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Today’s number:

A Working Vacation

After a couple of stops along the way, we reached our vacation destination, a rented abode where we plan to stay for four weeks, a period that will include a significant wedding anniversary.

It’s not all beer and skittles (“what,” I hear Tom Lehrer saying, “is a skittle anyway?”): we brought a considerable amount of work with us. The theory is that pleasant and cooler surroundings, the absence of distractions, will be conducive, and we can reward ourselves with walks and the occasional adventure. We’ll see.

I do hope to have a few things to say about law teaching in a week or two, once I get done writing my early-term lectures. And after the shock of relaxation works off, I may get back to firehose newsreading. But meanwhile, I’m sitting out the issues of the day such as whether progressives manage to block the supplemental war appropriation for its failure to include an Iraq withdrawal timetable and the Obama administration’s continuing flight from transparency.

Onward

Leaving the DC area in a Southwesterly direction. I predict light blogging until we wash up at our vacation location on Monday.

All Aboard

Drive to Sanford, FL, today, then take the Auto Train overnight to Lorton, VA, then tomorrow morning drive to Chevy Chase, MD for a brief visit.

Then I will move on in a mostly South Westerly direction.

Home Again

I’m home - for a bit over a day. Then it’s the car train to DC…and onwards to other points afterward.

But I’ve done my raw grading. Now to curve the first-year’s grades.

Teaser

Finishing a paper.

Working on a Big Project I hope to reveal in a week or two.

Not working enough on a different Big Project I hope to reveal in a couple of months.

Grading starts next week. (Cf. The Scariest Moments in Law Teaching.)

No blogging today, at least not until late, please feel free to talk amongst yourselves….

Crickets Chirping

I’m hearing crickets chirping.

“Crickets Chirping” is sort of bloggers’ cliche: it’s often used to mean a silence so deep on some issue (where there should be noise) that one can hear the crickets. But since Sunday afternoon I’m really hearing real crickets chirping — two transparent bags of them fresh from the pet store. They’re going into school with one of the kids tomorrowtoday to feed the science teacher’s bearded dragon. And meanwhile, they’re loud.

(The picture is nothing like what the bags look like. I just liked the picture.)

My Email Is Down

My email appears to be down — if you are trying to reach me urgently, I suggest the phone…

The problem seems to have started late last night, so anything you sent after, say, midnight my time is sitting in a queue somewhere.

Update: Partly fixed. I’m getting new mail. Not clear what happened to the mail sent while I was down.

When Trees Reproduce

This is the time of year in Florida when I get a very violent allergic reaction to something in the air. When up lived in New England, the allergy season was final exams, which I guess means that it’s Spring here now.

There seems, most years, to be a strong correlation between when the mangoes bloom and when I sneeze hard enough to cause damage, but my doctor once assured me that since there aren’t any mango plants very near where I live, and I sneeze like crazy in the yard, odds are that it’s not mango pollen itself because it is a very heavy grain and doesn’t travel that far from the plant. It is, he said, likely to be a tree that pollinates on the same schedule. And indeed, there were not a lot of backyard mangos in New Haven.

But what tree? How to tell?

Weatherbug says “Predominant Pollen: Cedar/Juniper and Bald Cypress.”

But JustWeather.com says the pollen count is “low”. Yah, right.

Weather.com agrees, but adds, “Most active tree pollen types: Oak” (and there’s a big live oak in the law school courtyard where my eyes itch and water…hmm…). They also say today’s pollen will be worse than yesterday’s. Oh joy.

Local Pollen Types for Miami-Dade County, Florida in Winter offers a veritable cornucopia of suspects in the tree category (not mention the grasses and weeds):

Alvaradoa (Alvaradoa)
Avocado, Bay (Persea)
Bayberry (Morella)
Blackbead (Pithecellobium)
Castor-Bean (Ricinus)
Cherry Palm (Pseudophoenix)
Coconut Palm (Cocos)
Coral-Bean (Erythrina)
Elder (Sambucus)
False Sensitive-Plant, Mimosa (Mimosa)
False Willow (Baccharis)
Hercules’-Club, Prickly-Ash, Toothachetree (Zanthoxylum)
Holly (Ilex)
Leadtree (Leucaena)
Mulberry (Morus)
Nettletree (Trema)
Oysterwood (Gymnanthes)
Punktree (Melaleuca)
Royal Palm (Roystonea)
She-Oak (Casuarina)
Soapberry (Sapindus)

Not that knowing would probably do me any good, but I’d still like to know the true name of Nemesis. Meanwhile pass the Fexofenadine.

391176

According to dynastree.com,

[T]he surname Froomkin the 391176. most frequent name in the US.

That is all.

My Ringtone Search

I got a new cell phone a little while ago, because my old one just plain died after five years of abuse. The new one allows me to download .mp3 snippets as ringtones, and I’ve had some fun playing with it and putting in custom tones for the people who tend to call me. My wife gets the Monty Python Theme song (aka The Liberty Bell March), because she likes it.

Since I got the new phone, I’ve been using a “yes we can” audio clip as my default ringtone. (You can hear the part I use from the latter part of this video.) I got the idea from reading about South American electoral campaigns, in which I gather it is common for campaigns to produce ringtones and for supporters to use them. If nothing else, “yes we can” got a lot of knowing laughs.

But in my mind that was always a pre-election ringtone. Now I need something more permanent, or at least different. Ideally, I’d like something mixing the optimistic and the cautious, probably political, but more appropriate for the next months, a period in which the poetry of campaigning ripens into to the prose of governance. The ideal song would not be too obnoxious to others, and would sound nice to me, lend itself to excerpting, and no doubt meet many other criteria I’m too tired today to formulate.

Got any suggestions?

Note: I have never ever liked the sound of Happy Days Are Here Again. That is Not An Option. I also rejected these stanzas from Talking Heads’ Don’t Worry About the Government because, much as I like the song, it’s too jangly for a ringtone I’ll hear over and over.

That song, incidentally, has always meant “Rosslyn, Va” to me for no obvious reason except it seems to fit….

In Which I Register With Zipcar

I’ve just registered with Zipcar, the $8/hour car sharing service.

We only have one car because we live near enough to campus to walk to work. But as the kids get older there are more and more occasions where they need to be schlepped in two different directions at the same time. So I think the idea of a car sharing service is wonderful and I’m delighted that it’s finally come to Miami.

Except that it sort of hasn’t.

In towns where Zipcar is really present, they have multiple locations — sometimes a plethora of locations. If your close location is out of cars, you go a bit further.

Will a car be available when I want one?

It’s natural for new members to worry that cars won’t be available when they want them. About half of all reservations are made the same day. We monitor utilization very closely, adding more cars as usage rises, keeping availability high. But the beauty of the system is that Zipcar members are entitled to use any of the cars in our fleet. So even if the Zipcar right around the corner isn’t available, you’ll still be able reserve one located only a few blocks away.

But in Miami, as far as I can tell, at present there’s only one location. Yes, it’s on the campus, and yes, it’s near my house, maybe 10-15 minutes walk and almost as long to drive there, as the relevant entrance is on the far side of the campus. But still.

As far as I can tell from the occasional online spot check, they have a grand total of … two cars. So far, they do seem to be available most of the time. But if neither of those two cars is available…I think the next closest car is in Gainesville! Where, incidentally, they have a lot more locations.

We’ll just have to see how it goes.

Home

We made it back.

Delta put us in business class for the transatlantic portion of the journey, which was something. They also gave us a voucher to sit in the Air France Lounge while waiting for the flight, but when we got there the AF lady said it was only good for one person, so that rubbed a bit more salt in the wound and we went back out to the terminal.

We had plenty of time to sit in the terminal as our flight left about an hour and half late.

Fortunately, we had a long connection, so we still landed with plenty of time to make it.

Unfortunately, our second flight left about an hour late too, so it was even longer.

The bags were almost the last ones out, leading to some gallows humor for a while, but they made it.

We got home at about 11pm, after a door-to-door journey of just under 33 44 hours [posting while jetlagged I got the sign wrong on the time zone correction of 5 hours….]. Our neighbor was outside his house, welcomed us back, and said he’d hidden the newspapers (which restarted on the day we had planned to be home) for us, which was very nice of him. I’d been worried about the burglar invitation card. We have nice neighbors.

And he told me what Delta stands for: “Don’t Expect to Leave The Airport.”

Delta Airlines Canceled Three of Our Four Tickets for No Discernable Reason

This story does not end well. In fact, for all I know, it doesn’t even end.

We, family of four, arrived at Manchester Airport a good two and a half hours before our flight, which was due to depart at 11:55. There was a considerable queue even then, but it was making steady progress, and during the half hour or so it took us to get to the front of it, we endured being asked first basic security questions, then having our carry-on bags individually tagged with security flimsies, then having the usual pointless questions about who packed our bags, whether they ever escaped, and a command recitation of all our electrical gear. This concluded with ‘Mike’ the security guy taking our passports away and tapping stuff on a laptop for a long time. Then he, as he had promised, brought them back.

Eventually we made it to check-in. And this is where the real trouble started. I never like it when the ticket clerks stop looking bored and start looking like they are concentrating, and this fellow was definitely concentrating. For some reason, all the luggage tags were coming up in my son’s name, and only one boarding pass would print. He checked the printer. He did a tappety-tap routine on the keyboard. He consulted with the silver-haired gentleman on the left, and then the young lady on the right. The codes just were not right on the tickets and he didn’t know how to fix it. Sorry, he said at last, but you’ll have to go over there to the ticket desk.

It’s now about two hours before flight time, there’s no queue at the ticket desk, I’m holding a little piece of paper that Delta printed out for me during our outbound kerfuffle which shows our four return tickets as “Confirmed”. What can go wrong?

Lots.

The lady at the ticket counter was not wearing a name tag, just an Air France pin, so I cannot alas report her name, but she wasted little time in getting to the point: we didn’t have tickets. Or, rather, my 14 year old son had a ticket, but the other three e-tickets we were relying on to fly home with had been refunded. They were gone. And the plane was full anyway. It was clear from her manner that she was entirely open to the possibility that we had somehow tried to do something underhanded (pocket the money?) and then put one over Delta Airlines. We explained the saga of our outbound flight, and she put in a call to some office somewhere who were, she asserted, the only people who could figure out what had happened (she didn’t say ‘and make it right’). No one in the airport had the authority to do anything. So she called Fares. Long wait. No joy. She called Global Assistance. There was another long round of holding during which she told me to just wait. We were told that the flight would close an hour before departure, and the minutes continued to tick by while the anonymous lady, secure in her disempowerment, displayed no sign of urgency or even concern about our predicament. Our request to see a supervisor were at first not even acknowledged, then we were told there was none, only a manager, and he was off at the gate doing operations and thus unavailable. Take that, worm. (No she didn’t say it – in words.)

The hour came and went. Eventually – after it was too late to do us any good – the matter was kicked upstairs to “Jen” who apparently actually works for Delta instead of for whoever it is who runs the front line that Delta relies on to deal with customers. By the time matters got to Jen, it seemed to have dawned on Delta as a corporate entity that we had not in fact engaged in a scheme to embezzle, nor sold our tickets for a side jaunt to Fiji while abandoning a child to fly as an unaccompanied minor to a city where there would be no one to collect him. Jen was in fact very sympathetic. But at that point there was little she could do. Not only was it too late to get us on our original flight, but there were basically no other flights out of Manchester which would get us to Miami today. And even if there were such a flight, they did not as yet have whatever it was they needed to actually issue us a ticket. Jen went off to the back to make phone calls in the hope of resurrecting our tickets, a process that consumed more than another hour.

Meanwhile, I’m standing at the counter, resisting offers to go sit at the corner as there is no longer anyone waiting to be helped (no more flights, remember?). Every so often another member of staff comes out from the back with a progress report which consists of “she’s still on the phone.”

Eventually Jen is off the phone. It’s now going on to about 12:30. They are prepared to rebook us on a new flight once they have recreated our tickets. Alas, they haven’t yet actually succeeded in producing tickets for us, and the only flight left today would be from Paris at 5pm. And even if they could get us to Paris by 5, there are no seats on the flight. So we’re stuck. Bonus day in Manchester (with our bags, but without much in the way of clean laundry), they’ll provide a hotel, just hold on while they check if there are rooms…

Half an hour later there are rooms, comped meals, but as yet no tickets. I’m prepared to stay there until we get them or Hell freezes over, whichever comes first, but “Declan F.” the supervisor is now to hand, full of beautiful promises of tickets in the morning presented in an Irish accent, even an invocation of the Deity, and Caroline decides to believe him. So we check into the airport hotel, endure some more confusion (our names have become quite garbled in the transition), and have to be back at the ticket counter at 9am tomorrow.

… we are told that if we run like crazy to BA, two terminals over, we can catch a flight to London and connect from there to MAN. I’m given an itinerary, on which is scrawled “talk to Andrea” — she’s the person at BA who will know all about us.

We run, having to exit the security zone to get to the BA ticket counter. We make it. But there’s no Andrea. She’s going to be on our flight and is changing. Not that it matters. It seems that when charming Delta lady #2 gave me our new itinerary, she neglected to include a “FIM”, which is something you have to have if you have an e-ticket and are being moved to another airline; apparently paper ticket holders, that vanishing breed, don’t need them. No “FIM”, no ride.

So, leaving the family to hold the fort, I run back to the Delta counters, two terminals away (at least I don’t have to re-enter security). I find the last man standing. Between gasps, I tell our story. He vanishes to find a supervisor. In time he returns, and fills out a FIM, a ticket-sized little form that comes in quadruplicate, in a laborious manner that suggests he has never seen one before and is a bit suspicious about the use of ink-based writing implements. At last he is done.

Jen and Declan say that they think that the lady who first booked us on BA tried to rebook our e-ticket using some e-ticket related tie-up between Delta and BA. If she’d done it right, I would not have needed the fabulous FIM. But perhaps she didn’t do it quite right, and as a result the BA people couldn’t see the ticket, leading them to demand the paper FIM. The Delta guy who created the FIM worked off a record that had already been modified, so even if he knew what he was doing it might all have been doomed by then, and he may well not have known what he was doing either. In any case, their guess is that at some point along the way, our return tickets (well, three out of four anyway) were paid over to BA as well as our outgoing tickets. That was wrong, and Delta’s fault rather than ours. Certainly Occam’s razor suggests that the screwup happened in MIA when we were re-routed. But if you ask me, the system did not fail well.

