Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

It Begins With the First-Year Dinner

Posted on August 15, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

The academic year starts tonight with the first-year dinner, an event I think I've attended each of my 18 (!) years here. I was curious to see if I'd ever blogged about it, and it seems I did in 2005's First-Year Dinner Report:

One of the self-imposed duties that comes with the job is attending the dinner we give to welcome first-year students. If that sentence sounds as if the dinner isn't something I look forward to, well consider these facts:

  1. The dinner consumes scarce and expensive baby-sitting resources (my wife and I both teach at UM; we both feel we have to go)
  2. The preprandial cocktail party is held outdoors at one of the most oppressive and sweltering times of the year
  3. I am always the designated driver and thus the open bar is just adding insult to injury
  4. I have to smile a lot
  5. I don't teach any first year classes, so many students seem disappointed to meet me, focused as they are on what they fear is an upcoming first-year ordeal.

This year was no exception as to points 1-4, but very different on point 5: a surprising number of incoming students had found this blog, so they seemed happy to put a face to the rants.

And I happened to sit with some extraordinary students at dinner:

  • A Romanian (from Transylvania, no less), with a philosophy Ph.D from Stanford, supervised by Richard Rorty
  • An American fresh back from working in Niger
  • A Polish-born American who recently resigned a commission in US Army intelligence (in part, he said, because the failure to prosecute commanders for recent atrocities — an absence of command responsibility — suggested a failure among our leaders to hew to the ideals he had been taught he was serving).
  • A Kazakhstani national here on a Fullbright whose English is flawless.

And these were not our international LL.M. students, who are always wonderfully experienced and diverse. These are a random sample of our J.D. students.

One could have quite a bit of fun teaching in a place full of students like that…

Of course, some things have changed since 2005:

  • We don't need baby-sitters any more;
  • The Dean's office stopped holding the cocktail part of the reception in the sweltering and potentially rainy Biltmore courtyard, and instead booked a nice large room;
  • The idea of standing for an hour even if not in the heat seems potentially physically challenging, so rather than making a point to be on time, I'll probably be a bit late for the cocktail part;
  • I teach a first-year class: Torts.

It's still an event in which I have to smile a lot, but maybe there's something to smile about. No word yet on who's driving, though.

Posted in Law School, U.Miami | 1 Comment

Partially Rehabilitated

Posted on August 15, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

[Update 8/16: Seems I was too optimistic. See comments for details.]

I've managed to get Google to notice this blog again.

Google's reconsideration process doesn't take as long as the “several weeks” they warn it might, but it did take about ten days for them to get around to it the last time I asked. Being an impatient sort of a person, I thought I'd try to shortcut it a bit.

I created an XML sitemap using the nifty free sitemap generator at auditmypc.com. In fact, I only created a partial sitemap stopping at about 13,000 entries. The program would have done more, but they were in all relevant ways duplicates and I lost patience as it bogged down my computer. Once the monster was ready, I uploaded it to Google via the webmaster sitemap tool, and all of a sudden, ta-da!, Google admits discourse.net exists.

And searching Google for links:discourse.net now returns “About 708,000 results” although some of the first page results are a bit odd.

I suppose a page rank other than a question mark can't be that far behind?

Earlier entries: That's Odd (7/6), Google Woes (8/3), No Joy From Google (8/12), Got 'em (8/13).

Posted in Discourse.net, Internet | 2 Comments

Tidying Up for the New School Year

Posted on August 15, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

Got a haircut, and gave my homepage a a makeover.

It's just a cleanup, only stopgap until I do something interesting with it.

Of course I said that about the last, really ugly version, and that ended up lasting for a couple of years.

Posted in Personal | 3 Comments

Got ’em

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

I found the hack.

Someone managed to change the .htaccess file on this site to add these three lines several screens below the rest of the file (so it didn't show up if you opened it in an editor):

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Slurp|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^ http://arbat.or.**/ [R=301,L]

…where the ** above were in fact the letters “at”.

That URL in turn redirects to a sub-page of a blog at triares.com.

I've changed all my passwords to the site; now I think I'll give a couple of days and see if they come back before asking google to reconsider me again…

The reason it took me so long to find this is that I usually use the spider simulator to check what google sees. But I guess it wasn't a good enough emulator; only when I used the true google-bot in the webmaster tools did the problem reveal itself.

Of course I have no idea how they got in. But I did find similar code in other sites under the same user, none of which were production sites, so I just killed them. I'm hoping it was something in one of those that hadn't been updated quickly enough that caused the problem.

Earlier entries: That's Odd (7/6), Google Woes (8/3), and No Joy From Google (8/12)

Posted in Discourse.net | 3 Comments

Bank Sleaze

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

The Agonist, The Checking Account Scam – How Wells Fargo Gouged Its Customers.

