One of the big problems with top-down, logical, designs for national identification systems is that they tend strongly towards a single point of failure.
Fatal crypto flaw in some [Taiwanese] government-certified smartcards makes forgery a snap.
Not the last story like this we’re going to see.
Some kind soul has put on YouTube an entire 1967 performance by Tom Lehrer — in Copenhagen of all places. (Is rhythmic clapping still a custom there today?)
Enjoy it now before someone takes it down.
Incidentally, it seems Tom Lehrer is still around:
Most people assume that Tom Lehrer is dead, just as he has always wished us to think. Lehrer is by no means dead, but he turns 85 this month. After he retired at the peak of his fame in 1960, he gleefully collected all newspaper references to “the late Tom Lehrer,” and a CD box set of his collected works that came out in 2000 was called “The Remains of Tom Lehrer.”
…
LEHRER HAS REMAINED, if not a recluse, an intensely private man. Nobody knows much about him except his songs, exactly as he likes it. He grew up in Manhattan, the privileged Jewish son of a necktie manufacturer, attended a prep school and then Harvard, where he spent seven years pursuing a doctorate he never got (“I wanted to be a graduate student forever”). After he stopped performing, he produced a handful of songs for “The Electric Company” (“Silent E” is still fondly remembered by yuppies) and this or that riff, like his Jewish Yuletide carol, “Hanukkah in Santa Monica.”
Those songs never get old for me. But I had to explain to one my kids once, many years ago, who Brezhnev was.
Colleague Markus Wagner passes along this info:
The Junior International Law Scholars Association (JILSA) is holding its annual meeting on Friday, January 31, 2014, at Berkeley Law School. JILSA is an informal network composed mostly of junior scholars at American law schools who get together annually for a self-funded workshop. Junior scholars and fellows interested in presenting works in progress at the meeting should email proposals to Jean Galbraith and Markus Wagner by Friday, November 8. Please send a working title/abstract and provide a sense of the shape the paper is in. Proposals to present early stage works are also welcome.
There is actually a whole network of excellent conferences for junior legal scholars in a variety of subjects these days. I don’t think they existed when I was junior enough to qualify — if they did, I was certainly blissfully ignorant of them.
The union says it’s a huge victory. It’s a win, but I’d call it a medium win.
Below I reproduce the SEIU’s press release, then add some comments.
Continue reading
Question 1 from the interviewer: “How can you be so wrong?”
But it actually goes quite well.
(Link in case the embed doesn’t work for you.)
Anthony Casey Addresses Entering Students at University of Chicago Law School is a fine introduction to what matters in law school.
A sample:
If you believe the op-ed pieces in newspapers and the blogs spread across the Internet, you may think you are here just to learn how to read law and to prepare to take the bar exam in three years. That view is a surefire way to waste your time here. People quite ignorant of what a good lawyer does will tell you that law school should be shorter, that law school should teach students how to pass the bar, that law students learn too much theory.
I am going to let you in on a secret. The bar exam is a memory test. You had the skills to take the bar exam when you were a freshman in high school. You certainly don’t need three years to prepare for it. That is true. But passing the bar does not make someone a good lawyer. It just makes them a lawyer. And if you think that is enough, I can direct you to a thousand websites and jokes about things that went wrong when “just lawyers” were trusted with important problems.
What differentiates good lawyers – graduates from this law school – is the ability to advise clients about what those laws and documents actually mean in the real world, how they affect human interaction, and most importantly, how those effects can be changed.
To prepare you for this – and we do prepare you for this – we will teach you to explore how rules, policy, and human behavior interact. It is precisely for this reason that law school is (more than any other area of study) so interdisciplinary. You cannot understand the rights that a lender will exercise against a bankrupt corporation without understanding finance, economics, psychology, political theory, and philosophy, to name a few.
All of that is to say that the world, or at least those who are most noisy on the Internet, misunderstand both the practice and the study of law. They will tell you that lawyers create chaos and academics don’t care about the real world. Do not be taken in by this.
Spotted via Leiter.
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