Did I mention that tomorrow’s plane was 10 people over booked before the nice folks in Manchester added the four of us to the passenger list?

I have a lifetime gold card on American Airlines. They’re not perfect, but they have never canceled a ticket of mine with no warning or reason.. Delta was noticeably cheaper for this flight than American, and four times noticeably adds up to appreciably. But I think I’ll be willing to pay a significant premium to fly AA next time.

And I really have no idea what is going to happen tomorrow morning. (But hey, Delta, if you’re reading, how about business class?)

Travel Stories

I’m happy to read that my friend Ann Bartow had a True and Amazing Travel Experience.

I just had a travel experience too, but it was not quite as nice. We are heading back to the US today, so perhaps this is a good time to tell the story of our outbound journey.

Our saga begins in Miami last week, on Tuesday afternoon. The four of us are waiting for the 4:15 pm Delta flight to Atlanta, which will connect us to our flight to Manchester, UK.

Gate staff announce that we have problems. Two of them. The first is that the radar is not working. The second is that the weather is bad in Atlanta, and there may be air traffic control issues. But not to worry, the necessary part is on its way on the next flight from Atlanta, and is expected to arrive at 5:30. Meanwhile, we are instructed to sit tight, there’s no need to rebook anything.

Being long-legged, travel-experienced, and able to do simple arithmetic, I am third in line to the counter as I figure our connection is doomed.

The very nice lady at the counter makes what seem to be Herculean efforts to rebook us. After much typing and phone calling (most of which involves trying to figure out the numbers for other airlines as all the numbers on her list appear to be out of date), she finds us an Air France option. What about our luggage, I ask? She obligingly begins the process to get our checked bags (family travel, ten days…) off the plane.

But Wait! The pilot himself comes out and announces that the radar is repaired. All is well. Except that it isn’t. The bad weather has now ripened into ATC delays and we can’t go anywhere for an hour. My connection seems utterly doomed.

The flight delay now being ATC rather than mechanical, the status of our flight has changed, and our new tickets — only one or two keypresses away from finality — are no longer possible since Delta won’t rebook us on a different carrier for delays which are not their fault.

Gloom. Doom. But Wait! After only a few minutes, the weather report has shifted again, and it’s ok to board for immediate departure. If we leave fast enough, we might — might — just make it. We board. Delta does a much better job than American of enforcing boarding order on Miami crowds, who are generally among the most unruly in the world, and boarding proceeds fairly well. Cabin crew explain that local mechanics were able to fix the old part, and all is well.

Except that once we are all in the plane, there’s a new problem. There’s a man wandering around in the aisles holding a boarding pass, but he doesn’t seem to have a seat. In due course we hear that what happened is that a family booked two kids in one seat, but that they’re too old to share; a “non-revenue” passenger is thus booted off the plane (a mother with a tiny baby, and then her husband), and the family in question re-seated. We’re now too late barring some sort of air-speed miracle.

And off we go to Atlanta. Did I say “to” Atlanta? Maybe “towards” Atlanta would be better. About 20 minutes into the flight, the Captain comes on the PA and says, in best Chuck Yeager right-stuff voice, that the radar has failed again, and we’re going to divert to Tampa. No, wait, he’s on the PA again a minute later, the company says we’re going back to Miami, because it is fractionally closer.

So we’re back in Miami. Cabin crew tell us that anyone who wishes to leave the plane here may do so, but if we leave we may not be allowed back on. The captain explains that the offending part is easy to replace, it’s just like a circuit board - you snap it in, test it, and then he’s fully confident in flying the plane. One Swedish couple leaves, saying they don’t trust the plane any more. There’s a trickle of departures. One person returns with coffee from Starbucks, and now we all want off. Cabin crew relent — we can get off, but the plane is going to Atlanta eventually, so we should take our stuff if we do in case we aren’t there when its ready.

We get off — our connection is history, and I’d like to know our options. And after all, it’s clearly mechanical now. Back in line, and in time we are told that if we run like crazy to BA, two terminals over, we can catch a flight to London and connect from there to MAN. I’m given an itinerary, on which is scrawled “talk to Andrea” — she’s the person at BA who will know all about us.

We run, having to exit the security zone to get to the BA ticket counter. We make it. But there’s no Andrea. She’s going to be on our flight and is changing. Not that it matters. It seems that when charming Delta lady #2 gave me our new itinerary, she neglected to include a “FIM”, which is something you have to have if you have an e-ticket and are being moved to another airline; apparently paper ticket holders, that vanishing breed, don’t need them. No “FIM”, no ride.

So, leaving the family to hold the fort, I run back to the Delta counters, two terminals away (at least I don’t have to re-enter security). I find the last man standing. Between gasps, I tell our story. He vanishes to find a supervisor. In time he returns, and fills out a FIM, a ticket-sized little form that comes in quadruplicate, in a laborious manner that suggests he has never seen one before and is a bit suspicious about the use of ink-based writing implements. At last he is done.

I begin to lumber off at speed back towards BA (the flight is leaving soon). “SIR! SIR!” the last man shouts, chasing me down the concourse. “Wait! I need my copy!” It seems one of the four copies is his. Unfortunately, he has no idea which one of the four is his, and decides after much scrutiny that he wants the original. I’m suspicious. What if BA want that one? Why doesn’t he take the last one, the accounting copy? But no, he insists, and I haven’t the heart to grab it from his hands. “Just come back if they want this one he says.” Right - the plane will be long gone by that point.

Lumber, lumber, wheeze.

It seems BA are happy with the three copies. It’s late by now and the queue at security is mercifully light. We make the plane. We make the connection in London.

Of course, the luggage doesn’t make it.

When we arrive in London we inquire, as instructed, about our bags at the BA counter. They of course have never heard of them. Indeed, our file on BA is innocent of the concept of checked luggage. But the nice lady takes our Delta luggage claim checks, and enters them into our record. We are told to make a claim in Manchester.

We arrive in Manchester and make our way to the luggage counter. The man there is very cheerful. Everything is going to be fine. Our bags have been spotted in London, they will put them on one of the may London-Manchester flights, and then deliver them to us forthwith. Just fill out these customs declaration forms, here’s a folder with a number to call and a web address to monitor their progress.

We stagger out towards our destination.

Time passes. Bags do not arrive.

That Wednesday evening I check the web site. According to it, our bags are not located.

I call BA. The central call center doesn’t know any more than the website.

I call the local Delta baggage number that I’ve pulled off the web. The line is busy for an hour, but when I finally get through, they’re nice too. Their guess — which is what I suspected — is that the bags went to Atlanta when our original flight finally departed. Once in Atlanta, having missed the original flight to MAN, they would sit there until the next flight; as there’s only one per day, that means Thursday.

Fair enough.

Thursday rolls around. The BA website’s information has not changed. I call them. They don’t know anything, but are very sure that my bags will turn up any moment. They do tell me that unaccompanied bags can take up to seven hours to clear customs, so I shouldn’t worry if my bags are not out early in the day. I call Delta. They agree to send someone round to the baggage area to look for the bags, and to call if they find them. No one calls.

I call again in the evening. It’s been more than seven hours since the Manchester landed, but no one has seen our bags.

Friday morning — we’re about to go out and buy a new wardrobe — I call Delta again. The Atlanta flight has just landed, and they propose to send someone round to look for our bags. They’ll call us if they find them. And, miracle of miracles, in about an hour they do call back and say they’ve located them all. The first delivery van won’t leave until noon, so we can’t expect the bags before early afternoon.

In fact, it’s quite late in the afternoon before we see them, but only three days or so after checking them, we have our bags again.

We get to use them for almost a week, and now we’re going to check them again…

A version of Friday’s McCain item is queued up in case I’m trapped in some airport motel somewhere.

Traveling Today

Drive to Sanford, FL, today, then take the Auto Train overnight to Lorton, VA, then tomorrow morning drive to Chevy Chase, MD.

The End, The Beginning

I taught my last class of the semester this afternoon. For several of the students it was their last class of law school, and they were more than a bit giddy with relief — demob happy. But we had a good class anyway, or because of it.

The end today for graduating students is really just a beginning of something bigger and longer and likely more important, which is why we call that ceremony coming up “Commencement”. The end today for me is just a turning of a wheel: I expect to do it all again next year.

But for one of my colleagues today, it was the final turn of this particular wheel. After 56 years on our faculty, here since September, 1951, Minnette Massey taught her last class today. It is very hard for me to imagine our University of Miami School of Law without this indomitable, outspoken, adorable, sometimes irascible, deeply decent, icon and pioneer of the Florida bar—one of the first women to do innumerable things in the Florida legal world. Minnette was Acting Dean for three years in the ’60s; I have to suspect sexism kept her from ever being appointed as ‘Dean’. She was a mentor to two generations of state legal luminaries, and the go-to person for local federal judges who needed special masters in complex cases, particularly before they had Magistrate Judges to do some of those jobs. Among Minnette’s many achievements is decades of work to fully integrate the bar, not least by mentoring students and young professionals. She’s not young, but no one who knows her thinks she had to retire. Minnette made it clear, however, that she didn’t want to be one of those people who waited until she had to be forced out: her leave-taking, like so much else in her life, would be her own decision on her own time on her own rules.

Everyone has a Minnette story or three. Here’s one of my earliest: back when I was in my first year of law teaching, with a full three months under my belt, I attended the AALS winter conference for the first time. I was teaching Civ Pro I in those days, so of course I went the to the meeting of the Civil Procedure Section, which happened to be a joint section meeting with the Admiralty section that year — the big case was Carnival Cruise Line, which was about the enforcement of forum selection clauses on cruise tickets. On the way into the room, I bumped into Minnette. I had planned to lurk in the back. Minnette steered me to the front row, greeting everyone in the room on the way, which left us craning our necks up at a panel on a raised dias. The talk began. The admiralty speaker was, from a civil procedure standpoint, somewhat obvious. And he was not brief. I was thinking how much better off I would have been in the back, but here I was in the front, with a senior colleague I didn’t know very well, she had said hello to everyone, we were very visible, there was no escape, we’d just have to look interested. “ISN’T THIS BORING?” Minnette said to me in a stage whisper loud enough to be heard next door. (I later learned that was her regular voice.) I wanted to crawl under my seat. But no one else seemed to mind. I suspect that everyone in the room just knew she was being herself: you always know where you stand with Minnette — she doesn’t play games, and no, she won’t suffer fools in silence, but you cannot be around her long without seeing how much she cares about people and about justice. Minnette doesn’t brag (much), so it takes somewhat longer to learn just how much she has given to others and to our law school. I will miss Minnette enormously — unless we are lucky and she again blazes a new trail, this time in retirement, and makes Emeritus status something that involves greater involvement in the law school community than has commonly been the case in the past.

Several of us snuck in at the end of her class this afternoon to join the standing ovation in Room 109, and formed an impromptu receiving line in the aisle as she left the room. When she came to Charlton Copeland, currently our most junior faculty member, she said, “It’s up to you now.”

Happy Passover

Happy Passover to all!

(automated post set to go up at sundown…)

That Was In Another Country

Robert Waldmann has a very good memory.

But the past is another country. And besides…

PS. If you were at that party, and by some miracle you happen to read this, get in touch.

Mail Is Down

The entire University of Miami domain seems to be having holiday troubles, and it’s taken my regular mail server down with it. UM is officially closed for the holidays at present, so I don’t know how fast the repairs will be.

If you need to reach me urgently…use the phone.

Or, there’s always my backup email address of myfirstname.mylastname@gmail.com, but I don’t check that as obsessively as I do the usual account.

Update (12/21): It’s working now.

Work

An absolutely ridiculous amount of my time this semester has been eaten up by administration. In this post I’ll talk about two tasks, one small and annoying, the other large and on-going.

I have spent at least 15 hours this semester struggling with … cover sheets. Yes, as part of my new job as “Director of Faculty Development” I am responsible for ‘encouraging’ the colleagues to be more visibly productive by posting their work product online, especially at SSRN. SSRN encourages you to have standardized cover sheets if you’re going to have lots of papers online. Our IT people were unable to produce decent ones, so in the end I had to do it. But although mine were not as bad as theirs, they weren’t perfect either, and every so often I have to go fix some glitch they cause on documents created with some new wordprocessing wrinkle. Maddening.

The second task is much more serious. In what must count as a significant working out of my karmic debts, I was sentenced to the law school’s Strategic Planning committee. For various complex and political reasons, not least our desire to issue a report before we get too far into the ongoing Dean search, we’re trying to do a plan in about half the time one should. So we meet a lot. In fact, we meet three or four times a week, for hours at a go.

We will soon send a draft of our work to the faculty, which will no doubt provide feedback with gusto. Once we recover, we have to redraft and try to provide a final text the faculty will like. All by early December.

I don’t know exactly at what point our new plan, whatever it turns out to be, will become public, but I look forward to discussing its substance here once I am free to do so.

Drat.

I’ve been offered a chance to go to something really interesting far, far away at someone else’s expense.

And it looks like I won’t be able to do it: it’s happening the same long weekend as the AALS hiring conference, and I’m married to the chair of our committee. She has to be there, so I have to be here — although our kids are amazingly large to look at, they’re not big enough to be left alone for a night, much less for four days in a row.

Words You Don't Like to Hear About Your Air Conditioner

Words you don’t like to hear about your two-year-old central air conditioner in the middle of August in Florida:

“They’ve had all sorts of problems with that model. They stopped selling it.”

In DC

I’m in DC for a long weekend with family and may not post much.

It was interesting to arrive at National Airport, and be greeted by a display at the t-shirt store of a shirt that said something like, “I Love My Country, It’s My Government I’m Afraid Of.”

It wasn’t very pretty, but I was still tempted to buy it.

Durham

What is it about ICANN meetings and lost luggage? Last year an airline lost my luggage on my way to an ICANN meeting. And here I am, a year later, stopping off in Durham on my way to this year’s nomcom session … and a different airline lost my luggage.

I should say that Lufthansa’s way of dealing with it was pretty impressive. American Airlines was just short of surly at the airport, the news that there was no info in the system about where my bag was didn’t give me confidence, and now, well after the next flight came in, the online service still doesn’t show any info about my bag. This looks bad, doesn’t it?

Update (9:15pm): “Bag Tag Number(s): RDU AA xxxxxx has arrived and has been scheduled for pickup by the delivery service on Jul 07 at 11:00 PM local time. It will be delivered to the address you provided within approximately 6 hours* of pickup time.”

