Yearly Archives: 2009

UM Law May Have a New Building Much Sooner than You’d Think

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Law School to Share New Building With Business School in Fall 2011 (from the Res Ipsa, our student newspaper).

The building is permitted (that's very significant in Coral Gables!) and the elegant outside is already designed. It's planned to be between the Lowe Art Gallery and the existing Business School — a nice part of campus. We'd get three floors built to our specifications, our own entrance, and some shared common space adding up to about 60% of the square footage of our current plant. And the best part is that all of this would be an add-on to our current building, solving our space crisis pending construction of our new hoped-for mega-building on the South-Eastern side of campus…a plan which still requires some substantial fund-raising.

The ink is not yet affixed to this deal, and devils can always lurk in the details, but at first glance this looks like a truly wonderful development for the University of Miami School of Law. And it explains where we'll find suitable office space to house all those new faculty members we plan to hire in the next few years.

My only worry is that this new building will reduce the space on campus for the annual Beaux Arts Festival of Art, as I think it will occupy part of that grassy expanse.

Posted in U.Miami | 3 Comments

Knowledge Ecology International

Posted on October 15, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

!='s KEI FOIAs USTR ACTA NDAs points us to a really great blog post by Jamie Love on what appears to be a really good blog called Knowledge Ecology International (“Attending and mending the knowledge ecosystem”).

Recommended for anyone interested in the intersection between intellectual property law and, well, freedom and development.

Posted in Law: IP | 1 Comment

The Search for the Senate Democrats’ Spine Continues

Posted on October 14, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Daily Kos: Harry Reid abdicates his leadership role.

Seems the X-rays emerging from the Majority (q.v.) Leader's Office are not encouraging.

Posted in Health Care | 3 Comments

Books Snark

Posted on October 14, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Snarky letter in today's NYTimes, Letter – How to Find a Book

To the Editor:

Re “A Library to Last Forever” (Op-Ed, Oct. 9):

Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, writes, “Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.”

Fly??? I’m pretty sure I can e-mail a reference librarian and ask her to check holdings before I do anything so drastic as fly. Hasn’t this guy ever heard of the Internet?

Lauren Baratz-Logsted
Danbury, Conn., Oct. 9, 2009

Not to mention this major civilization advance known as “inter-library loan” — a service provided not only by university libraries but even by better public libraries.

Posted in Internet | 6 Comments

A New Way to Think of Supreme Court Justices

Posted on October 14, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

john_marshall.jpg
In a faculty seminar earlier this week, a (female) colleague said, apropos Chief Justice Marshall, that he “is the only Supreme Court Justice I would have liked to date.”

This is, to me, a wholly new way to think of Supreme Court Justices.

Any other candidates?

Posted in Law: The Supremes | 1 Comment

Be Grateful for the First Amendment (and the Internet)

Posted on October 13, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Guardian gagged from reporting parliament:

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

Fortunately, sanity (and the internet) prevailed. Gag on Guardian reporting MP's Trafigura question lifted,

The existence of a previously secret injunction against the media by oil traders Trafigura can now be revealed.

Within the past hour Trafigura's legal firm, Carter-Ruck, has withdrawn its opposition to the Guardian reporting proceedings in parliament that revealed its existence.

Labour MP Paul Farrelly put down a question yesterday to the justice secretary, Jack Straw. It asked about the injunction obtained by “Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton Report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura”.

It's called the Streisand effect now,

The Streisand effect is an Internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be publicized widely and to a greater extent than would have occurred if no censorship had been attempted.

Having one major country with the First Amendment and lots of servers means that most other countries cannot at present easily censor like they used. (See my 1997 article The Internet as a Source of Regulatory Arbitrage). But there are exceptions: countries with almost no Internet access, and countries that have managed to control both the basic routing information and limit the number of connections to the outside world. That would be China, so far.

Posted in UK | 2 Comments