Blog Posts

Oh, to be a digital overlord, a master of the social media universe, occupying an office at Twitter, or Facebook, or Google. The money just keeps rolling in. You get to decide what to publish or not with impunity. You’re the owner of a monopoly so big even governments cower at the...

A remarkable story appeared in the Connecticut legal press last week, but its significance appears to have been missed both by the editors and by those quoted in the story. “Hundreds” of unprocessed complaints against lawyers are awaiting attention in the offices of...

Just in case you’ve not had enough of all things pandemic-related, I recommend Lawrence Wright’s, “The End of October,” published just weeks ago. Mr. Wright, a writer at The New Yorker, previously wrote a gripping and Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the plot...

One of the most startling emails I received during the current pandemic involved a class action lawsuit on behalf of inmates in a midwestern federal prison. The ACLU wanted prisoners released on a compassionate basis due to the threat of infection. What shocked me was that obesity was a...

I guess I missed the chance to watch Judy Mikovits’s Plandemic, a 26-minute video viewed more than 8 million times on Facebook and YouTube. That’s because censors on Facebook and YouTube took it down because it contains what The New York Times called “baseless”...

New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo earned high marks early in the pandemic for declaring that he would not put a value on human life, and that he would spare no cost to save every life. Of course, he didn’t really mean it. He couldn’t mean it. Life is risk, and, sad but...

In the last post in this series, Alexa made you happy, wealthy and safe, but by means you might not have foreseen. Your worst enemy was mauled in a traffic accident, one million dollars appeared in your bank account, and you lay strapped to a gurney with a morphine drip.
...

The pandemic has revealed the fault lines in American politics, we’re told. That’s probably true. Herewith a decidedly dystopian snapshot. Simply put, our communal ties are frayed, perhaps irreparably.
Cicero observed that a republic, or commonwealth, was...

Artificial intelligence, that is, the ability of a computer to learn and either to augment or to replace human activity presents profound legal challenges for the criminal law. What to do when your computer assists you in accomplishing a goal, and the result turns out to be a violation...

I am convinced that I am an artificial intelligence alarmist for the same reason that I like dystopian and apocalyptic literature. What I don’t understand is why the secret hope for catastrophe. The current pandemic has certainly called my bluff. Be careful what you wish for, I...