Monthly Archives: November 2003

Travel Notes

Posted on November 14, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

There are things I learn from traveling, and things I re-learn.

Learned: MIA — never good at the best of times — has managed to get worse. In order to serve the herding needs of the security services, you now have to walk three times as far to get to low-numbered “C” gates … which is where the flights to NY leave from. It now feels even more like Laguardia at its worst.

Re-Learned: When we’re having lovely weather in Miami, the rest of the country, is having seriously crummy weather. Example: my flight to NY started its decent to JFK, only to abort rather suddenly. Seems the winds were gusting at 70 MPH, which is too much. So we got diverted to Baltimore to re-fuel before trying again.

Re-learned: NY streets are a lot cleaner than the NY of my childhood memories.

Learned: The conference hotel looks out onto the site of the World Trade Center. It’s even more depressing that I would have thought. It feels very odd to look down from the 52nd floor onto the small crowd milling about outside the fence.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Travel Notes

Fools and Consistency

Posted on November 13, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

“A foolishng consistency,” Oliver Wendell Holmes Ralph Waldo Emerson [this should teach me not to blog on the road, but probably won't] famously wrote, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.” All too often abbreviated to leave out the first two words (which of course imply that much consistency is not at all foolish), the insight captures something deeply true and more than a little unsettling about the evolution of the common law. The common law does change to fit the times and to fit new circumstances. The price of this capacity to mutate is indeed some occasional illogic and some inconsistency with precedent. When things are going well, we at least manage to treat like cases alike for the moment, remaining fully conscious that our ideas of what is “like” and “different” are things we lawyers both construct and soak up from the legal and social cultures we inhabit. And we fight about which sorts of consistency are wise, and which are foolish.

I was thinking about Holmes's Emerson's aphorism this morning as I read the news about Washington and Iraq. It seems we need to reverse the aphorism to capture something more than a little true and deeply unsettling about the course of United States foreign policy. I don't mean the Bush doctrine of US supremacy and unilateralism, which is certainly consistent and arguably foolish. Rather, I mean the Bush policy towards the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. Having said loudly and often that the US must stay the course, not cut and run, etc. etc., the Administration now shows disturbing signs of what the Brits call 'wobble'.

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Posted in Politics: US | 2 Comments

Off to (the State of) Play

Posted on November 13, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Blogging may be light for the next few days, and will certainly be erratic, because I'm off to New York to attend the State of Play conference. There are a bunch of interesting papers online, so it looks like it should be a good event.

I'm mildly amazed at the speed with which the academy can take a social trend and turn it into something that generates scholarship worth reading. Yes, sociologists have been writing stuff about MUDs and MOOs for years, but — to be blunt — as far as I can tell, having looked at piles of it, only a depressingly small fraction of it was neither jargon-ridden nor obvious.

Things changed when the graphics got better, and games went mass-market and commercial. For me at least, the first sign something was up was when Edward Castronova started writing economic analyses of virtual worlds. Next thing you know there's an explosion of writing about massively multi-player online role-playing games. In fact, there's a whole virtual community.

Of course, my participation in all this is something of a cheat, since I'm very much the junior author on the paper, more than half the work having been done my co-author Caroline Bradley.

Posted in Internet | Comments Off on Off to (the State of) Play

LOTR3 Without Saruman?

Posted on November 12, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Slashdot | Saruman Completely Cut from 'Return of the King'

Far be it from me to venture into the culture wars, but this is nuts.

Posted in Kultcha | 12 Comments

White House Caves on 9/11 Documents

Posted on November 12, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Yahoo! News – White House, 9-11 Panel OK Documents Deal.

Basically the White House just caved to the 9-11 investigators on this one in the face of a threat of a subpoena (and falling poll numbers…). The full Commission won't access the documents—which include the Presidential Daily Brief—instead only a sub-committee (picked by the committee) will get access. That means there's a fig leaf for the White House. But the sub-committee can share what it learns with the rest of the committee. So it's a pretty threadbare fig leaf.

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Posted in Politics: US | 3 Comments

What Motivated the Cert Grant In Guantanamo Case? Linda Greenhouse Thinks She Knows

Posted on November 12, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

I usually like Linda Greenhouse's work, and I've been trying to figure out why this news analysis item on the Supreme Court's decision to hear the jurisdictional aspect of the Guantanamo detainees case is so annoying.

For starters, I don't find the account of the Court and the Executive going toe to toe while hepped up in “alpha mode” at all convincing. (I also don't find it attractive, but that's a different issue.) She writes, “it now appears that the administration laid down a challenge the justices were unwilling to ignore. This was a moment long in coming: the imperial presidency meets the imperial judiciary.” I think this is way over-dramatic for a ruling to grant cert. on jurisdiction.

Greenhouse argues that the administration took a needlessly hard line in arguing the court should deny cert. and this somehow poked a stick in the court's metaphorical eye. But what else was the Solicitor General supposed to do?

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Posted in Guantanamo, Law: International Law | Comments Off on What Motivated the Cert Grant In Guantanamo Case? Linda Greenhouse Thinks She Knows