, contentious, and heterogeneous.  Many of the painful struggles over the teaching of history in today’s India concern just such soothing but deeply misleading fictions of the past.  One cannot understand the current political debate if one begins from the position of romantic nationalism that the Hindu right has expended so much energy in marketing.