Dorf on Law

Google recently released a free tool called NotebookLM that enables users to upload numerous documents and then chat with an AI about the content. It's not clear to me that this is very different from other AI tools that enable users to interrogate materials they upload but it has one huge advantage: Google does not use the files users upload to train the model, so one can take advantage of the tool without worrying about giving away one's content. On the latest episode of the podcast Hard Fork , hosts Casey Newton and Kevin Roose (yes, the NY Times reporter whom chatGPT famously tried to convince to leave his wife) discuss NotebookLM with Steven Johnson, who works at Google Labs and helped create NotebookLM. From their discussion, I inferred that NotebookLM could be a useful tool for scholars, journalists, and others trying to organize information from many sources. One feature of NotebookLM especially intrigued Newton and Roose: its ability to create podcasts with human-soun...

There are no gold bars pictured in the indictment of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, but in other ways it is very much reminiscent of the charges that were brought against New Jersey's now-former Senator and convicted felon Robert Menendez. Whereas Menendez took money from Egypt in exchange for influence, the new indictment alleges that an only slightly less authoritarian Middle Eastern ally--Turkey--was the benefactor of Adams. And while mostly Adams appears to have exchanged favors for campaign contributions, like Menendez, he also allegedly sought and obtained personal goodies--paying economy fares for international flights and then being upgraded to business class by his Turkish friends. The two corruption cases share an additional feature. Menendez was initially defiant even in the face of what appeared to be (and turned out was considered by a jury to be) overwhelming evidence. So too, despite screenshots of damning email exchanges and a level of detail that the Justice Depa...

J.D. Vance is a walking disaster for some very big reasons, the most important of which include his cruelty toward immigrants (and toward anyone else who happens to be near the blast zone of an anti-immigration stunt gone very bad), his deliberate lying, his sexist/racist/eugenicist worldview, his desire to make divorce more difficult (even for women in violent marriages), and of course his anti-abortion insanity.  I discussed all of those issues in a new Verdict column today, " Vance Vance Devolution " (the title of which is a nod to a classic arcade game ).  It was exhausting even to think about just how awful the guy is. My double - length Verdict column on Monday and Tuesday of this week, along with my Dorf on Law column on Tuesday, all prominently featured criticisms of Vance along with other matters.  Today's Verdict column, however, was all-Vance-all-the-time (with necessary references to Donald Trump along the way).  Even after writing all of that, howe...

For many decades, conservative judges, law professors, and political pundits ridiculed Justice Douglas' reasoning in the landmark case Griswold v. Connecticut . While striking down a statute that forbade all contraception use and prohibited doctors from giving advice about contraception, Justice Douglas relied on six constitutional provisions to find a right to privacy in the Constitution because "s pecific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance."  A few years later, Roe was based on the right to privacy.  The disgust on the right for Douglas' penumbras and emanations reasoning has been severe, often cruel, and always dismissive. One commentator observed that "perhaps the most important and puzzling spatial metaphor in American constitutional law is Justice Douglas' 'penumbra' from Griswold v. Connecticut ." In one of the most famous law review articles...

How is it not an ongoing story that the Republicans' vice presidential candidate (a Yale Law graduate) stated in all seriousness last week that he will continue to call immigrants who arrive in the US legally "illegal immigrants"?  No, that was not a typo or an unfair characterization.  Here is what J.D. Vance said in response to a reporter who had pointed out to Vance that the Haitian immigrants in Ohio -- who are now living in fear (along with their US-born neighbors) because of the lies that Vance and Donald Trump have continued to spew -- are in fact legally residing in the country: Now the media loves to say that the Haitian migrants … they are here legally. And what they mean is that Kamala Harris used two separate programs: mass parole and temporary protective status. She used two programs to wave a wand and to say, “We’re not going to deport those people here.” Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I’m still ...

