Blog

If I was an aspiring attorney in the 1870, and was considering Columbia and Yale Law School, which one would I choose? The New York Times has a hilarious retrospective with various advertisements that Ivy League schools ran in newspapers enticing prospective students to attend their school.

Take this advertisement for the Columbia College Law School from Sept. 27, 1870. Here are some of the details:

• Classes ran from October 4-May 15. Even if you were not admitted to school as late as September 27, you could still gain admission by October 4!
• Who needs three years of law school? The entire course could be completed in two terms, about 20 months.
• The best part– “Graduates are admitted to the Bar without further examination.” That would be pretty cool.
• Classes at 37 Lafayette Street were downtown, and quite close to the U.S. Court house.

Or, take this advertisement for Yale Law School from August 4, 1868 (almost 2 months after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment!).

• Like Columbia, courses are only two years (who needs a third year?).
• Forget about the LSAT. “No preliminary examinations” is required.
• Plenty of breaks- Eight weeks of vacation in the fall, and three weeks of vacation in the spring, plus winter recess of two weeks.
• Plus tuition is a staggering $80 for the first year, and $70 for the second year.

 

Hilarious. Here is the TImes’ writeup:

In an ad hovering over a pitch for cured hams on Oct. 7, 1871, Columbia Law School assured applicants that (unlike some rivals) its graduates were “admitted to the bar without further examination.”

Harvard Law opted instead to drop the names of distinguished faculty members in ads it ran from 1868 to 1871. And Yale Law School, one of the most sought-after law schools on the planet, ran ads in August 1868, a time when its own future within Yale University was rocky, regaling student with reasons to consider New Haven.

They included “access to library without extra charge,” eight weeks of fall vacation, three weeks of spring vacation and a two-week recess “embracing Christmas and New Year.” And, the ad noted, “students can enter or leave at any time.”

 

I have been following this development for some time (see here, here, and here). In late 2009 Google introduced an App called Google Goggles. Basically, you take a picture of something, and Google tells you what it is. Take a picture of a painting, Google identifies it. Take a painting of a book, and Google shows you the Amazon.com page for the book. It’s pretty cool. But what about taking a picture of a person? Will Google tell you who that person is? Well Google may be working on such an app.

Earlier today CNN reported:

Google is working on a mobile application that would allow users to snap pictures of people’s faces in order to access their personal information, a director for the project said this week.

In order to be identified by the software, people would have to check a box agreeing to give Google permission to access their pictures and profile information, said Hartmut Neven, the Google engineering director for image-recognition development.

“We recognize that Google has to be extra careful when it comes to these [privacy] issues,” Neven told CNN in an exclusive interview. “Face recognition we will bring out once we have acceptable privacy models in place.”

Engadget has an update, which includes Google’s quasi-denial:

Google has reached out to clarify that there are no plans to introduce functionality of this sort yet, not without “a strong privacy model in place.” More importantly, however, the linking of facial recognition to personal data is described as “inventions of the reporter” rather than something the company’s actively pursuing.

I’m not persuaded that this app is purely the “invention[] of the reporter.” Numerous Google executives have discussed this product for years.

AsI blogged on May 19, 2010, the FInancial Times reported that Google CEO Eric Schmidt was considering a similar product.

Google executives are wrestling over whether to launch controversial facial recognition technology after a barrage of criticism over its privacy policies.

Mr Schmidt said: “Facial recognition is a good example . . . anything we did in that area would be highly, highly planned, discussed and reviewed. When you go through these things, you review your management procedures.”

Way back in December 2009, I blogged about a New Zealand Herald article that quoted Google VP Marissa Meyer also discussing facial recognition technology:

Marissa Mayer, the vice-president of Google’s search product and user experience, said: “We are blocking out people’s faces if people try to use Google Goggles to search for information about them.

“Until we understand the implications of the facial-recognition tool we have decided to block out people’s faces. We need to understand how this tool affects people’s privacy and we cannot change that decision until we do.”

The message seems to be that Google has the power to do this (they already search photos in their Picassa service), but are just looking for the right way to do this without violating privacy.

I’m not consoled by this. Particularly in light of Google’s recent showdown with the FTC over Buzz’s privacy violations, how much faith do we have that Google will in fact launch this with all privacy considerations taken care of?

