Gun Manufacturer Liability

In Torts yesterday, we started on strict products liability. At some point, we touched on the liability of gun manufacturers for the costs of crimes committed with guns. This naturally started up a shitstorm.

First, let’s assume that there is in fact a legitimate public interest in ordinary citizens being able to buy a gun (if there weren’t, then we would be discussing banning guns period, not strict products liability). Given that legitimate interest, my initial reaction was that holding gun manufacturers liable for gun crimes would be horribly unfair. It’d be the equivalent of holdng auto-manufacturers liable for hit and runs. After talking to my modmate Sam though, I think, from an economic efficiency and loss distribution perspective at least, it’s an interesting proposition.

Facebook Redirect Phishing

Two of my friends inadvertently gave away their passwords to a Facebook password phishing site yesterday. If you don’t know what phishing is, see the Wikipedia article.

Hypothesis: The way Facebook formats its links in e-mails actually makes it easier for phishing sites to trick some users into giving their info.

Phishing websites work by creating mirror images of other websites and tricking you into logging in to them with your account info from the other site. So let’s pretend I owned notfacebook.com. I could trick people into giving me their Facebook password by sending them to http://notfacebook.com/login.php, a page that looks exactly like the actual Facebook login page, except when you entered in your password, you would be sending it not to Facebook, but to me.

Check Out Lawless Lagomorphs

LawLag.com

Some helpful reminders re. Damn Small Linux

Damn Small Linux (DSL) is a distro that’s less than 50MB. It’s great for booting off a USB stick (directions here). The problem (or feature) is that by default things don’t persist on DSL. To get that working, you’ll want to periodically back stuff up somewhere– in my case, I wanted to plop it back on the original drive I booted from.

To do that, just right click somewhere on the desktop and go to system > backup/restore. You’ll need to enter in the device that represents your USB stick (probably sda1). This will write a gzipped tar file to the drive. To restore, you just need to supply a “cheat code” of “dsl restore=sda1″. Note that this won’t remove any of the default files already in the home directory (e.g. events.cal) on the restore; it only restores stuff you’ve added or changed.

Also, the USB drive is mounted under /cdrom, so you can manually fish out any additional data you’ve stuck there as well.

Polygons

Linking Test Scores and Teachers

Under the “Race to the Top” guidelines, California may be ineligible for federal money because of a law pushed by the teachers’ union that prohibits the state from linking together student test scores and teacher performance. While there are a lot more issues at stake here than just test scores — e.g. state vs. local control seems to be an issue here — I’m not sure there’s anything inherently wrong with using student test scores to evaluate teachers.

How the AP et al can make money

Dear AP et al,

So prompted by this and this in response to this and this, I feel obligated to suggest one way for you all can make money off of your content without being complete dicks. The basic issue is that you don’t want “unauthorized use”, which, as far as I can tell, means “stop copying and pasting our stuff — we wanted you to pay pay for that”. Your solution is, as far as I can tell, to use DRM to track how your content is used.

In other words, you plan to sue people who copy and paste. Well, good luck with that.

Now if you’re done being silly, riddle me this: what exactly is the problem with people copying and pasting and forwarding your content? If I worked in marketing and if that happened to something I wrote, I’d strip down naked and run around the office screaming, “We’ve gone viral! We’ve gone V-I-R-A-L!” Then I would buy a new car.

Life Experiences – An Example

A follow up regarding the role of life experience in interpreting the law:

In Jacobellis v. Ohio, the Supreme Court examined whether a particular film violated obscenity laws. In his concurrence, Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within [hardcore porngraphy]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” (emphasis mine).

I humbly submit that the life experiences of Justice Stewart figured prominently in his knowing it when he saw it.

Impartial Defined

I’m going to Berkeley Law this fall, and in an attempt to get my toes wet, spent some time going over the transcript of the Sotomayor hearings earlier today. One of the issues that came up repeatedly was whether allowing “life experiences” to affect your judgment violated the duty of a judge to remain impartial. The most experience I have with judging is high school debate, so … big grain of salt, but myinitial reaction is no, it doesn’t. To understand why, let’s step back a little bit and consider what it even means to be impartial.

Law is not math. It is subject to interpretation. When your laws are written over the course of over two hundred (occasionally turbulent) year by thousands of (occasionally boneheaded) individuals, you’re going to get contradictions, gray areas, and general stupidity.  Ideally, you’d ask the legislature to clarify, but it’s possible (probable?) that individuals within the legislature will disagree on what they meant when they wrote it. And that’s assuming the individuals are still alive and conscious.

Therefore, law cannot be impartially interpreted in the same manner that, say, a calculator impartially interprets a mathematical equation. Instead, the best a judge can do to be impartial is to be consistent and by extension, predictable.

Health Care. Please fix.

I haven’t made up my mind about how to achieve health care reform. But shit like this needs fixing.

A friend of mine, let’s call her Susie, recently graduated from college and was about to start work. She moved into Boston from her native Wisconsin a week earlier to unpack and get settled. Unfortunately, shortly after moving in, she developed a urinary tract infection.

The timing of this could not be worse. Because she had already graduated from college, she was no longer covered under her the university’s health care plan. Her work provided health care, but it didn’t kick in until after she started several days later. While she was still signed up with an HMO from Wisconsin, but the HMO did not cover out-of-state care. In the only week of her life that she was without health insurance, Susie got sick.