Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

The Case FOR Miers

Posted on October 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

MAXSPEAK ENDORSES HARRIET MIERS FOR SCOTUS.

I think he’s serious.

Posted in Law: The Supremes | 4 Comments

Heartburn for Conservatives?

Posted on October 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Eric Muller engages in a little forensic scholarship, and digs up Harriet Miers’s law review note from 1968.

There just might be a little quote in there to give conservatives heartburn. (Understood in context I think it’s a quite reasonable position consistent with traditional federalism, but it certainly isn’t a quote that screams judicial restraint.)

Posted in Law: The Supremes | 3 Comments

Roberts, CJ Takes His First Decision

Posted on October 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Justice Roberts Takes Supreme Court Bench:

Roberts wore a plain black robe, without the gold arm stripes that had been used by his predecessor, William H. Rehnquist.

A good start.

Posted in Law: The Supremes | 1 Comment

Double or Nothing

Posted on October 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

I don’t know much about Harriet Miers, but on paper she does not appear to be the most qualified nominee available. I like the idea of someone with political experience, and don’t see the absence of judicial experience as any sort of disqualification. The problem is that the overall c.v. is rather thin compared to, say, a Roberts, a Scalia, a Souter, a Warren, or even a Stewart.

At first sight, her overwhelming qualification appears to be loyalty to Bush, and that, in these times, is no great selling point.

Oddly, the initial conservative reaction is not favorable. [UPDATE: The article at that location has been neutered. ]

The obvious initial issues, post New Orleans, are cronyism and competence, and I expect that these issues will dominate the moderate and liberal reactions in the next few days; the issue may get a lot of additional oxygen if the ABA rating is anything less than its highest endorsement — and it could be.

If the conservatives end up splitting on this nomination, or even just lukewarm, it’s possible that this nomination might fail on a straight vote, without even a filibuster.

Which raises this Machiavellian question: WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?

Basically, there are three completely different possibilities that jump out at me:

The first one is that they are losing their grip over there in the White House, and this is just dumb. Plausible, but even post-Brownie, one must be wary of misunderestimating this crowd’s political sense.

The second one is that they are not losing their grip in the White House, that Ms. Miers has depths which are not immediately obvious, and that they will become manifest in due course. I’ll bet this is the least likely scenario, but it pays to keep an open mind at this early stage.

And the third scenario…well, it looks like this: The White House has hedged its bets. Either it gets its loyalist onto the Supreme Court, which will be handy for all sorts of reasons ranging from Guantanamo onwards. Or it doesn’t. And that’s fine too. The battle over Miers will take months, meaning that the battle over the next really red-meat nominee will take place much closer to the next election. Which is just the time you want to re-ignite the culture wars for maximum electoral effect. Plus the Senate, having rejected one nominee, may have less stomach for a second fight. (Not that this worked for Nixon, of course.)

Posted in Law: The Supremes | 6 Comments

Plug-Ins Considered Harmful?

Posted on October 3, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

For some time now, I’ve been planning something that I hope will be interesting and useful, that will be based on some sort of content-management platform.

I don’t want to say too much about it, but for present purposes imagine that it is organized a little like a newspaper, with sections each operated individually. Unlike a newspaper, here the “front page” will consist primarily of an aggregation of the “inside” sections, or perhaps of teaser versions of the full content that is actually located in the “sections”.

All content will be open for comments. Readers will be free to go straight to the “sections”; indeed if they are reading the “front” and try to comment, that will take them inside the appropriate “section”.

I want to use free tools that have a substantial user community, and do as little modification as I can get away with, in order to minimize the tech support I’ll have to do. I’d love to use Slash as the engine for this as it is very strong on the integration of a front and ‘inside’ sections, plus has lots of other community-building features, but Slash just isn’t user-friendly enough for either the posters or the commentators. Plus Slash requires mod_perl, which just won’t play nice with other things going on the machine I have available.

Currently, I’m looking at WordPress, with each section being a separate blog, and the “front page” as a sorted aggregation of the RSS feeds. [This requires a tiny bit of work, as WordPress and the most common plugins want to treat each RSS/Atom/whatever feed as a separate thing rather than a contribution to a melting pot.] WordPress is certainly friendly enough, and I like the ability that its reliance on themes give me to have a constant ‘look’ for the site but maybe vary the color scheme a bit for some sections. Perhaps WordPress is a little light on the cool tools. But then maybe I can live without the glitz. Even so, that still leaves out a few things that I think are essential.

For example, to make this particular site nice, I think I need robust and good-looking threaded comments. And WordPress, out of the box, doesn’t do that (yet). There is a threaded comments plug-in, but I’m very reluctant to commit to it because of its effects on the upgrade path. Will it work with the next version of WordPress? Who can know, when one is at the joint mercy of the WordPress developers and of the plugin writer. Or, what if a future version of WordPress has threaded comments, but in a manner incompatible with this plugin? Then I have to find some way of translating the historic comments into the new schema. (Not all this project will, I hope, be total ephemera.)

I could hunt around for a different CMS that already does what I want — I am, for example, learning about Drupal — but there are not that many with a sufficiently large installed base that I feel comfortable committing to them.

But one thing that this has made clear to me is that from the perspective of someone trying to find the right tool for a project, even (especially?) a person who wants to use open source tools, there’s a real disincentive to committing to a project that relies heavily on extensions and plug ins that are not supported by the core designers of your software package. By doing so, you not only put yourself at the mercy of there being appropriate upgrades for the main branch, but also of the plug in and, worst of all, the interactions between the two.

Posted in Software | 2 Comments

ITU Would Be Happy to Replace ICANN

Posted on October 1, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Reuters reports that,

U.N. agency says it’s ready to govern the Net:The United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union is ready to take over the governance of the Internet from the United States, ITU head Yoshio Utsumi said on Friday.

The United States has clashed with the European Union and much of the rest of the world over the future of the Internet. It currently manages the global information system through a partnership with California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, better known as ICANN.

“We could do it if we were asked to,” Utsumi told a news conference. The U.N. agency’s experience in communications, its structure and its cooperation with private and public bodies made it best-placed to take on the role, he said.

While the ITU’s desire to replace ICANN has been an open secret for years, this is the clearest declaration yet from the ITU’s rather outspoken leader. The official line until now has been much softer.

As far as I can tell, the US government mistrusts the ITU for various complicated telecoms-related related reasons I’ve never fully grasped. That’s just as well, as the ITU is no friend to impecunious NGOs, who are at best third-class participants in its deliberations, and certainly never participants as of right, only suffrage.

“Washington has made clear that it would oppose any such move, despite widespread demands for changes in the current system.

We will not agree to the United Nations taking over management of the Internet,” said David Gross, a U.S. Department of State official attending a two-week conference preparing for a U.N. World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia in November.

Reading all this, one canny observer on a list I follow remarked, “The secret to good comedy is timing.”

Posted in Law: Internet Law | 4 Comments