Where I'm Going

I’m going to have another little burst of travel: Saturday I’ll be leaving for the Durham, NC area to drop off a camper (the two-legged, not the four-wheeled, sort), Monday I’ll go on to Toronto to spend a packed work-week in a room with other members of the ICANN NomCom.

The NomCom’s proceedings are covered by promises of confidentiality, so I won’t be blogging about them — and if the meetings run late, which they likely will, I many not be blogging about much else next week either.

After that, it’s back home for the rest of the summer.

PS. No substantive posts today because I spent the WHOLE DAY in a meeting (but not about ICANN).

Long Journey Home

Flying from Istanbul to Manchester today; long frequent-flier-ticket layover until tomorrow’s flight to Boston, followed by long frequent-flier-ticket layover until evening flight to Miami. Many chances to lose luggage.

This is a fascinating city, but it feels like what we saved on the tickets we pumped into the Turkish economy in other ways.

Istanbul

We are enjoying Istanbul. Below is the night-time view of the Blue Mosque from the far corner of the roof terrace of our hotel, which hints at the grandeur of the best of the local architecture.

Indeed, given the number of mosques near here, we are well-placed to hear the muezzins’ calls.

More Travel

After that trip to the great identity conference in Italy, I spent a pleasant weekend at my 25th (!) college reunion. Then home for a couple of days, and now I am vacationing in the UK. Without luggage, which is still in Boston.

We used frequent flyer miles for this trip, which means we could add a second stop at no cost, so in about a week the family will go to Istanbul, which is a place I’ve always wanted to visit. Using the miles meant we had to take the flights available, and when you are a party of four, there are not many. So we are only staying five days, and then it will take us two days to get home.

Once I recover from jet lag, I hope to blog about my experiences with the passport office…

I will have some connectivity here in the UK, so I expect to post now and then. While I’m in Turkey, the site will be in the hands of a wonderful guest blogger, about whom more soon.

Called for Jury Duty

Approximately 300,000 citizens in Miami-Dade County are randomly selected by a computer each year to be summoned to jury duty for the Eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida. Summonses are mailed to citizens who possess a valid driver’s license or identification card issued by the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

Miami-Dade County has a total population of about 2,370,000; of which about three quarters are over 18, so make that circa 1,778,000 adults. If 300,000 per year are selected for jury duty for the 11th circuit alone (ie ignoring federal court), then a resident’s chance of being picked in any one year is almost 17%.

Assuming the chance of being picked was a constant in the past, from an ex ante perspective my chance of NOT being picked 14 years in a row was, I calculate, just over 7%. I know people who’ve been called three times in that period, which the odds tables tell me would be around the expected mean, but I was the seven-percenter and never got called. Well, my luck (good or bad) changed this week: I have just received my first-ever jury summons.

It used to be that being a lawyer made you ineligible to serve in most parts of the country. That rule is pretty much defunct now, perhaps because there are so many lawyers it shrank the potential jury pool too much, perhaps because the bar is no longer a small club where everyone knows everyone and almost every lawyer would have to be excused anyway.

Like most lawyers, I actually find the idea of serving on a jury somewhat appealing: it’s a way of seeing the legal system from a perspective that is usually inaccessible to us. On the other hand, if I’m not going to be selected, I don’t find the idea of going down to the court house and sitting around all day in some horrible room with a TV blaring to be at all attractive. And realistically, that’s the most likely outcome: as a general rule, lawyers don’t especially want lawyers on their juries. On the other hand, I know of at least two colleagues who have sat on juries, so it’s by no means out of the question.

The date they picked for me is on a day I teach, so I’m going to apply for a postponement to May, one which the form suggests is routinely granted. Miami-Dade has a one-day, one-trial rule: you turn up once and either you are picked on that day or you don’t have to come back until your name comes up again. I’ll report back after it’s all over.

An American In Paris

My father is having his 80th birthday today, and has taken himself and my mother off to Paris to celebrate, which seems like a pretty good idea (except that the rest of us have to stay back here and work or go to school).

I hope you have better things to do today than read this, but just in case, Joyeux anniversaire dad!

A Day In the Life

Got up at 6:15. Our carpool leaves promptly at seven AM and I’m driving today. Traffic seemed a little lighter than usual. I have this hypothesis that early traffic is lighter on overcast days, because some people count on the sun to wake them up, and on rare shady mornings they oversleep. But it’s sunny today. Maybe I have to alter hypothesis to include cold days — when it’s cold (under 60) people maybe huddle under the covers a bit longer. The radio said it was about 55 when I woke up, which counts as arctic in these parts.

Home, pick up kid #2, make the shorter run to his school. After finishing the school run by 8:05 I have a little time to glance at the papers and review a bit of the reading for this morning’s seminar.

From 9 to 11 I (co)teach our seminar on law and games. We’ve been reading about identity and the presentation of self and about the ways in which the gaming experience might effect players. The students in the seminar are great, as usual, and we have a very spirited discussion of the reading, notably Tracy Spaight’s article “Who Killed Miss Norway” (which appears in Jack M. Balkin & Beth Simone Noveck eds., The State of Play: Law Games and Virtual Worlds (2006)) and Nick Yee, The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play, 1 Games and Culture 68-71 (2006). We don’t get through them all; next time we’ll take up, among others, the other two articles I liked most from this batch, Gunther Teubner, Rights of Non-Humans? Electronic Agents and Animals as New Actors in Politics and Law, 33 J. L & Soc 497 (2006), and Sherry Turkle, Always-on/Always-on-you: The Tethered Self, in Handbook of Mobile Communications and Social Change, James Katz (ed.) (forthcoming). Of these, the Teubner article is the most difficult; there’s a lot going on there, much to think about, although I wonder if it coheres.

Then for almost an hour I meet with a student who has come by to find out why he did relatively poorly on his final. It always amazes me how rarely students do this. And to the extent that people do look at their exams, it’s more likely to be a B+ that wants As than a C or C+. And you almost never hear from the D’s. How are you going to improve if you don’t look for feedback? Admittedly, it can be a painful experience for both sides: the student must revisit something that is not a happy-making event, and the prof has to be the bearer of unwelcome news, which typically includes several of: you missed this issue, you misread that question, you left out these cases, you recited facts but didn’t give any analysis, I couldn’t figure out what you were saying here, and on we go. I commonly recommend Fischl & Paul’s Getting to Maybe for several of these problems, but it’s not a panacea. On his way out, meaning I think to be kind, he asks if I might have gone to school with his father, who also went to Yale college. Turns out that the father graduated in 1965 — when I was in kindergarten. It seems that, at least to this user, my presentation of self in real life adds about twenty years…

At noon I go up to the faculty conference room where I’m giving a talk to faculty and staff on various tricks you can use to get more out of your computer. Most of it is about firefox plugins. It’s amazing how much more efficient one can be with a few of the right tools. Talk starts at 12:30, finishes before 2:00.

Back to the office. Read some email. Nothing urgent, for a change. Work on putting together a list of possible visitors for next year. Although it’s still unclear how many new people we’ll actually hire next year, it’s certain we’ll be under full strength due to leaves and such so we have the luxury of thinking about who would be interesting and fun to have around — subject to the very real constraint that it would be a lot better if they happened to to teach in the areas we have needs. I’m chairing the committee that has to come up with names, which is fun but not as easy as it sounds. (If you are a law prof reading this and fancy a semester in a tropical paradise, please do get in touch ASAP.)

Home, where attempts to work are undercut by the need to try to ensure that homework gets done. Today’s first distraction is the need to celebrate the winning of a science prize by the homework-avoider-in-chief. The second, later distraction, is a long fruitless hunt for a lost notebook. (It is later found at bedtime.) Eventually I give in and glance at the New Yorker.

Then it’s time to prepare for tomorrow’s administrative law class. I’ll be finishing a somewhat whirlwind introduction to formal adjudication under the federal APA, subject of course to the Due Process clause of the Constitution. The class is at 8am, and the students who trek out to it three times a week seem like a serious bunch — but I also get the sense that several of them feel pretty lost. Now, in one sense that’s actually a good thing: this is a confusing subject, one composed of a series of interlocking parts that only start to make sense once you’ve seen them all. Thinking that you get it at this early stage would most likely be the result of a false sense of security, or shallow reading. Then again, it’s not much fun to be confused, nor is it all that much fun to be the source of confusion. So in addition to re-reading the cases and working in summaries of the latest decisions, I try to tweak my recycled notes from last year to include more explanation, but that is constrained by the need to stay on schedule and the fact that the courts keep on deciding new cases which refine rather than replace the old rules. The early morning hour has resulted in a dynamic in which students are not asking enough questions. I’m going to have do something about this. The first step is setting up panels of people to be called on — I don’t much care for cold-calling after the first year. But it might even come to that in the end.

End the working part of the evening with another bout of administration, compiling a list of possible names for an academic center I’ve been helping to organize. It’s hard to come up with something that accurately describes it, has a catchy acronym, hasn’t been used elsewhere, and works in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Finish with some time reading blogs, email, and writing this.

Not exactly a typical day, especially in that I gave a talk and didn’t do any academic writing, but that was today.

Roof!

Back in October 2005, we had ourselves a little hurricane called Wilma. It beat up my neighborhood quite a bit, although of course what we suffered was nothing like the damage to people in New Orleans and Texas under Katrina.

It turned out that we lost a large number of roof tiles in Wilma, a galling loss as the roof itself was only a few months old. It also turned out that we were not alone -- the whole county seemed to have damaged roofs. And then it turned out that there was a shortage of roofers. And of roof tiles. And in due course I discovered that we had the rarest roof tiles in South Florida -- indeed, it seemed in all of America. They're barrel tiles called Altusa Fume, and they come from Venezuela, and it seems for a while there was some problem getting Venezuelan goods into the USA. So no roof tiles. Or no roof tiles unless you wanted to pay for a bale of them even though you only needed under a hundred.

Every so often I'd call the roofing company and get various sorts of promises, all of which involved calling me back at some point and all of which were religiously broken. At first I understood - they were fixing roofs with leaks, not just those with damaged tiles (which in addition to being ugly increase the chances of further damage and leaks in the next storm). We went through an entire hurricane season with the broken tiles -- but fortunately no hurricanes. Meanwhile the contractors were all off doing new roofs which, I gather, pay better than repairs.

But now I'm here to tell you that the age of miracles is still upon us (or is it perhaps an age of new construction downturn?) : a roofing contract appeared in the mail last week. I sent it back, and yesterday we had a real live roofer putting real new tiles on my roof.

And now it's all fixed.

Happy Thanksgiving

Expect little or no blogging this extended vacation weekend as I try to sleep away this bug that just won't quit...

Scholarly Agenda 2.0

I recently applied for something which required an up to 500-word statement summarizing past, present and future scholarship. The trouble is, I HATE writing self-assessments. I had to write one for my tenure file years ago and found it excruciating -- and it took me over a week. This time it was a little easier -- if only because I only had 24 hours to do it before the deadline.

Here's what I wrote. I think it's true, although there's a lot more I would have said if I'd had more words to play with:

I started teaching expecting to be a somewhat traditional scholar of US administrative law. Although I still teach the course with great pleasure, and occasionally write in the core of that subject, my interests soon grew to include the rapidly developing issues created by advances in computer technology and especially the Internet. Today, while still at heart a public lawyer, I find myself to be one with a particular interest in governance problems concerning information, and information systems. These complementary interests underlie the majority of my work to date, and are themes in my current and future projects.

Much of my recent work has concerned governance issues raised by information technology. This includes governance of the Internet by its users, self-governance by means of new technology, governance of online activities (including e-commerce) by the operation of private law, and especially regulatory initiatives by public bodies, both national and trans-national, that seek a role in either Internet regulation (e.g. the domain name system, which is the Internet's plumbing) or seek to regulate the things that people do online. My background in administrative law has proved surprisingly useful for this, as it gives one a grounding in standards of fairness and regularity against which to measure these new and ever-evolving regulatory processes. It has also made me conscious of the need for equivalent rules and norms (and avenues for individual redress) to constrain and govern new trans-national rulemaking processes, particularly those designed as public/private hybrids.

The regulation of information technology is perhaps just a special case of the regulation of information. I continue to write about privacy, particularly the ways in which new technologies may threaten or enhance both the individual's and the state's control of information. Thus, current projects include work on privacy in public places, and a forthcoming project in which I hope to set out an optimal set of rules for as privacy-friendly an ID card system as one could hope for in the United States. Ideally, the next stage in this project would be to broaden it to include a comparative dimension.

The ways in which we use information and information technologies also have implications for the smooth functioning, and perhaps even the nature, of self-government, both on the small-scale of affinity groups, clubs and on the larger scales of individual participation in national and even trans-national lawmaking. NGOs are using the Internet to organize their participation in matters ranging from UN sponsored conferences to trade negotiations. Localities are experimenting with a range of devices that allow citizens more direct participation in what were formerly bureaucratic and administrative decision-making. These are, potentially, tools for a new type of self-governance, and as they mature they may require not just amendments to our ideas of how administrative law works, but to more fundamental concepts about how we organize democracy. I intend to take part in those debates, both as a participant, and as a scholar.

17000Hz

They say you stop hearing high-pitched noises as you age.

I top out at 17,000 Hz on this test of high-pitched hearing. Encouragingly, my nine-year-old tops out at the same level. Then again, this may explain why he never seems to hear me...

[Slight caveat: it's possible my soundcard and/or speakers max out before 18000 Hz, which could also explain why we don't hear anything on the high ones.]

The Home Network Takes a Dive

The home network's access to the outside world croaked this week.

Monday saw intermittent failures ... resulting in hours of fruitless debugging on my part ... followed eventually by total DSL or router collapse on Thursday (it's not the switches -- the computers see each other just fine). After plugging a laptop right into the modem failed to get a signal, even though all the right lights on the modem were green, Bellsouth decided that the problem was my aged Alcatel 1000 modem, and offered to send me a replacement Westell if I'd just agree to keep paying them for another year. Yeah, like any addict makes plans to cut off his supply...

The "new" modem came late Friday. It's a tiny slip of a thing compared the Alcatel behemoth. Only it wasn't a new modem, it's refurbished. And there's still no signal -- only this time the DSL light blinks instead of giving the steady green one requires. Another call to BellSouth revealed that they failed to ship me a line filter which it seems that a Westell requires to operate (but the Alcatel 1000 does not). So, more promises to send what's needed -- although not until late Tuesday.

As a result, posting may be light for the next couple of days as the kids are home and I'm not going into the office much.

So, if you are trying to reach me by email, please be patient. Or just pick up the phone?