This product fulfills a prediction I made way back in 2008 in Omniveillance:

With the advent of photo-sharing Internet sites like Flikr, MySpace, and Facebook, people can now upload photographs and “tag” a specific person’s identity in the photo with metadata, as if they were captioning it in a scrapbook (i.e., John Doe is the third person on the left). Although currently the tagging process must be done manually, new facial recognition such as Google’s Picasa system utilizes artificial intelligence computers to automatically index and tag the subjects of photographs.147 Software like Polar Rose is capable of scanning the entire World Wide Web, matching faces with previously tagged photos based on similarities in biometric features, and automatically tagging the photo with the person’s identity.148 Berners-Lee mentions tagging as one of the key prerequisites to the semantic web.149

Once an image is tagged, these captions can be searched and indexed like any other document on the Internet. As a result of this emerging image-analysis technology, a search engine like Google can easily correlate a person’s face with his name, contact information, personal preferences, friends, and any of his personal information located on the Internet. In fact, Google’s Director of Product Management, R.J. Pittman, “said that Google is developing visual crawling software that can be used for facial recognition and scene analysis.”150 Applied to Street View, this future technology can be combined with tagging and advanced image search capabilities to identify anyone who is recorded by omniveillance.

Omniveillance is on its way.

Today Professor Walter E. WIlliams turns 75. As the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Williams has made countless contributions to making complicated economic doctrine more accessible to the masses. Yet, I owe Williams something of a personal debt.
Growing up in New York City, I had never heard of George Mason University. I first heard of GMU during my youth while listening to (don’t judge) the Rush Limbaugh Show (in my youth that was the only alternative to the stuff I learned in NYC public schools). Williams frequently substituted for Rush on Fridays. I learned so much about the fundamentals of economics from those programs. I had never considered things like tariffs, taxation rates, the minimum wage, and other such topics before.

Later, Williams came to speak at Penn State, and I attended. His lecture on the role between the state and individual was enthralling. His flawless challenges to the statist orthodoxy I had learned at all levels of my public education stunned me. I was hooked. After the talk, he graciously autographed a copy of one of his books, and could not have been nicer.

A few years later, when applying to law schools, I was totally ignorant about what to look for in a law school (beyond the US News rankings). I knew I would be working in Arlington, Virginia, for the DoD, and I figured that close-by George Mason would be a good pick, based in large part of my experiences with Williams. In hindsight, that was one of the best decisions I made.

So Professor Williams, happy birthday, and thank you for all that you have done for me (even if you have no clue).

Interesting paper on SSRN, titled Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship. Here is the abstract:

To date, there have been no studies focusing exclusively on the impact of open access on legal scholarship. We examine open access articles from three journals at the University of Georgia School of Law and confirm that legal scholarship freely available via open access improves an article’s research impact. Open access legal scholarship – which today appears to account for almost half of the output of law faculties – can expect to receive 50% more citations than non-open access writings of similar age from the same venue.

I place all of my articles on SSRN, and I always ensure to negotiate that right with the journals I work with. I frequently research articles on SSRN. If I have to go to West Law to find something, I may just find something else freely available. This makes sense.

Today during arguments in Pliva, Inc. v. Mensing, Attorney Louis Bograd on behalf or Respondents ran out of time. How did he handle it? By asking to finish his point. The Chief let him finish his “sentence.” What did he do? Speak for another two long sentences (72 words)! Chief Justice Rehnquist would never have stood for such surplusage. Of course Nino got a quip in there.

I would like to make one final point, Your Honor. In Bates — and I apologize; we didn’t address this specifically in our briefs, because I didn’t notice it until later — the statutory scheme at issue in Bates, under FIFRA, was almost identical to the — I’m sorry. I see my time has expired. May I finish my point, Your Honor?CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: You can finish your sentence.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Make it a long sentence, with a lot of “ands.”

(Laughter.)

MR. BOGRAD: There was no CBE equivalent in Bates in the — under the FIFRA statutory scheme, and yet this Court upheld against a motion to dismiss on preemption grounds a failure to warn claim, admittedly under an express preemption provision. This Court upheld a claim against a pesticide manufacturer even though the pesticide manufacturer could not have changed its warning without prior EPA approval, exactly the same situation that confronts the generics here.

Thank you, Your Honor.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you, counsel.