Among the many interesting things in the article is this nugget:

It is also interesting that Judge Alsup is willing to fault the bank process of sending customers reams of tiny-print legal documents that nobody reads or can understand. No doubt the bank lawyers thought this document was a foolproof way to protect the bank in any lawsuit – “see, it says right here….!”. Judge Alsup was not fooled, particularly as the Wells Fargo executives involved testified that the bank did not expect customers to read or understand this document.

I have not read the decision, but it seems from the article to rely on the obligations of good faith and fair dealing in the California Business and Professions Code, and thus may not easily be generalizable nationally.

Posted in Econ & Money | Comments Off on Bank Sleaze

Voter’s Guide to the Miami-Dade Downballot – Part V: Miami-Dade County Charter Amendments

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

Votes on charter amendments make judicial elections seem a model of clarity and participation. Voters are given impenetrable summaries on the ballot. Even in their abbreviated form they are fairly long, and I wonder how many voters bother to read them. Of the voters who bother to read them, only a fraction can understand them, particularly as they are often deliberately opaque. Even if you can parse what they mean, it would be impossible to understand the implications without a much greater knowledge of local politics than any normal person would want.

So it pays to be prepared.

Charter Amendment Eliminating the Office of County Manager

Shall the Charter be amended, effective November 2012, to eliminate the office of the County Manager as a charter office which currently assists the Mayor in administering County government?

Of the three initiatives, this is the only one that feels at all like a hard call. The proposal would abolish the position of County Manager, the non-partisan professional who used to run the county back in the days of our 'weak Mayor' form of government. In 2007 Miami-Dade county switched to a “strong Mayor” government, taking a lot of the County Manager's power and giving it to the elected Mayor. The argument for this new amendment is that the County Manager is now basically redundant. The argument against the amendment is that the County Manager still has plenty to do, and Miami-Dade County needs all the professionalism it can get.

I opposed the 'strong Mayor' amendment. While he is far from perfect, the uncomfortable truth is that Mayor Alvarez is one of the better Miami-Dade (or just Dade County) Mayors in recent history. We've had some pretty terrible ones, and it seemed wrong to me to concentrate power in the Mayor's office just because we happened to temporarily have a decent person in the job. Similarly, even if — and opinions differ — the County Manager isn't really needed now, we may need one the next time we have a truly corrupt county Mayor. History suggests that won't be far in the future.

The Herald recommends a NO vote. I agree, and plan to vote NO on the County Manager amendment.

Home Rule Charter Amendment Authorizing County Commission to Abolish Municipalities of Twenty or Fewer Electors

Shall the Miami-Dade County Home Rule Charter be amended to add to the provision that no municipality shall be abolished without the municipal governing body calling an election and without the approval of a majority of electors at such election to provide that the Board of County Commissioners may by ordinance abolish municipalities with twenty or fewer electors?

To be honest, I had no idea what this was about when I first read it. Here's how the Miami Herald explains it:

This is aimed at Islandia, the municipality in Biscayne National Park that was created in 1960 to pave the way for a mega resort. Environmentalists blocked plans to develop the 33 specks of land, and now just six people — mostly park rangers — are registered to vote on what is largely federal property.

Taxes are collected, but there is no municipal authority to spend them: The county finance department is sitting on almost $6,000 in unclaimed checks. The Miami-Dade tax collector says the city “went off the radar.''

The last mayor went west and hit the lottery. Tax reports have not been filed to the state in more than a decade.

This city exists in name only.

The Herald recommends a YES vote, and that seems reasonable to me.

Home Rule Charter Amendment Relating to Franchises

Shall the Charter be amended to make it consistent with the practice of all Florida Charter Counties by allowing the Board of County Commissioners to grant a franchise or amend a franchise agreement upon approval by a two-thirds vote of board members present without requiring subsequent approval by a majority of the electorate as is currently provided for in the Charter?

This one is just sleazy. Weirdly, the explanation appears in a Herald editorial but not as far as I can tell in any of its news columns:

Voters are likely to be baffled by the thickly-veiled ballot language in the last of the charter amendment questions. The proposal asking whether voters would like to give up their say in county franchise agreements fails to mention the only entity that has such a contract: Florida Power & Light.

In other words, this amendment attempts to clear the decks to ram through a sweetheart deal for FP&L without having to submit to the voters for their approval. Don't be fooled: Vote NO on this amendment.

Part I: Introduction
Part II: Circuit Judges
Part III: County Judges
Part IV: School Board, District 6
Part V: Miami-Dade County Charter Amendments (today)

Posted in Miami, Politics: 2010 Election | 1 Comment