An American July 4th

My holiday, which began yesterday, has not started well. The last of the last-minute pre-departure things on my list was to bring in the wooden rocking bench that usually sits on my front porch. I have to bring it in because it could be a danger in the event of a hurricane while we are away. So I remove the cushion on the rocker, and reveal ... a whole lot of bugs. It's termite swarming season in Florida, and I have a sick suspicion I know what these are. So I call the bug people, and ... they're closed for July 4. But I'm not taking that in the house.

But it gets worse.

We were scheduled to leave Miami on American airlines on a flight to Boston with a tight but tolerable connection to a flight to Manchester, UK.

A few minutes after the Miami flight was due to start boarding, the gate staff announced that there was an air traffic hold in Boston and that we'd be so late there was no point boarding. Probably very late. There, I thought, went the connection. But a minute later they countermanded that and said we should board after all -- the pilot had accepted an alternate route.

So we boarded, pushed back a little late, the pilot came on and said that the new route would delay us about 20 minutes, we'd be 40 minutes late in all. That meant a sprint in the airport, but it was do-able. And we did it.

We boarded the second flight, taxied out to the runway....and the pilot came on to say there was a problem with the temperature sensor on the engine, and we'd have to go back for repairs. So we limped back to the gate. And waited for the ground crew. Then waited for them to report.

And after an hour or so, they did: we weren't going anywhere. So we all exited into the terminal. By now it was well after 9pm, so Boston airport was basically closed. There were no open concessions. There were no more flights out of Boston to anywhere. There were only a few gate staff there to rebook and hotel us all. And I'm traveling with two tired (but so far well-behaved) kids.

By about 11pm I had made it to the head of the line. And I'd started only about a third of the way into it. I'd had the sense to book new seats by phone, so I'd gotten three of the last seats on July 5th's flight to Manchester -- 24 hours later. We got our hotel vouchers, $45 in meals which were supposed to feed three people for three meals. And we went to claim our luggage, which had been offloaded from the plane.

Two of our bags were there. One was not. No explanation as to why. No one authorized to go hunting for the missing bag (mine, not the kids). So after a dispiriting search and queuing for surly baggage service -- did you know only supervisors are empowered to give you a toothbrush? -- we made it to the airport hotel around midnight. Only be told they only had smoking rooms.

The kids' room wasn't that bad. Mine smelled like the inside of a cigar. I didn't sleep much, and I'm still having nasal flashbacks.

The next morning we go back to the airport to hunt for the missing bag. In due course -- without setting any land speed records -- the day crew admits they might have an idea where in the bowels of the airport it is hiding, and go off to find it. And they do. So now I have to take this bag back to the hotel to join its brethren, and then the kids and I can play tourist in Boston for half a day.

Which we do, and which isn't bad, but would be a lot more fun if any of us had any energy, or if the kids didn't feel they were losing a day with their grandparents. The kids are being great, but it can't be easy for them. I did manage to contact the bug company, and they're going to survey us for termite infestations. They did say that even if there are termites on the bench, those guys won't move to the house any time soon, as they'll have plenty to eat. I guess that's reassuring, in a way.

And now I'm back at the Boston airport, posting this, ready to try again. The folks at check-in assure me it's a different plane, so maybe we'll actually get there this time. If I don't post for a while, that's a sign we made it.

Wordpress Designer Needed

I am involved in a non-profit project that wants to set up a very distinctive wordpress blog.

The ideal theme would have a great and appropriate logo. It would work with a text-rich site (either one-column with something cute to attract notice to a few fixed links and elements or more likely two-column). And it would make extensive use of WordPress 2.0's ability to build a theme customization panel that allows on-the-fly theme customization so we could, for example, have a suite of similar looking blogs with different colors and perhaps type faces. Advice on suitable color combos for the first half dozen variants would also be welcomed. The programming work (installation, plugins) is covered; what's needed is design work by someone used to making themes for WordPress.

Of course, being non-profit, the project's funds are...limited. But not zero.

If any readers have experience in this sort of work, or can recommend someone experienced (and public-spirited when writing bills), please contact me via email.

We Are Not Alone

It seems that other people have domestic debates a lot like ours.

My English Wife Sent Me This

According to a UK government report, entitled "Sex, lies and money. Research reveals finance is the new taboo,"

One third of women are dishonest to their partners about their credit card spending habits (33%) compared to 29% of men admitting not always telling the truth.

Is she trying to tell me something? Or does she suspect?

Life's Little Mysteries

Why did someone from the Czech Lands call my cell phone three times in quick succession this morning while I was teaching, but leave no message? The number doesn't work when I try to call it back...

Wilma Aftermath: Grasping at Straws

FP&L says that 172,300 customers in Miami-Dade still lack power, which makes about 18% of the 956,500 affected by Hurricane Wilma. In other words, 82% of customers in Miami-Dade have their power back.

But we still don’t.

As the Miami Herald reports

In Coral Gables, about a quarter of residents are still using flashlights, candles and generators -- and the percentage has remained the same for three days, said City Manager David Brown.

''The percentages aren't going to change that much anymore because the pockets are so little,'' Brown said. ``When you go and turn on 25 residents, it doesn't change the number on 5,500. Unfortunately, when you've been without power for many days, tempers start to flare, frustrations start to rise.''

FPL Vice President Geisha Williams acknowledged that progress was becoming piecemeal. The work is now down to blown-out transformers and downed wires, especially in small neighborhoods.

''It's slow and it's gritty and it's tough,'' she said.

The good news is that yesterday at about 6pm, an actual FP&L truck parked on my street and actual FP&L employees got out to look at the damage behind the house across the street.

Then they went away.

Wilma Aftermath: Still Waiting

More than three quarters of the residences in Miami-Dade county that lost power during hurricane Wilma had it restored by last night, according to FP&L.

Ours is not among them.

Good News (Sorta)

No, no, not the indictment (full text). It's never good news that our government is run by liars and crooks.

FP&L have advanced their estimate of when I get my power back from Nov. 22 to Nov. 15.

I feel like I should feel more grateful.

Wilma Aftermath: Suspended Animation, Active Worries

We’re fine, but we’re in a sort of suspended animation. There’s power three or fewer blocks in every direction, and even for one or two houses on my street. But the rest of us are left in limbo, watching food and gas supplies dwindle.

FP&L, the local power company, has promised that all those of who live in Miami-Dade north of Kendall Drive (the group I’m in) will have power by ... November 22. Yes, by Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, although there is apparently no shortage of gasoline, there is a very great shortage of gas stations with power. And without power they cannot pump the gasoline. Knowing that our pre-hurricane hoard of gas -- which runs the generator which keeps the fridge going -- was due to run out Wednesday night, I went off in search of gas Wednesday morning. All I found was gas lines. The first one was short, but only because it was a flash crowd; there was in fact no gas being pumped. The second one was ten blocks long. The third was almost as long, and the station had run out but expected a new delivery ‘soon’. The fourth was again ten blocks or more. I gave up and went home. By Wednesday night, an hour before curfew (curfew runs from 8pm to 6am), the line at the closest station was only about fifty cars, and took maybe forty minutes; I got home with minutes to spare. But I got my twenty gallons, and I’m good to go for another three days or so. I expect that by the next time I need gas, there will be a lot more stations open so the lines will be shorter.

A more pressing problem may be food, although risk-averse legal types that we are, we have several days worth of pasta, rice and the like, even after we finish eating the frozen stuff. Most of the local stores are running on generators and selling mostly dry goods at present. It would be nice to find a source of milk and bread, but I can’t complain compared to many. Plus the Miami Herald reports that FP&L will be prioritizing stores starting today, now that they’ve gotten the hospitals and other first responders sorted out. (A longer-run problem may be laundry; but I’m sure there must be a host of machines somewhere in the student dorms.)

The schools claim that they will reopen Monday, and that is the university’s current plan as well. The remaining issues are whether the roads will be sufficiently clear, enough traffic lights will be working to make the journey safe, and especially whether gas supplies will be plentiful enough to allow people to commute.

It also seems as if the weather, which has been unseasonably dry and cool -- the mid-70s -- will revert to normal, starting Friday, and climb to the mid-80s. Plus it will rain a lot, topping up the humidity. So it’s going to get much more unpleasant in the house, and the fridge will have to work harder, making greater demands on the gas supply.

In fact everything is fine, and our discomforts are in the grand scale of things quite minor. But it is surprising how much time coping requires.

Wilma Aftermath: Deja Vu All Over Again

Trees down everywhere. Several side streets blocked by trunks. Most houses in the neighborhood lost at least some roof tiles, but no one near us appears to have major damage. Power has been restored east, west, north and south of us -- but not to the few streets surrounding me.

It was a ferocious storm, and we didn't even get the worst of it -- that was probably in Broward, one county north of us. From about 7am to 10am yesterday, we could every so often hear a tile being ripped off our roof, often ricocheting from the top floor down to the overhanging roof below (and doing more damage). It was all too easy to imagine the roof being peeled off, Hurricane Andrew style, if things got worse. It's very hard to describe the sound of your roof being dismantled by a storm. Something between an angry giant flicking at it, and near-misses by something a bit more powerful than small arms. In retrospect, the house held up fine, but as this was the first serious test of our new roof post-remodeling, during the event we were more than ordinarily stressed out of our minds.

In the bright light of day, our damage is no worse than many other people's (whether, with a brand new roof it should be less is a question I don't know how to answer yet). And the weather is nice and cool today, so we don't have the sweltering problem we had the last time the power was out for days, plus the generator runs longer on a tank of gas since the fridge has less work to do.

I'm writing this from the office - which has power - but don't expect much more from me until things get closer to normal.

Wilma Update

Michael and his family are fine, but they lost power early this morning. So no blogging for now. The phone works: "We're watching the storm go by," Michael tells me. "It's very blustery out there."

Where to Get Your Donuts in Ohio

There are not that many Froomkins in the USA: Indeed, I recall going to an exhibit of a Social Security computer as a kid in the late 70s, where you could run your surname through the system and find out how many SSNs had been issued to people with the same name, and the total was something like 17. (That doesn’t count alternate spellings, of which there are many, for what is basically a transliteration from Russian.)

Over at froomkin.com we’ve collected the information we could about Froomkins ‘round the world, and it’s not a long list.

What are the odds, therefore, that there would be two people named “Michael Froomkin”¹? And that the other one would make the best donuts in Ohio? In 54 varieties?

No one makes creme sticks like the Froomkins, loyal customers insist.

Michael Froomkin, president of the company and son of co-founder Berkeley Froomkin, acknowledges that health concerns have hurt business over the years but he can’t say how much.

“People still like doughnuts,” he observes. “Doughnuts are still a staple breakfast item.”

Plaza Donuts, founded by brothers Irv and Berkeley Froomkin, who operated three Youngstown coal yards, opened its first store in Akron. Two years later Plaza opened its second store in Sharon, Pa., and 1963, the company opened its store in Liberty — still operating today and where its business offices are located. Of the first three stores, it’s the only one still operating. The other four are in Boardman, Girard, Niles and downtown Youngstown; all are supplied from the Liberty bakery.

The business remains a family affair. Irv’s sons, Craig and Howard, serve as vice president and secretary-treasurer, respectively. From time to time, both founders come in to help out, Froomkin says.

¹ OK, technically “Michael” is my middle name, but despite naming me “Andrew” my parents (and everyone else) have called me “Michael” since I was born. Go figure.

I was forced to throw in the “A.” when the nice people at the DC Motor Vehicles Office refused to give me a driver’s license in a name that differed from y birth certificate; then I needed a signature on checks that matched by driver’s license…

And indeed, it seems I’m just “a” Michael Froomkin instead of “the” only one.

Annals of Uncommon Household Accidents

Today an elderly but sizable orange juice can -- part of our hurricane supplies left over from yesteryear -- exploded at 6:20am while we were rushing to get the kids ready for school.

This makes an impressive mess in the cupboard and all over the kitchen floor.

Empowered!

The electricity went back on around 6:45 pm. So far the temperature in the house has dropped about three degrees, down to 88 (31 Celsius). I guess there is a lot of specific heat in all those books we used to line the walls.

I think it may take a couple days for my brain to cool down to a functioning temperature. A good night's sleep would help too.

Hot

Still no power. The house is now thoroughly saturated with heat and humidity. The books are curling. We are drooping. The generator made strange I-think-I'm-gonna-die noises (like before it runs out of gas, but the tank was full) until we gave it a three-hour rest. During which the freezer temperature rose six degrees.

Much of the area has power now, but we're in the middle of a big dead zone running from at least Blue road north of us to US 1 south, and starting at least at 62nd Ave to the west, running to the university to the east. Even the traffic lights, repaired most other places, are dead in this area. Occasionally we see a power truck rolling by, or doing something mysterious and ineffectual on one of the larger streets. The only cheerful note has been a tree trimming crew coming down a street, surely a precursor of the electric crew, right? Right?

In past storms, FP&L has had a pretty nifty system by which you called their computer, and they told you how long it would be before you had power. This time, perhaps due to the size of the damage, they just said "90% of customers will have power by Tuesday; the remainder by Friday." Today's paper said they were going to get more specific, and give us predictions on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. Well, if so, the prediction for my neighborhood is grim:

This is Monday's update on restoring power after Hurricane Katrina.

Power in your area will be restored by the end of the day on Friday, or sooner.

This is the most current and complete information available for your area.

Of Envy and Gratitude

Anyone who doubts the idea that perceptions of one’s wealth and well-being are strongly influenced by interpersonal comparative factors need only contemplate the position of someone remaining without electricity while much of the surrounding county’s power is being restored. It is very hot and humid in our house.

On the other hand, I did see a power truck go by a few hours ago.

Then again, one always remembers how much worse it could be. I hope somehow it misses New Orleans. (Steve, we're thinking of you.)

Meanwhile I've relocated temporarily to my nice air-conditioned office in order to write tomorrow's 8am lecture.

Powerless

Like most of Miami-Dade, we got sucker punched by Hurricane Katrina. Several factors combined to make us overconfident: First, the track showed it going far enough north of us so that we'd only get tropical storm force winds ... and we know we can handle that. Second, we had four false alarms last year, each characterized by hysterical warnings to prepare, all of which resulted in us hunkering for naught. Third, and no doubt following from the second, the media played this one very low key. Fourth, having gone through Andrew 14 years ago, a strong category four hurricane, or maybe even a five, the sound of Katrina, a 'mere' category one, just didn't get the panic juices flowing.

It should have.