In the days since CNN reported that North Carolina Lieutenant Governor and Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson once used the comments section of a porn site to describe himself as a "Black Nazi" who approved of slavery, political pundits have speculated that Donald Trump's endorsement of Robinson--including his characteristically hyperbolic description of Robinson as "Martin Luther King on steroids"--could end up costing Trump North Carolina's 16 electoral votes. Color me skeptical. The fundamental difficulty with this claim is that it is a guilt-by-association scenario going in the wrong direction. For all of his flaws and terrible views, Robinson is not as bad as Trump. Robinson has not been indicted, much less convicted, of any felonies. Robinson was not found civilly liable for sexual assault. Robinson lacks the capacity to permanently end American constitutional democracy. Suggesting that people who are otherwise willing to vote for Trump ...

A recent NY Times essay by Thomas Edsall reports on Leonard Leo's "Big Plans for America," which are, from the perspective of "barbarians, secularists and bigots" like me, appalling. Most of the essay is not about the plans' substance, however, but about the funds that Leo has at his disposal for turning them into reality and how he has been spending those funds. According to Edsall and the sources he cites, much of that spending is on fees to firms that Leo himself runs. Here are the key allegations (which I have no independent basis for either confirming or challenging): The millions of dollars Leo has raised through his tax-exempt nonprofits have, in turn, flowed to profit-making consulting companies owned, in part or wholly, by him. In 2016, he created the BH Group, a for-profit consulting firm that is now defunct, which received at least $6.9 million from tax-exempt donor nonprofits run by him. Four years later, Leo formed CRC Advisors, also a profit-m...

Chris Coons became one of Delaware's US Senators through an improbable stroke of luck.  In 2010, he was the Democratic Party's sacrificial lamb, a local politician nominated to run against a popular, moderate Republican who was that state's incumbent Member of Congress and who was expected to easily make the step up to the Senate.  Then the proto-MAGA Tea Party happened, and instead of running against a sober, likable public servant, Coons found himself running against someone who was so weird (yes, that word fits pre-Trump/Vance nutcases, too) that she ran a campaign ad in which she declared: "I'm not a witch." This is not to disparage Coons, who I happen to have known since his college days and who has served in the Senate admirably.  But just as Barack Obama's Senate seat landed in his lap due to a completely unexpected scandal that flipped what was supposed to be an easy win for a high-profile Republican in Illinois, Coons's national career was bir...

During last week's Presidential "debate," Vice President Harris characterized former President Trump's plan to increase tariffs on a wide variety of goods--especially those coming from China--as a tax that would fall on American consumers. In response,  Trump repeated his frequent claim that foreign countries, not American consumers, pay the tariffs. That is false--both as a technical matter and as a substantive matter. As a technical matter, when goods are subject to tariffs, the party seeking to import the goods--typically a U.S. distributor, wholesaler, or integrated business--pays the tariff. But anyone with the slightest bit of economic sophistication understands that the important question with respect to any kind of a tax, including a tariff, is not who hands the money over to the government, but what the incidence of the tax is--that is, who ultimately bears the burden of the tax. For tariffs, the usual answer is that tariffs increase costs for consumers. VP H...

Trump on post-birth abortion (that is, murder).  Trump on "transgender operations" on prisoners.  Trump on immigrants -- immigrants who are in the country legally, by the way -- and eating pets.  Those were three of Donald Trump's more outrageous moments in his non-debate last week with Vice President Kamala Harris.  There were many more false claims, only a few of which I managed to pack into my long review of the non-debate here on Dorf on Law last Wednesday.  Of the many lies that I had to leave out of my response, this bizarre claim about President Biden was the last to be cut to reduce the word count: "And you know what? I'll give you a little secret. He hates her. He can't stand her." Those lies all sounded as if they came from outer space (or some other empty space).  But we are now relearning that what comes out of Trump's mouth is quite often not some spontaneous and opportunistic fabrication.  We are accustomed to hearing about the fever s...