A Personal Blog
by Michael Froomkin
Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Miami School of Law
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All opinions on this blog are those of the author(s) and not their employer(s) unelss otherwise specified.
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Monthly Archives: July 2019
Good Sound Bites
Posted in Politics: Impeachments
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Peek Behind the Curtain
Today’s Deep Learning Is Like Magic – In All The Wrong Ways, is making the blog rounds and for a good reason — it’s a quick distillation of some essential truths about “AI” aka “Deep Learning” that the public needs to hear.
This essay in Forbes,
Posted in AI
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Video of Panel on “Regulating Safety and Quality” of Medical AI
Recently (June 1, 2019), I participated in a conference on AI & Medicine called Machine M.D. The organizers at the University of Ottawa have posted video from the event, so here’s Panel #1 on “Regulating Safety and Quality“. I was the first speaker, early in the morning…
Posted in AI, Talks & Conferences
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Note to Self: Enable DNS over HTTPS on Firefox
How to enable DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) in Firefox. Hope it plays nice with VPN…
Posted in Uncategorized
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Almost as Good as ‘No Vehicles in the Park’
‘No Vehicles in the Park’ is the basis of one of the great teaching texts for jurisprudence. HLA Hart famously asked,
A legal rule forbids you to take a vehicle into the public park. Plainly this forbids an automobile, but what about bicycles, roller skates, toy automobiles? What about airplanes? Are these, as we say, to be called “vehicles” for the purpose of the rule or not?’
Believe me, any law professor can fill two hours running hypotheticals off this. There us even the occasional real-life case.
Comes now, however, the Nevada Highway Patrol, in the person of Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Travis Smaka, who pulled over a vehicle in an HOV lane (not a park) that appeared to have only one occupant — only to be told by the driver that there was in fact another “occupant” in the vehicle: the corpse he was transporting. Trooper Smaka was unpersuaded, but he let the driver off with a warning. (See Police: No, a corpse doesn’t count toward the HOV lane passenger minimum for details.)
So, if the HOV rule is “minimum two occupants in the vehicle,” should a corpse count? Or, as my wife says, how about a pregnant woman in Alabama? If a fetus is a ‘person’ for manslaughter purposes, it is a person for HOV occupancy purposes? Or what about a telepresence robot being operated by some third party? Could that count?
Update: ‘Pearls Before Swine’ weighs in.
Posted in Legal Philosophy
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