Katrina went south of the predicted track. The power went out about 8pm on Thursday night. The morning after revealed a scene of devastated vegetation only slightly less than after Andrew. Roads were blocked in every direction. Between here and the law school, for example, about a block and a half, the road is blocked by two gigantic fallen trees. We escaped quite cheaply, losing our favorite frangipani tree. Unfortunately, it landed on the neighbor's car. Fortunately, the fall was broken by an intervening hedge, and the car has at most a scratch.

Caroline and I had a hard time after Andrew, or at least as hard a time as you could have when you hadn't lost your roof. We had arrived in Miami only a few days earlier, had no hurricane supplies, not even a candle, and no idea where to go to get food or ice. The entire neighborhood was without power for two weeks; four lucky homes, of which ours was one, were without for five weeks. At night we would lie exhausted, overheated, by the open window that rarely vouchsafed a breeze but certainly carried the enviable and very loud noises of next door's generator.

It's not as bad this time: we have hurricane glass instead of those beastly metal shutters, plus after we had kids we bought a generator, and consequently we are able to keep our food from spoiling. There's ice. There's a light in the evening. We cook with gas. We can even run (one) fan. And if I manage to post this, we were even able to get the modem and router to wake temporarily.

Florida Power and Light says that 90% of the homes in Miami-Dade lost power. Of them 10% got it back by last night. They predict that 90% of those who lost power will have it back by Tuesday night - still more than 72 hours away - but that the remaining 10% may have to wait as long as Friday. Meanwhile it's unclear when the schools will reopen (the paper suggests it may be as soon as Monday). And if I can get online, I'll find out more about whether I need to get my lecture ready for 8am Monday.

I imagine there won't be much blogging until the power comes back.

Or Even Yesterday?

The first of many senior moments:

Self, for it is he: Yes, lots of cultural references get lost in class. For example when I talk about Nixon, to a good chunk of the class it's as much history as if I were talking of Ulysses S. Grant.

Youthful colleague: I wasn't born yet at the time of the Nixon administration.

Self: Might as well shoot me now.

Youthful colleague (twisting the knife): I wasn't even born in the Ford administration.

Obligatory link to David Bowie, Young Americans.

Incidentally, am I wrong to read significance into the shift from Young Americans to I'm Afraid of Americans?

Thank You Jon!

Jon Weinberg has done a terrific job as a guest blogger (he even fought the spam, which decided to try to flood the blog while I wasn’t looking). But I’m home, so the data/ink (or is that data/electron?) ratio will now go down to its usual level.

I hope to write a bit about my trip soon, but my first priority is to get some sleep. Then shop for food…

A Note From London

As it happens I am in London, spending an evening between planes on my journey homewards. I am watching coverage of the mostly failed bombing attempt today in London on the TV in an airport hotel. That was not the plan.

I had a very much better plan. I had a ticket to see the great Michael Gambon as Falstaff in Henry IV, part II this evening, at the National Theater. And I wasn’t inclined to let a bomb threat campaign stop I think that the terrorists win if you cower at home. Seeing the TV news presenter read a government statement asking people to go on with their daily lives clinched it. Michael Gambon here I come, I thought, as I set out to brave what I imagined were the London crowds. But first I had to get to London from Heathrow.

The problem was that London transport is basically shut down. For a while there, I thought I had a Plan B - I figured out a route from the airport with the help of the excellent London Transport Real-Time Map. The Piccadilly line that takes you from Heathrow to central London was (and is) shut. There is an express train from LHR to Paddington – but given my late start, no obvious way to get from Paddington to the show in time. Surface transport would, I imagine be at a standstill, queues for taxis very long, and it’s a bit far to walk in the time I had available.

So the plan was to eschew the express, take the local train about half way to Ealing, and switch to the central line, which seemed to be working. I went back to the airport, bought a ticket from the vending machine for the London Connection to Ealing Broadway, and descended to the platform. No trains showing on the departures board. A small hand-lettered sign revealed the reason: no trains today beyond Hayes due to “technical issues”. The nice but harassed lady at the station duly refunded my ticket.

It seems even when you don’t want to let yourself be defeated by terrorists, you can still be defeated by British Rail. Then again, it’s probably a mercy. By the time I got back to my hotel, the Central line seemed to have been stopped too.

Phrasebook Greek

One of the things I’ve done to prepare for my trip to Greece is dig out the Greek phrasebook I’ve been storing since my previous trip, almost 20 years ago.

I’d forgotten quite how horrible and useless the Institute for Language Study’s “Vest Pocket Modern Greek” was.

Here are real, honest to goodness, phrases that they provide. While reading these, keep in mind that there are only about ten phrases per page, and the phrase section of the book runs under seventy pages. And they still decided to include these.

• What a fool!
• Alice is less diligent than Barbara.
• The girl with the big brown eyes was elected the queen of the ball.
• My brother-in-law has a new truck.
• I have never gone bankrupt.
• Just continue your work. Don’t look at the camera.
• I appreciate truth.
• What is faith? It is life’s foundation.

You have to wonder what sort of traveler they had in mind. Apparently, one who needs to say, “The beautiful Greek girl didn’t come to see us.”

Why I Write 'Legal Scholarship'

The question is posed:

PrawfsBlawg: Why I Write. (No, Really, Remind Me Again — Why Do I Write?): I want to ask the question: why do we write? This is a surprisingly difficult question on which I’d be curious to hear from my fellow bloggers (or blawgers, or…forget it). Let me limit it to the question, why do we write legal scholarship?

You could say that before I got tenure, I wrote for tenure. And there’s a grain of truth to that; I certainly made it a goal to write so much that the faculty — which claims to hold to a norm that you should not vote against a person unless you have read all their writing — would find voting ‘yes’ to be the lesser of two evils.

But by now I have had tenure for some time, so I don’t really have to write. Failure to write at all would cost me some respect — unless it’s for good cause (say, service to the community or intense involvement in pro bono litigation). That said, law teaching is a surprisingly monastic life. I don’t actually spend much of my day talking to anyone. And Miami is far enough away from other places where people do what I do that getting to them is an Event. And rare. So respect or its lack actually has little implact in my daily life. So that can’t explain why I write several times as much as the uncertain minimum needed to avoid the cold shoulder.

Is it for money? Legal academic writing is unpaid. If a keynote address pays anything over expenses, it’s a memorable payday. It doesn’t happen very often. I once scored in the low four figures for a speech and a paper and thought it the most amazing thing. At the margin, in some years, the Dean has a very tiny amount of discretionary money to throw towards people who he wants to reward, and writing is one thing he says he wants to reward. Although, 102% or even 104% of a salary that is increasingly behind the norms of the trade is still a salary that is falling behind the norms of the trade — and when coupled with increases in health insurance costs, one that may be losing real buying power. So I guess I’m not doing it for money. Or if I am, I’m an idiot.

So why write then? I think it varies. Let’s look at the last five years or so:

++Some articles I wrote because I wanted to understand something, and only writing it down would make it clear.

• ICANN & Anti-Trust , 2003 ILL. L. REV. 1, (with Mark Lemley).

• The Death of Privacy?, 52 STAN L. REV. 1461 (2000).

(Almost everything fell into this category in the early days — I’m not sure if that’s because Internet law was new, or because I was, or both. But my digital signatures and certificates work, and also my crypto work, generally fell in this category. And, my next big project does too…)

++ Many articles I wrote because the idea seemed cool so I wanted to share them, and/or I wanted to work them out on paper to better understand them..

• Virtual Worlds, Real Rules, 1 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REV. 103 (2004) (with Caroline Bradley).

• Habermas@discourse.net: Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace, 116 HARV. L. REV. 749 (2003).

• Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow’s Economy, in INTERNET PUBLISHING AND BEYOND: THE ECONOMICS OF DIGITAL INFORMATION AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY 6 (Brian Kahin & Hal Varian eds., 2000), (with James Bradford DeLong).

• Semi-Private International Rulemaking: Lessons Learned from the WIPO Domain Name Process, in REGULATING THE GLOBAL INFORMATION SOCIETY 211 (Christopher T. Marsden ed., 2000).

++ Some articles I wrote because I was angry and wanted to fix something.

• ICANN’s UDRP: Its Causes and (Partial) Cures, 67 BROOK. L. REV. 605 (2002).

• Wrong Turn in Cyberspace: Using ICANN to Route Around the APA and the Constitution, 50 DUKE L.J. 17 (2000).

++ I wrote an article because someone attacked me, seriously mis-stating both my arguments and the relevant law.

• Form and Substance in Cyberspace, 6 J. SMALL & EMERGING BUS. L. 93 (2002).

++ Some articles I wrote because someone I like asked me to and/or because it was the price of admission to a conference where I got to meet nice people and learn interesting things…

• When We Say US™, We Mean It!, 41 Hous. L. Rev. 839 (2004).

• Commentary: Time to Hug a Bureaucrat, 35 LOY. U. CHI. L.J. 139 (2003).

• ICANN 2.0: Meet the New Boss, 36 LOY. L.A. L. REV. 1087 (2003).

• Anonymity in the Balance, in DIGITAL ANONYMITY: TENSIONS AND DIMENSIONS (C. Nicoll et al. eds., 2003).

• Internet’s International Regulation: Emergence and Enforcement, in EVOLUTION DES SYSTEMES JURIDIQUE, BIJURIDISM ET COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL / THE EVOLUTION OF LEGAL SYSTEMS, BIJURALISM AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE (Louis Perret & Alain-Francois Bisson eds., 2002).

• The Collision of Trademarks, Domain Names, and Due Process in Cyberspace, 44 COMM. ACM. 91 (2001).

Which motive produces the best articles? That’s perhaps not for me to say.

Lloyd Cutler

Former Clinton Counsel Lloyd Cutler Dies at 87
When I worked for Wilmer, Cutler in London I had the privilege of working for "Lloyd" as he wanted to be called (not that we younguns ever quite did) on a pro-bono matter. Lloyd Cutler had drafted the firm to help him in connection with an international project to advise Czechoslovakia, which was trying to draft a new constitution. (We were too late -- they cut the deal that doomed them to split two days before we made our presentations.) I found a very impressive and decent man, with a dash of the Washington fixer.

The Washington Post quotes its former ombudsman as describing him as "a corporate godfather by day and Sister Theresa by night." Sounds about right.

Lloyd Cutler worked on many good causes, and as one of the US's equivalent of the 'great and the good' performed many public services. His greatest achievement may be the institution he left behind. I don't know whether it's still as true today, but the Wilmer, Cutler I worked in was an impressive and highly decent place, a Washington institution, a litigation powerhouse at once intellectual and moral, with an intense commitment to public service. Not many firms manage that. Not many people can help create something like that -- and then let go at the right time.

I last saw him here in Miami in January 2003, when the National Research Council's CSTB Committee on "Privacy in the Information Age," which he chaired, held a meeting here. He was older, and moved less surely, but the fire (and the growl) was still there, undiminished.

Happy Passover

Happy Passover to all!

Email Issues (Tempory)

For what seem good and sufficient reasons, my normal email account at UM will be down for the next couple of days, starting immediately. In theory everything will forward to gmail, but my experience is that this never works right, plus gmail randomly flags real mail as spam (and piles of spam as real mail). And gmail feels so slow compared to PINE.

So if you really want me to get your email between right now and Monday, don’t send it to my university address, send it to the address described cryptically in a form I hope foils spammers.

Visual Travel Records (2)

And also via Ed Bott, here’s the world version via the visited countries project:

PS. Several other cool-looking projects also from Douwe Osinga.

Visual Travel Records

Thanks to a trackback from Ed Bott, here is a visual presentation of the same data as in the last post:

Have I Really Never Been to Ohio?

As far as I can recall, I’ve never been to Ohio. Somehow, that seems like a strange gap.

bold the states you’ve been to, underline the states you’ve lived in and italicize the state you’re in now…

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

Of the places I’ve lived in the USA, my favorites are easily Chicago and Washington, D.C., although I also had a very good time in Boulder, and New Haven wasn’t that bad either. And if the circumstances were different I suspect I’d like Northern California a lot better next time. I have somewhat mixed feelings about South Florida: there’s lots to like, not least the intellectual strength of the Miami faculty, but there’s stuff not to like too. For one thing, it’s a long plane ride from all the other places I like.

That's A New One

I’ve been called many, many things in my life, but “whimsically surnamed”? That’s new.

My. Goodness.

One of my pronounced character traits, some might call them obsessions but what do they know, is a certain devotion to comparison shopping. It started with computer equipment, even involving a two-year subscription to Computer Shopper in its big fat heyday, but now extends to quality and price comparisons when buying pretty much anything other than dinner for two that costs more than about $50. One of my wife’s few imperfections is making fun of this noble devotion to social wealth maximization in which I do my bit to ensure that we have the toughest most competitive market for everyone’s enjoyment.

I can sort of understand how this predilection might have seemed mildly annoying in days of yore: trooping to stores to look for models that were randomly in stock, perusing out-of-date Consumer Reports for reports that proved to be on models no longer sold, well, it took time, and sometimes we needed it now. Here as elsewhere, however, the Internet changes everything. Comparison shopping online is much efficient, although no faster since if the ease of information acquisition increases geometrically, the amount of information (and mis-information) increases exponentially. So it still takes a little while. But it’s more fun. And I can do it late at night.

All of which is prompted by the observation that the vacuum cleaner is dying.

So as I’m starting up another round of happy hunting, I find this description of a vacuum cleaner, yes a vacuum cleaner, that kinda makes you want to run out and try one, and kinda makes you want to hide under the bed:

My. Goodness.

I am not the world’s best housekeeper. My roommate graciously lent me his Eureka so that I could deal with a few trouble spots in my part of the house, the most significant of which was a green area rug that had never been vacuumed. I have a cat that likes to spend a lot of time on that rug, so I had forgotten that it was originally green and not a muddy greyish color.

I plugged in the vacuum, puzzled over it for a bit, mashed the handle release, and turned it on.

The monster surged to life and immediately began pulling me across the rug. I should probably mention that I had unwisely opted to put this rug on a hardwood floor with no backing, so it wasn’t long before the vacuum was dragging me and the rug around the floor. Don’t ask me how it did it; maybe it was using The Force ™. All I know is that this thing wouldn’t stop. I finally managed to pin the rug in a corner and drag the cleaner across it. The vacuum growled in what I can only hope was anticipation, and with each pass of its mighty brushes the color and majesty of the original rug (purchased for $20 from a guy selling them out of the back of a van four years ago) came to light.

