Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Kevin Drum Is Shrill

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

House Republicans Have Completely Melted Down:

Apparently there are now two groups of Republicans in the House. First, there’s a group of firebrand conservatives headed by Eric Cantor, which, as near as I can tell, is mostly dedicated to finding slightly more slippery language to sell its usual right-wing agenda of school vouchers, block granting Medicaid, increased tax credits, and gutting labor laws. Second, there’s a group of insane, frothing-at-the-mouth conservatives who think of Cantor as Nancy Pelosi’s lapdog and are basically uninterested in anything other than repealing Obamacare, slashing taxes even more, ending the welfare state, and making speeches about how Obama is destroying America. It’s quite a little group that John Boehner has up there.

What put him over the edge? Could it be this? No, that was about the Senate.

Posted in Politics | Comments Off on Kevin Drum Is Shrill

Yet Another Law School Ranking

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

Given the source — AbovetheLaw.com — I would have been prepared to dismiss it out of hand. But Brian Leiter, who is a very discerning consumer of rankings, says that that the “ATL Top 50” is “not nuts and contains some useful information”. Coming from him, that is fairly high praise.

U.Miami Law comes in at 49th on the list — considerably higher than our usual US News rank, and right near the middle of the range (41-55) I would put us at if I were Ratings Czar. And Yale is #1, so they got that right too.

Posted in Law School, U.Miami | 1 Comment

Britt Blaser Wins ‘Law Day’

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

The attempted rebranding of May Day as ‘Law Day‘ by anti-communist Cold War legislators never took off. I think the idea of a ‘Law Day’ isn’t bad (although isn’t every day law day?), but as a piece of counter-programming it has always been both too half-hearted and rather tone-deaf.

But in the true spirit of the occasion here’s a vaguely law-related May 1st post from Britt Blaser: Hooray, Hooray, The First of May!.

Posted in Law: Practice | Comments Off on Britt Blaser Wins ‘Law Day’

On ‘squishes’

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

Reading about Sen. Cruz calling other Republicans ‘squishes’ because they were not, at least in his telling, as hard-line as he is, reminded me of when I lived in the UK and the late Margret Thatcher and her supporters derided their less-immoderate fellow Tories as the “wets”.

It also made me wonder about the national differences the two terms imply. Am I alone in thinking that there’s some suggestion of unmanliness about ‘squishes’? And if so, is that in fact tied to a national difference, or just to the gender and general sexism of the particular speaker?

Wikipedia tells me that,

Historically, the term “wet” was English public school slang for someone judged to be weak, feeble or “soppy”. Within the political context it was used both as a noun and an adjective to describe people or policies which Thatcher would have considered to be weak or “wet”.

So maybe it isn’t all that different after all?

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze, UK | Comments Off on On ‘squishes’

In Which I Join the EPIC Advisory Board

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

EPIC has announced the 2013 members of the EPIC Advisory Board. They are Michael Froomkin, Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law; Sheila Kaplan, student privacy advocate and founder of Education New York; Eugene Spafford, a/k/a/ “Spaf,” professor of Computer Science at Purdue University; and Tim Wu, professor at Columbia Law School and author of “The Master Switch.” The EPIC Advisory Board is a distinguished group of experts in law, technology, and public policy. Joining the EPIC Board of Directors in 2013 are current Advisory Board members David Farber, Joi Ito, and Jeff Jonas. For more information, see EPIC: EPIC Advisory Board.

–EPIC, Froomkin, Kaplan, “Spaf,” and Wu Join EPIC Advisory Board

The EPIC Advisory Board is a large group of privacy luminaries, and I’m proud to join them. (The 2013 members are the new members, not the whole Board.)

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on In Which I Join the EPIC Advisory Board

Almost As Strange as Fiction

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

The discovery of a new, more solid, superionic phase of water, made me think of Kurt Vonnegut, who in his novel Cat’s Cradle imagined an ultimately deadly state of water he called ice-nine, which was solid at room temperature. Fortunately the real stuff requires vastly greater temperature and pressure than found on the Earth’s surface:

One lesser known phase of water is the superionic phase, which is considered an “ice” but exists somewhere between a solid and a liquid: while the oxygen atoms occupy fixed lattice positions as in a solid, the hydrogen atoms migrate through the lattice as in a fluid. Until now, scientists have thought that there was only one phase of superionic ice, but scientists in a new study have discovered a second phase that is more stable than the original. The new phase of superionic ice could make up a large component of the interiors of giant icy planets such as Uranus and Neptune.

Posted in Science/Medicine | Comments Off on Almost As Strange as Fiction