When the vacuum stopped dragging me over the rug and I finally managed to shut the beast down, I was aquiver with awe (or maybe it was fatigue - the monster’s a heavy one). I could look down and see, for the first time in years, the rich emerald tones of my cheap geometric carpet, long hidden under a protective layer of cat hair and tracked-in leaves from my front yard.

My roommate had not lent me a mere vacuum cleaner. He had given me Excalibur.

Problem is, the darn thing weighs 21 lbs, and we’re used to a much lighter canister model. And with the addition to the house, we now have stairs. Plus we have wood floors, tile, and area rugs. This monster sounds as if it might swallow the lighter rugs whole…

EFF Names Advisory Board

I’ve joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s first Advisory Board. There are some amazing people in the group—it’s flattering to be in such good company. My only worry is that California is a long way away…I think I’ll be doing a lot of phone conferences alas. Media coverage at The Register (blush). Full text of EFF’s press release below.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is proud to announce the formation of its first Advisory Board, a group of legal and technical experts who will assist in shaping long-term strategies and goals for the civil liberties organization. The Advisory Board will meet regularly with EFF staff and Executive Board members to offer guidance and outside perspectives.

“EFF is thrilled to have such wonderful thinkers, activists, and community leaders joining us,” said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. “We look forward to working with them and benefiting from their wisdom.”

Added EFF Executive Board Chairman Brad Templeton, “This is an exciting time in EFF’s history. We’re bigger than we’ve ever been, and we’re able to take on many new cases and issues. I welcome the Advisory Board’s help in shaping what EFF will become as we move forward.”

The Advisory Board brings together a broad range of backgrounds and points of view.

Ed Felten is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and author of the highly respected tech policy blog, “Freedom to Tinker” (www.freedomtotinker.com).

Michael Froomkin is a professor of law at Miami Law School and an expert in Internet law and constitutional law.

Paul Grewal is a partner at Day Casebeer and an expert in high tech law. He is admitted to practice before various federal courts, as well as before the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Jim Griffin is the CEO of Cherry Lane Digital, a company dedicated to the future of music and entertainment delivery. Griffin also founded the Pho list, where thousands of members meet to discuss digital media.

David Hayes is a partner in the Intellectual Property Group at Fenwick & West LLP and is an expert on copyright law and digital media. He has served as counsel for a number of precedent-setting software copyright infringement cases, including Apple v. Microsoft and the Napster case.

Mitch Kapor is one of EFF’s founders as well as the founder of the Lotus Development Corporation. He is also founder and chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF).

Mark Lemley is a professor at Stanford Law School and is director of the Stanford Center for Law, Science and Technology. He is the author of several books and has testified before Congress and the FTC on patent, antitrust, and constitutional law matters.

Eben Moglen is a professor of law and history at Columbia Law School. He serves as pro bono General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation and co-wrote the GNU licenses with Richard Stallman.

Deirdre Mulligan is an Acting Clinical Professor of Law at the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley. She focuses on the interplay between politics and the Internet and was previously on staff at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Michael Page is a Partner at Keker & Van Nest LLP, where he focuses on intellectual property litigation. He has represented numerous high-profile clients and recently won a California Attorney of the Year award.

Michael Traynor is a partner at Cooley Godward LLP, where he specializes in intellectual property, business, and First Amendment litigation. He is president of the American Law Institute and has argued before the US Supreme Court.

Jim Tyre is an attorney and EFF fellow who has represented free speech interests for more than 20 years. He is a founder of The Censorware Project, which provides public information about censorware products.

If You Have To Think That Hard Maybe You're Not Doing It Right

Yet another reason I’m glad I’m happily married: I have no part, or even interest, in this debate.

Today's Discovery

Universities don’t cut your nominal pay. They just raise the cost of health insurance.

My Kerry-Edwards Sign (III)

We’ve been having some substantial work done on our house, which means that between periods of frustrating inactivity it is overrun by armies of sub-contracted workers. Last week it was painters.

The sign gets a reaction from these transient visitors. By and large the sub-contracting bosses are not very pro-Kerry, although at least around us they profess to not be very pro-Bush either. And our general contractor says he may vote for Nader, or may stay home. At first I thought he was saying that to tease us, now I think he means it.

Several of the workers’ cars have Kerry stickers.

The head painter, I’ll call him ‘Ernesto’, mentioned in imperfect English that he’d seen our Kerry-Edwards sign. Ernesto told us with quiet pride that this was going to be his first chance to vote here since immigrating from Honduras.

His first US vote ever would be cast for Kerry, Ernesto said. ‘Bush has not been good,’ he explained.

A few days later, Ernesto waved a bunch of Kerry-Edwards signs from the back of his truck: all his friends are getting them.

London Theater Update

It’s been slim pickings at TKTS, maybe because I’ve been showing up too early. Show up at or before 10am opening you don’t have to wait very long, but there’s less choice I suspect than if I showed up at noon and queued a long time. I would have loved to see the new David Hare play, but it’s not on while I’m in town.

So last night I saw Jerry Springer: the Opera. I am more of straight theater kind of guy, but I’d read about this and, well, I guess I’m glad I saw it. I’ve only ever seen about five minutes of Springer in some hotel somewhere, and I was fairly disgusted. The show is pretty smart about walking a line between joining in with Springer and condemning him. It revels in his horribleness while at the same time inviting you to revel too while at the same time marking an ironic distance. That’s clever. And uncomfortable. It’s a somewhat well, not raunchy but defiantly rude show. And it’s a real spectacle. The use of the audience as a modern trailer-trash manipulated Greek chorus is clever.

Jerry gets sent to visit hell, but the permanence of his stay is left ambiguous.

I left wondering what on earth Springer himself thought of it.

Apparently he liked it

“I ‘m honored to the point that I realize that I’m the only human being on the planet earth that’s an opera,” Springer says. “There have been others, but they’re dead.”

This evening I saw an RSC production of “Twelfth Night” set in an Indian milieu. It did the play no harm, allowed the addition of nice costumes and some good physical jokes, and thus distracted a little from the play’s utter implausibility. Orisnio was a drip who mostly didn’t speak loud enough. Viola played the role very straight, which mostly was not too good except in her scenes with Olivia, who was generally magnificent…topped only by the Fool who kept stealing the show. On the whole a good production of one of Shakespear’s weakest plays, but not in the same class as the History Boys, or the RSC production of Coriolanus I saw the last time I was in London, which I’m sure is the best Coriolanus I’ll ever see in my life.

Tomorrow it’s back to the National for “A Funny Thing Happened”.

Blogging may be sparse until I get back to the US late on Tuesday. Or, if we go on campus to watch the election returns with the students, maybe not till Wednesday…

Signage Update

Called home yesterday evening (London time) and among other things learned that the ‘Morales’ family (read about them here) now has a Kerry-Edwards sign, bringing our street’s total to four!

My Kerry-Edwards Sign (II)

In Part One I described the first day of our ownership of a Kerry-Edwards sign. In this part two, I report the sign’s untimely demise.

Orcinus reports there have been a number of violent incidents around the country in which people with the temerity to display a Kerry-Edwards sign have suffered for it. My story is much tamer: someone took the sign a day after I put it up.

I called the cops to report a theft, thinking that if this was not a unique event, it would help build a record of it. This being Coral Gables, a cop was dispatched within minutes to investigate the theft of a $5 sign. Unfortunately, we’d been out much of the day, and couldn’t even tell him about what time it likely happened. The cop was very polite. I got the sense he had views about the election and was disciplining himself not to utter them; he was professional enough that when he left I wasn’t even sure which side he was on. (Just in case you are thinking white male Florida stereotyped cop, forget it: this was a trim, no-accent, black man I’d guess in his 30s.) His main advice was that if we got another sign, not to put it on the swale (the strip of city-owned land between the sidewalk and the street), but rather on our property. Material on the swale, he instructed us, can be considered abandoned and thus anyone can take it. (My own opinion is that this rule does not apply to yard signs that are clearly fixed in place, even on the swale, but why believe me, I’m not a member of the Florida Bar. Anyway, it’s the law on the ground that counts.)

So we went to get another sign. This was not easy as there was a national shortage of Kerry-Edwards yard signs. But we got one, put it up, and it’s still there. Unfortunately, the shortage is so acute that the Kerry folks wouldn’t even sell me a spare for me to give to Ms. ‘Morales’ across the street (see part one).

Meanwhile, however, the street has sprouted two other K-E signs … and one Bush sign.

My Ballot Was Delivered

As I’m returning too late next Tuesday to vote, I voted absentee. It’s a very long ballot, with many constitutional amendments (most, but not all, bad ones) and bond issues (hard choices - they lump good projects with bad ones to make several choices very debatable); I predict very long lines at the polls. I paid extra to have the ballot “tracked” when I mailed it, and the USPS gave me tracking number 0302 0980 0000 2813 9838. According to the USPS web site,

Your item was delivered at 12:13 pm on October 26, 2004 in MIAMI, FL 33102.

That doesn’t prove they will count it of course.

My Kerry-Edwards Sign (I)

We live less than a block from campus, only a few blocks from where the first presidential debate was held. So the day before the debate we decided we needed a Kerry-Edwards yard sign. In an earlier post I described how I found the local Kerry-Edwards office. I went there the morning of the debate, and they gave me a yard sign, with the metal mount, saying it was just about the last one, they were going fast. We installed it as soon as we got home. That afternoon, returning from collecting the kids, I saw our neighbor from across the street, whom I’ll call Ms. ‘Morales’.

I should explain about the ‘Morales’ family. Viewed from across the street, they seem to be your typical Coral Gables residents—a very successful Cuban-American couple, a few years older than us, one college-age son. Mr. Morales is an accountant, she’s a not-quite-full-time Realtor.

(I will never forget one of my first encounters with Mr. Morales back in 1992. Having just arrived from London, we moved into our house a few days after Hurricane Andrew, at a time when there was no electricity anywhere in the neighborhood, roads were impassible due to trees down, and everything was in confusion. Our house was basically untouched, but theirs sustained severe damage. Despite this, we were more disoriented than they, in part because we were not used to the heat and humidity, had no clue where anything was, no emergency supplies, not even a candle or flashlight to unpack by when it got cool enough at night to actually move.

Despite their own serious damage, the Moraleses made every effort to be helpful. When the radio started warning about not leaving damaged houses unattended due to the danger of looters, Mr. Morales come over to comfort us. We had nothing to worry about, he said. He had an arsenal in his house, and was keeping watch on things. Any looter came by he was going to shoot him. The idea of an amateur, armed with an arsenal, poised for looters across the street scared me much more than the remote prospect of the looters themselves, though I understood that Mr. Morales meant his remarks to be friendly.)

So anyway, Ms. Morales made polite conversation about the construction on our house (which proceeds, but not fast enough). Then she came to the point. “I noticed you have a new sign on your lawn.” Uh-oh, thought I. She sees it all day out of her window. This isn’t going to be good.

Then she floored me: “Where can I get one?”

It seems the Moraleses, perhaps because of the college (ie draft!) age child, are now virulently anti-Bush. They voted for him in 2000, and boy are they sorry. She is angry about the war in Iraq, Ms. Morales told me—and she looked the way I feel, shaking with anger. And they’re angry about the new rules that restrict travel to Cuba, and limit helping any but the closest relatives still there. They’re very very anti-Bush; they’re voting Kerry.

Of such things are victories made.

(This is the first of at least three stories I plant to tell over the next few days about my Kerry-Edwards sign.)

Next: Someone steals my sign two days after I put it up.

This Explains EVERYTHING

Indiana University study: having children significantly lowers parents’ IQs.

Update: Alas, it’s a spoof.

Email double whammy

Item: the email server at work has not delivered ONE SINGLE email to me in almost 48 hours. Not even spam. There appear to be up to 140,000 queued messages for the faculty sitting on it. The nice man from IT promised on Monday he’d fix me by yesterday. We met today and he explained it would be 48 hours to fix anything and a complete sort-out could take a week.

Item: Gmail, which I am using as a temporary replacement (the interface drives me nuts) decided at some unknown point in the I-hope-recent past that much of my real mail should go to the spam filter, so now I have to search through up to 20413 pages of spam (100 entries per page) looking for the real mail.

Bonus item: I have a cold.

My E-Mail Is Hosed

My email at U.M. is 98% hosed. Random emails get to me quickly—but not many. Other ones get to me a day late. Many seem to bounce; for all I know some vanish. Outgoing mail from my UM account is also delayed or vanishing.

This is, to understate, very frustrating.

And the soonest I can hope for a fix is next week, since the entire IT dept. is doing things for student accounts this week.

If the fix doesn’t come next week, I’m moving my center of email gravity to something private.

Is This What I Have to Look Forward To?

Brad’s eldest is 14 years old, and guest blogs this evening, telling tales (well, a tale) on dad: The Rice Incident (Not Condoleeza).

My eldest is almost 11. Is this what I have to look foward to?

(See also Children Who Blog, although they don’t much these days.)

June 23, 1989

Today is our 15th wedding anniversary. We’ve known each other 20 years, more than half our recalled lives.

According to the Chicago Public Library, for the 15th, if I wanted to follow convention that would require either crystal (traditional) or watches (modern).

Nope. Not want I wanted to get or give.

So much for herd behavior.

Actually, the more I look a the whole list of traditional and so-called modern traditional gifts, the more repulsive (and arbitrary) it seems. “Furniture”? “Silver holloware”? (I had to look it up.)

Where do these silly lists come from anyway? Department stores?

One Obstacle to Using Gmail

The school’s email is working better today, but I’m wary. Very wary.

Gmail seems like one possible solution to my email woes. I was sent an offer to join a few weeks ago, but dithered so long over choosing a screen name that the offer lapsed. Now I’m re-motivated, and Constantin Basturea kindly sent me a URL to activate an account. But now there’s a new problem: I just read the license terms.

If you read the program policies to which assent is required (along with the privacy policy and terms of use), you find in there a representation that I do not think I can make in good conscience. I’m asked to agree that I will not,

Reformat or frame any portion of the web pages that are part of the Gmail Service

The trouble is, like everyone else I would plan to view my gmail through a browser. Sometimes it’s in a small window. Sometimes it shows text only and no graphics, sometimes all sorts of odd things happent to my desktop, some of them even intentional. Sometimes I have small text, sometimes bigger. And let’s not even talk about the ad blocker…

If this were a prohibition on publishing Gmail content to others in a transformed form, that might be less of a problem, although you have to wonder what this means if I forward the text of an email—do I have to include the ads? What if I only quote a paragraph in a paper I’m writing? But the text quoted above reads as a limit on how I display it to myself, and one which it may be impossible for me to comply with since all browsers “reformat” web pages according to my and the programmer’s instructions.

I would communicate this concern directly to Gmail, indeed in further correspondence no-good-deed-goes-unpunished Constantin Basturea even gave me a URL to use to submit the query…but it requires you have a gmail account to write to them.

So If I Don't Answer, Call Me

My e-mail account at work, to which all other email is funneled, is very seriously messed up.

Three facts:

1. A student tells me she’s been ‘e-mailing me all semester’ and justifiably complains that I didn’t answer. I try to answer student email as top priority, but have no recollection of any of the email. Nor is any of it in my extensive saved mail file.

2. An invitation to a major conference I’d really like to go to was e-mailed to me several weeks ago, I never got it, and they assumed I was not interested. I heard about it by accident yesterday.

3. Today, email both to and from me is taking random numbers of extra hours to turn up, sometimes in double digits. If it does turn up.

Some Observations:

● Numbers one and two may be due to my roll-your-own procmail spam filters. But I’m getting well over a thousand spams a day and have to do something. I’ve asked the law school to upgrade the Unix box to a version of Perl that’s less than four years old so I can install something like Spam Assassin, and they are working on it. No ETA, and if experience is any guide they’ll roll it out about a week before (or after) it’s obsolete.

Received: from spitfire.law.miami.edu (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by spitfire.law.miami.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id D9F065C7118
for ; Wed, 16 Jun 2004 08:01:02 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from smarty.dreamhost.com (smarty.dreamhost.com [66.33.216.24])
by spitfire.law.miami.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id CB0005CA84D
for ; Tue, 15 Jun 2004 21:48:43 -0400 (EDT)

● I may need to find a new, commercial email host or change to gmail.

● WHAT ELSE HAVE I BEEN MISSING?????

● And last but not least, how come no one picks up the phone anymore if e-mail isn’t being answered?

Florida Talk-Show Appearance Wed. 9am

If all goes according to schedule, shortly after 9am tomorrow morning I’ll be appearing on a West Palm Beach radio talk show hosted by Johnny Trumpet (!) on WPBR, 1340 AM. WPBR has an Internet feed accessible from their homepage so if you want to hear me talk about the torture memos, this is your chance.

I’ve done a few talk show call-in appearances over the years, but oddly almost none in Florida. I think this must be the first one in years.

Structured Procrastination

Brad DeLong points to an essay by John Perry called structured procrastination. Who would have imagined there was such a nice name for one of the organizing principles of my life.

Off to Cambridge (MA)

I’m off to Cambridge (MA) today. Tomorrow I speak at one event and probably listen in on another. I had thought to try to look up old friends, or newer friends, but it turns out that today is shot for socializing because I have to be on an 8pm conference call this evening, which pretty much messes up any chance of serious dinner plans.

But if anyone reading this knows me already and is interested in a late evening post-conference call beer in the general vicinity of Harvard Yard / Harvard Law School this evening, please drop me an email, ideally with a phone number. I land in Boston around 3, should make it to the hotel by 4, and they swear they have high speed internet in every room so I should get the message. (They better, as it turns out I have a lot of work to do before that 8pm call.)

Suggestions as to where to grab a quick, decent, solitary pre-call bite in that area also gratefully welcomed. Although I get up there ever few years, I really don’t know my way around Cambridge (MA) at all. Cambridge (UK), that’s another story.

Academic Seeks Chair

When an academic says s/he is looking for a chair, you might naturally assume that s/he seeks promotion. Once you become a full professor, there is no promotion other than administration, perks, money or prestige. A desire to avoid administration being one of the things that often attracts people to the Ivory Tower, academics who are not content with their lot and don’t want to be Deans usually go hunting for perks, money, or prestige. And the thing in academe that wraps them up in one package is a “Chair” — a title and usually some perks or money.

As it happens, however, I’m not looking for that sort of chair (not that I’d reject it if it came looking for me) — and a good thing it is too, as we only have two chairs here at UM and they are earmarked for lateral hires. No, I’m looking for the sort of chair you sit in.

I have a very nice desk chair. Or rather I had one. One day I came home and the back was broken. (Not broken as in in two pieces, but broken in that the main support snapped and it no longer stays upright when you lean back.) The children deny everything. There is no dog or other large pet. It is vaguely conceivable that I leaned back once too hard or once too often and broke it myself, although I sort of think this is the kind of thing even I might notice about my environment. In any case, there seems no point finding anyone to blame. The chair is broken. I need a new one.

Due to past bouts with carpal tunnel, I have fairly particular ergonomic requirements. I suppose I could get another chair like the one I had before, but it isn’t sold in stores, being marketed by mildly sleazy salespeople who sell to the ‘physically challenged’. I’d prefer not to deal with them. And the back wasn’t the first part to fail; various knobs and stuff whose purpose I never fully understood have fallen off over the years. It was a nice chair, but didn’t seem worth the huge sum I paid for it.

So, in the next day or two, I’m going downtown to do some trial sitting.

Jew

Tonight is the first night of Passover. What better time to try to remove an anti-Semitic link from first place in the Google results for Jew by linking to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew. (For more info about what’s going on see the explanation at normblog.)

Update: I wonder if google is smart enough not to count links that include links to the search result?

A Balmy Walk Through the Beaux Arts Festival

We spent a good chunk of the day at the Beaux Arts Festival of Art, which is sort of lke a very high class arts and crafts show with a small sprinkling of fine art, and is held annually on the campus, a good five minutes walk from our house.

The children were delighted that the marble-selling man was there again, and also the pirate captain with the demonstration of ancient nautical gear and games.

Caroline (and therefore I) took a keen interest in the many very elegant displays of jewelry.

It was a beautiful day, although we were mostly a little overdressed as the radio falsely claimed it would be cool instead of balmy.

Hard to believe it’s January and it’s cold in much of the country.

Off to Gainesville

I’m off to give a paper at the University of Florida, back very very late Friday. Blogging may be scarce.

Mail Down, Again

My UM mail host is down again. I’ve called it in, but fixes tend to be slower on Sunday. Please be patient if you are trying to contact me, and send again tomorrow if you expected a reply but didn’t get one.

Travel Afterthoughts

It seems we got off easy on our journey. We could have encountered something like Flight From London Detained at Dulles, More Than 200 Passengers Questioned Over Five Hours by Federal Officials (note that “officials said that several international flights have been similarly screened, including at least one other airliner at Dulles”), or the Osama ‘fin’ Laden problem.

Update: More evidence that we were lucky our flight landed without being stopped by someone: Two Flights to U.S. Canceled in Wake of Terror Concerns.

Home Again

The trip passed without incident. Except that BA’s 747 seemed in a less than perfect state of interior upkeep. My headrest wouldn’t stay up, which is very minor but very annoying when you are tall. More ominously, shortly after takeoff, very dark and nasty-looking brown liquid started dripping from the ceiling in the aisle next to me and also over the seats by the windows (we were in the middle section so it just missed us). The guy from the cabin crew said it was ‘just condensation’ and went off to get something to wipe it up, leading to a mildly comic moment as he reached up to wipe off the ceiling and got doused when the drip changed to a pour. He later came back to offer the more plausible explanation that there was a humidifier up there and it must have been overloaded with water; when we took off the angle of plane caused some of the water to slosh out.

If it’s true that how you celebrate the New Year tells you something about how you will spend it, I will be jet-lagged, dazed and confused, and asleep, in 2004.

I'm Getting Nervous About Our Flight Back to the USA

We’re due to fly on British Airways from Manchester to London to Miami tomorrow and it looks as if we may be caught up in the latest terrorism-related scare and political dispute. I’m not nervous about flying…I’m nervous about not flying: it seems there is a chance that my flight may be cancelled due to a dispute between the British airline pilots’ union (which opposes any guns on board their aircraft) and the US government which may require armed ‘air marshalls’ as a condition of flying into the US.

The US is requiring foreign carriers to have air marshalls on board. But the UK pilots’ union (and maybe British Airways?) is balking. The UK government appears to have bowed to US pressure, perhaps because of actual intelligence info (who knows?), but BA is not happy about it.

[The UK government] emphasized in a statement on Monday that “only the U.K. can authorize the placing of air marshals on U.K. carriers.”

The British Air Line Pilots Association said in strong terms that arms did not belong on aircraft, and British Airways, the country’s biggest airline, said it reserved the right not to fly if it was forced to add air marshals. “We have received the request for the deployment of cover capabilities on flights,” an official with the airline said. “Only if British Airways was satisfied that safety was enhanced would that flight take off.”

The airline pilots were less polite. On the TV news this evening they were quoted as saying that unless they can be satisfied that

1. The pilot remains in command of the plane.
2. The air marshalls are operating under written rules
3. Their training is sufficient to make it safe to have them on board

It looks as if my flight may be the first British one to have the new armed guards on board…and that the pilots’ union is advising the pilots to stay on the ground:

The British Air Line Pilots’ Association (Balpa) wrote to Alistair Darling, the Secretary of State for Transport, yesterday calling for a meeting to discuss the policy which it believes is “dangerous” and flawed. The association, which has said it does “not want guns on planes” has advised pilots to refuse to fly if they do not feel happy carrying armed marshals posing as passengers.

Mr Darling said he would meet the pilots to discuss their misgivings and said they would be told when an undercover marshal was on a flight.

The Secretary of State defended the Government’s decision to allow plain-clothes officers with low-velocity weapons on selected flights, saying it was a “responsible and prudent step” that would be used “where appropriate”.

He said their use was “only one of a number of measures” and “a last line of defence”, together with increased screening of bags, to deter terrorists. But he warned that passengers could face longer queues at airports because of the “heightened” state of security.

“The best thing is to try to stop people getting on the aeroplane in the first place,” he said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“Most of our efforts are rightly focused on the screening of passengers’ baggage.”

Sky marshals are expected to begin deployment in the next 24 hours on transatlatic flights to and from the UK.

Wouldn’t just strengthening the cabin door to the pilots’ area be enough?

If the London-Miami flight won’t fly we get stranded in London — we presumably have to do the Manchester-London leg no matter what and can’t just elect to stay here, where we have a place to stay, until the dust settles. What happens in the event of a labour dispute to us and to our luggage will probably not be much fun.

Then there’s this, which doesn’t make me feel good either: Skies of Major U.S. Cities Off Limits for New Year. Again, I’m more worried by the hysteria than the formless threats. I sure hope they write the rules of engagement for those militiary pilots circling the civilian US skies carefully. Would they really shoot down a civilian plane?

The Post-Xmas Phrase Parents Learn to Hate

The post-Xmas phrase parents learn to hate: “Some assembly required.”

Notes on Travel (Pitfalls of Orbitz Dept.), Xmas in the Dark, and an Uncertain Number of Septic Tanks

Assuming the existence of some future point when I have more energy, I will explain further why our bedroom is now in a different part of the house, and why my desk is in that room too. The story involves architects, a contractor, vast sums of money, permits, the acquisition and filling of a 10×15 climatically controlled storage space, the expectation of permits, an as-yet-undetermined number of real and proposed septic tanks, vast sums of money, the partial destruction of our kitchen, the Sisyphean expectation of the final permits, and of course random and unpredictable delay.

Meanwhile, however, as we appear to have hit a period of delay until the waveform number of future septic tanks collapses to an integer and either produces a permit or a lawsuit, I have cancelled my plans to cancel my plans to go to England for two weeks of Xmas revel with the in-laws. Rather than stay here and grade exams, I will use my ticket. [Much more than you probably want to know about the dangers of buying air tix online in the extended entry.]

I am not the only person I know who abandons Miami when the weather is at its coolest (ie just warm), driest (ie just a little damp) and most perfect in order to go spend a fortnight in the exciting outskirts of Didsbury, a suburb in the outskirts of Manchester, England, which is a somewhat dark and wet and cold and dark and wet and cold place at this time of year. After all, my wife and children do it too. But they are 50 to 100% British, so they may be genetically predisposed to enjoy four daily hours of what is euphemistically called “sunlight”. (Lest I be suspected of Manchester-bashing, it’s a great town, and often very nice in the summer time.)

I intend to keep adding to the blog while in Didsbury, but as my internet access will be POTS rather than broadband, and metered POTS at that, I may have fewer posts, and they are likely to have much more about England and the rest of the UK than is the normal fare here.

Adventures With Orbitz

At one point in the pre-festivities, at a moment when permits seemed belatedly attainable, I attempted to call British Airways to see if I could delay my departure for a few days, with the rest of the family going on ahead of me. I knew it was a cut-rate ticket [Albeit, not cut-rate enough!], from Orbitz, so I expected some penalty. What I got was much weirder. The man from the BA call center said that his computer didn’t show enough about the ticket for him to even tell me if changes were possible. The travel agent had not released sufficient fare details for them to know the conditions. I would have to call the travel agent direct.

OK. I found a phone number for Orbitz. They passed me around to various desks, and eventually I was told that

1. There is a $200 ‘separation’ charge for making changes to just one ticket booked as part of a group of tickets
2. There’s also a $30 processing fee
3. And you pay the difference between your fare and the fare for the flight you take
4. But never mind all that. Even though my ticket is changeable, there’s another snag. I have a paper ticket (BA requires these apparently, it certainly wasn’t my choice) and the only way Ortbitz can change it is if I mail it in. And they need it at least 14 days before flight time. And as I’m requesting this less than 14 days in advance, they can’t do anything.
5. So why don’t I call BA and see what they can do?
6. And, I could always try to change it at the airport. (Gee, thanks.)

So I called back BA. No dice. They can’t see the record, and even if they could they wouldn’t look at it. If you buy from a travel agent, they won’t change the outbound under any circumstances, just the return. Policy. No debate. End of story.

Off to Amsterdam

The whole digital world is converging on Geneva for the WSIS talks. Proving again that I am incapable of herd activities even when it would be good for me, I’m going to Amsterdam to participate in a Round Table of the “Experts Group on Telecommunications Law” being organzied by the always impressive IViR, the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam . The modest paper title I was assigned (in 20 pages, please!) was “International and National Regulation of the Internet”. But what they really wanted to hear about, it transpires, is about ICANN/ITU and what it means for registry regulation. Short answer: wrong question.

It’s a short, brutal trip: out today, back late Sunday. I imagine there are good Internet cafes in Amsterdam in which case I will keep the blog updated…and then change all my passwords when I get home.

My e-mail is Down

I route all my e-mail to my university account, and the machine there is having a Very Bad Day. All of my directories got changed to a ‘read-only file system’ overnight, and basically, nothing works. Mail sent to me is either in a holding pattern, or lost, until further notice. Update: Fixed, as of this evening.

On the subject of mail, I’m getting so much spam these days that it is overwhelming my procmail filters (I still use PINE to read my mail—it’s virus-proof). More and more junk is getting through. As I tighten my filters, some legit messages are being tagged as spam, which means I end up having to wade through the trash folder to rescue them which is a serious waste of time.

Because I’ve been online a long time, my address is in every spammer’s directory there is. I’m seriously thinking of starting over with a new address and configuring all my existing ones to auto-reply a .gif file with a picture of the new address—in order to foil bots. (I put my e-mail address in the published text of articles, and I want a way for readers to continue to be able to contact me.) I know this is unfair to people with visual impairments who depend on readers to read their mail to them. That and being pretty busy with other stuff, are my excuses for putting up with the flood for now.

Off to FSU

I’m off to FSU to give a paper on national ID cards, and won’t be back until late Monday. Getting around Florida is actually more difficult than going out of state. But at least there are some direct flights to Tallahassee. In January I’m going to Gainsville, and it turns out that it’s not so easy to get there….

Travel Notes

There are things I learn from traveling, and things I re-learn.

Learned: MIA — never good at the best of times — has managed to get worse. In order to serve the herding needs of the security services, you now have to walk three times as far to get to low-numbered “C” gates … which is where the flights to NY leave from. It now feels even more like Laguardia at its worst.

Re-Learned: When we’re having lovely weather in Miami, the rest of the country, is having seriously crummy weather. Example: my flight to NY started its decent to JFK, only to abort rather suddenly. Seems the winds were gusting at 70 MPH, which is too much. So we got diverted to Baltimore to re-fuel before trying again.

Re-learned: NY streets are a lot cleaner than the NY of my childhood memories.

Learned: The conference hotel looks out onto the site of the World Trade Center. It’s even more depressing that I would have thought. It feels very odd to look down from the 52nd floor onto the small crowd milling about outside the fence.

Email outage

The law school is doing electrical work and has shut down our network, including our email server. As a result, any email sent to me today will either be held until tomorrow or bounce.

The AALS Meat Market Intrudes on Domestic Tranquility

I’m a single parent for the next few days, as Caroline is in DC for the annual hiring meeting of the AALS which begins tomorrow. Blogging may be light as a result. Caroline is the Chair of the law school’s appointments committee, which is a brutally hard job, but one she does well. Some of our colleagues have joked that Caroline should be Appointments Chair for life, but I don’t know that she or I could take that.

Every year Miami and every other law school gets over a thousand forms provided by the AALS’s central clearing service. Each contains a one-page summary of the c.v. and the teaching interests of a person who’d like to become a law teacher. In our school, the chair is the only committee member who has to look at them all; the other committee members get a chunk each, although they’re invited to look at more if they wish. Then those thousand-plus forms must be culled. To the extent they can, the committee members call references, and read writings, of the applicants whose forms pique their interests. Then they debate.

Some years we have only one opening, or none. This year, as it happens, we have several openings, and also some fairly specific subject-oriented needs, so the committee is interviewing in two parallel teams. Even so, that means winnowing down the 1000+ hopefuls to about 50 persons who’ll be seen at the, excuse the term, “meat market,” for about 30 minutes each. From that group, the committee will have to select a small number to invite to fly down here and spend a day being interviewed, presenting a paper, and having dinner with a semi-random group of faculty. It’s a very intense process for the interviewee, and fairly high stakes for the faculty since people tend to get tenure here. (That would be because we make such good initial choices, of course.) The initial hiring decision thus risks being the start of a lifetime relationship, and the faculty takes it very, very, very seriously.

Many of the applicants are extremely well credentialed; indeed credential inflation is rampant. When I went on the market I had published a student note, a book review, and had a fairly final unpublished draft article. My sense was that that record, plus an extra graduate degree and a few other things, put me comfortably above the credential median. Today, that package might still put you above the median, but not comfortably given all the Ph.D’s, and the people with half a dozen publications.

I vividly remember my on-campus callbacks from more than a decade ago, but the AALS experience itself is now a bit of blur. We were living in London, with jobs that couldn’t be abandoned for long, and even with coming a day early had some lingering jet lag. I had 17 interviews in two days, which meant I had very little down time and spent most of the day racing up and down the two towers and long corridors in the confusing hotel complex in Washington that the AALS uses for this event. Caroline and I were both interviewing all over, trying to find a geographic pairing, a feat ordinarily considered just short of impossible—but made somewhat possible by her stellar record, albeit discounted by the fact that some schools seemed incredulous that a British academic would dare suggest that she might teach US Securities law as well as European law and a common law subject.

Caroline had either one more or one less interview than I did — I can’t recall which. What I do remember is that we hadn’t anticipated the amount of walking and running we’d be doing to get from one interview to the next, and that Caroline’s feet were literally bleeding from her elegant shoes by the time we were done. (Another vivid flash of recall is of passing rapidly through the lobby in transit between towers, and seeing an acquaintance moping around; he said he had two interviews and asked how I was doing—I was too embarrassed to admit the extent of my good fortune.)

A thirty-minute interview isn’t much. I do recall the one question that totally flummoxed me: Judith Resnik asked me to name the legal academic whose work I most wanted my writing to resemble. The question had never occurred to me — I’m afraid I’d always wanted to be myself. I stammered out the names of the more productive people I could think of. USC did not call me back.

By far the worst AALS interview I recall was with another school that had an even better reputation. I was their last interview at the end of a long day. If I was exhausted, and I was, they looked even worse. The first 15 minutes were devoted to their sniping at each other—I barely got a word in edgewise. It was obvious to me that I’d walk out of there and they’d have no idea of who I was. Not good. At some point maybe five minutes before the end of the interview, I managed to intrude into the conversation with some polite version of ‘hey, isn’t this supposed to be vaguely about me?’. At which point the three disputants focused on me for the first time.

‘Well’ said one of them briskly, ‘do you have any questions for us?’. I hated that question. But I had a standard riposte prepared: “What is your idea of a good colleague?”. So far, it had seemed to have the virtue of not being a stock query that schools heard all the time; once or twice it had even elicited an interesting reply. This time the reply was unexpected, venomously directed at one of the other figures in the room: “Someone who doesn’t talk in faculty meetings.”

Naturally, they didn’t call me back either, which is perhaps just as well. By that standard, I might not have been a good colleague.

Children Who Blog

Amazingly, Google has no entries as of yet for “children who blog”. There are, however, several items on “kids who blog,” including this Christian Science Monitor item. Most of them seem to be about teenagers, especially girls.

I mention this, because all of a sudden I now have two kids who blog. It was Elder Son (age 10) who suggested he could have one at something.discourse.net. I didn’t like the idea of a blog open to the world, so we compromised on one that will be served from a different second-level domain name, and is password-protected so that only family members can read it. Fortunately my hosting plan allows me to serve several domains for the same price, and I had an underused one hanging around. Younger Son (age 7), who perhaps already has a keener sense about the dangers in the world (he has, after all, experience of dealing with Elder Son…), enthusiastically agreed with this idea.

So now the kids have an online newspaper they can update when they like, and we have an easy way to share digital pictures with a far-flung family. And the non-blogging relatives can send messages to the kids by posting comments. Don’t know if it will last as an enthusiasm, but if it does it should be fun.

What is 'American Food'?

One of the things I’m doing at the moment is supervising a State-department-sponsored three-month visit by a Ukranian graduate student working on a Ph.D in law. She’s interested in the effect of various institutions, especially NGOs, on cyberlaw. OK, that part I can handle. But as it’s her first visit to the US, and this a sort of cultural as well as academic experience, I feel compelled to do more than give her things to read and talk about her writing. I want to answer her questions about America. This is not always easy.

Take this stumper: she has a small budget for our lunches. We’d like to use that to introduce her to representative “American food”. But what’s that? No, besides hot dogs and hamburgers, McDonalds and Burger King. She can, after all, get those at home these days. And they are hardly the best advertisements for the place anyway (why I feel the need I feel to suggest good food is beyond the scope of this entry).

What foods are both suitably “American” and good (and not too expensive)? Most of the food I like best when I go out is ‘ethnic’, ‘national’ or ‘regional’—Chinese, Italian, Indian, Nicaraguan, Mexican, Cuban, Peruvian, or Thai, for example. Now, these are, in my mind, as ‘American’ as, well, apple pie^*, and indeed in the case of Chinese food I’m reliably informed that what we get here isn’t that much like what they eat there anyway. So that’s ‘American food’ to me. But it turns out to be a tough concept to sell.

Apparently, to the Eastern European mind Chinese food just isn’t authentically American enough. So, for my first attempt I suggested bagels, as she’d never heard of them. But it turned out, unsurprisingly, that they do have something a whole lot like bagels in Kiev. So that wasn’t so wonderful an idea after all.

My next choice will be BBQ ribs. But then what?

[*] Note about as American as apple pie—Is there any other nation in the world that claims things are as {nationality} as a food? As British as spuds? As Italian as spaghetti? I don’t think so.

And, yes, I do know I picked foods as imported as apple pie for those examples.

Rose Burawoy, Political Scientist

Rose Burawoy was born in Bialystock, then a thriving metropolis with a substantial Jewish population. She told me once -- exactly once, as she never mentioned it again -- that she remembered 'the Cossacks' running through and killing people in a pogrom when she was a child. She described it as something that had happened to other people, perhaps not far away, not as an eyewitness. (And, indeed, there was a pogrom in Bialystock in 1903, more killings in the area in 1920, and a pattern of killings and other anti-Semitic incidents in the 1930s ). In the retelling at least, my grandmother seems to have been as bothered by what she saw as provincialism, and was happy to escape to the bright lights of Berlin. Her life, and marriages, would later take her to Paris, and London, where she lived when World War II began, and finally to New York, where I think she was happy to be.

This geography explains something my grandmother once said that I find myself thinking of fairly often these days. I vividly recall my grandmother -- alone in the family -- objecting when I first said I wanted to become a lawyer. Don't do that, she said. Why not be a doctor? Or a businessman, or anything else that involves a portable skill. A lawyer can only work in one country, and you can't take your skill with you if you have to leave. 'What's wrong with that?' I asked, 'I like it here.' And my grandmother, who usually treated me like a child, and who rarely said anything terribly grave about anything, much less the war -- tending to limit her political commentary to how bad it was that old people had to worry about being mugged by the hooligans on the Manhattan streets, and how /insert-conservative-politician/ was good for the Jews because he was strong on defense -- gave me a knowing, wise, slightly sad, very grownup look, that said she knew I, the American grandson, was not going to understand, and said, 'When the Nazis come to America, what will you do then?'.

I laughed, of course. The Nazis were not going to take over America. And she said, quite seriously, 'That's what we said in Germany. Germany was the freest more democratic country in the world before Hitler. You'll see.'

I still don't think the Nazis are coming. But my grandmother's question is an galling reminder that in politics, like in the securities markets, past performance is no guarantee of future results. The people who founded this country called it a great experiment. As a citizen, a lawyer, and especially as a law professor, I have the luxury to think about the rules we use to govern ourselves and each other. Periods of stress do not bring out the best in most people, and current times provide ample evidence of that.

In the past two years, our government has embarked on a course of conduct, and legal argument attempting to justify that conduct, that I find simply horrifying. According to the current Administration, our government can:

• Hold detainees in Guantanamo indefinitely without trial. Hold some of them, including children, in what amounts to solitary confinement for years. Hold them abroad, because the Administration hasn't the guts or the decency to bring them to the US, where they would have rights to a hearing, to a trial, to judicial supervision of the conditions of their confinement. The government argues it can hold them during "wartime" -- and as this war is against an ism, it could go on for ever.
• Try some detainees in Guantanamo -- the lucky ones? -- under rules of court which, while not barbaric, are sufficiently tilted against the defendants to cast doubt on the fairness of the proceeding. To subject them to a possible death penalty in a non-jury trial -- and to cut off any chance of appeal to the Article III courts we usually expect to be the defenders of liberty and justice.
• Perhaps you think that this is wartime, and the nation must protect itself. While it's possible, I suppose, to imagine a circumstance in which we could not afford fair trials, it's impossible for me to believe we are anywhere near that stage.
• Or perhaps you think, as a number of recent judicial decisions suggest, that our government's constitutional obligation to act decently applies only to its dealings with US citizens and non-citizens in the US itself. I disagree -- I think our government has only the powers that emanate from the Constitution, and I don't find the power to act unjustly to be among them. (Even if I'm wrong about that, I'm saddened that this Administration is willing to so cavalierly drain our moral capital on bad trials, rather than demonstrating that we will give a fair hearing to even those we believe to be our enemies. But that's another issue, for another day.)
• Whatever you may think, this Administration clearly believes it has the legal right to treat US citizens as badly as it treats the "detainees" in Guantanamo. And not just US citizens the government thinks its local allies captured during a foreign war. No, this Administration, this Attorney General, this occupant of the White House, argue that they have the right to scoop up any US citizen, on any street anywhere in this country, and lock them up indefinitely. We have rules about how long an arrested person can be held without charges, and without lawyers. In the case of Jose Padilla, this Administration has violated all those rules. What it did was shockingly simple: when the time came to either charge Padilla with a crime, or let him go, the government removed him from the criminal justice system and tossed him in a Navy brig. And there he sits, while the lawyers fight about whether he's entitled to be charged, and to have assistance defending himself.

When a government claims the power to grab anyone off the street and lock them up indefinitely without trial, watch out.

I still think my grandmother was wrong about the Nazis taking over in America. But I'm reluctantly coming around to believing that she was right about my complacency. Our liberty is not now something we can take for granted. While we face somewhat amorphous threats from abroad -- threats I am confident we can endure and overcome -- we face increasingly concrete threats to our liberty at home. If we do not face the Gestapo, we nonetheless face a security apparatus that has claimed the right to methods that until recently we would have called Gestapo tactics. I am not predicting a pogrom, and solitary confinement, however unpleasant is not the Final Solution.

But I do not feel safer, nor even all that safe, when anyone -- no matter how well-intentioned -- claims that they can put me in a Navy brig, incommunicado, indefinitely, without charges or trial, just because they can satisfy themselves -- and no one else -- that I deserve it.