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Autonomous cars are not-so-slowly making their ways to a driveway near you. Regulators have been taking a relatively proactive view towards this emerging technology, recognizing that though they may pose some risks,they also hold the potential to make the roads much safer.

On Thursday, the Transportation Department made its first formal policy statement on autonomous vehicles. In a nonbinding recommendation to the states, it said that driverless cars should not yet be allowed, except for testing. But it said that semiautonomous features, like cars that keep themselves centered in lanes and adjust their speed based on the location of the car ahead, could save lives.

The position of the government, however, seems to be one geared towards nurturing in this new technology, with an eye towards improving the public welfare:

The statement detailed the benefits of self-driving and semiautonomous cars, which analysts said was a recognition by government officials that it had no choice but to keep up with the advancing technology in this area, which falls on a continuum from cruise control to full automation.

“It’s not that they’re trying to put the brakes on it,” said Richard Wallace, director of transportation systems analysis at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. “They’re trying to get out in front of it.”

Still, the highway safety agency was careful to address the tension between technology and regulation.

“Any potential regulatory action must appropriately balance the need to ensure motor vehicle safety with the flexibility to innovate,” it said.

The Times also quotes my friend Ryan Calo, who is a leading expert in this field. Ryan observes that because the automotive industry is so heavily regulated, vehicle-technology cannot innovate at the same pace as other types of technology.

Even though technology companies like Google generally fear that innovation far outpaces regulation and risks being stifled by it, it has a different approach with cars than with software or cellphones because cars have been heavily regulated for decades, said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington who co-founded the Legal Aspects of Autonomous Driving center at Stanford.

“We want to have some experimentation in the states to see what works, but it’s nice to have federal experts helping out, as long as they don’t take it too far,” he said.

I think we will see similar dynamics in the legal market, as new forms of technology will soon be able to deliver legal services in unconventional means (without lawyers). There will be, of course, concern to make sure that these services actually give good legal advice. I hope that there are enough people in state bars to value the countervailing interest–that these technologies can bring legal services to large, underserved portions of the population. However, I am more skeptical. Lawyers, as a bunch, tend to resist change–especially the type of change that can take away their business. Watching other emerging tech fields deal with long-standing regulations may offer a preview of sorts of the process that lies ahead for legal informatics.

I did not know about this history.

During the 1940 war between Finland and Russia, known here as the Winter War, Finnish Jews fought alongside their countrymen. But most surprising to those unfamiliar with this nation’s Jewish community could be the fact that Finnish Jews fought in World War II alongside Germany on the Russian front, as their country allied itself with the Nazis.

Even more unusual, the Finnish government afforded Jews full civil rights throughout the war despite strong pressure from the Nazis. Today’s community has a memory of a “field synagogue” built by Finnish soldiers in which they could conduct services alongside SS units.

Most interesting, perhaps, is another local story of a Jewish soldier who defied death to rescue a battalion of SS soldiers pinned down by enemy fire. Offered an Iron Cross he refused, in flawless German.

When a German officer asked where he learned to speak so well, the soldier reportedly answered that he was Jewish, and that since Yiddish was his mother language, it was easy for him to speak German. He then marched out of the deathly silent tent. The Finnish government supported his refusal of the award.

The fact that Nazi soldiers tolerated a synogague on the front is remarkable:

The Jewishness of these soldiers was not hidden from the Germans, and there even was a field synagogue. Furloughs were given for Sabbaths, and some came from considerable distances to attend. The Germans were aware of the synagogue but did not interfere (Rautkallio, Aseveljeys 127, 129–132). Some of the Jewish soldiers even liked to proclaim their religion to provoke the Germans, whose reactions were mainly surprised but not particularly negative. When asked about their Jewish soldiers, Finnish superiors usually defended them, saying they were no different from other Finns (Rautkallio, Aseveljeys 128–129). Jewish medical officers treated German patients and saved their lives, even risking their own (Rautkallio, Aseveljeys 133, 141). Several Jews were awarded German decorations, but they refused to accept them (Poljakoff in Torvinen, Kadimah 135; Smolar 155–57).

Update: Ilya Somin writes in with a correction:

There is a factual error here. Finland and Germany were not allied during the 1939-40 Winter War (when the USSR invaded Finland while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was still in force and Germany backed the Soviets), but during what Finns call the 1941-44 Continuation War (when Finland took advantage of Germany’s invasion of the USSR to retake the territory the Soviets had seized from them during the Winter War).

Kudos to Michele Olsen for retrieving Justice Scalia’s speech in Italy from a new ring of Dante’s inferno (where off-the-record recordings of Justice’s speech wither away in limbo).

Here is a rough transcript (unlike Justice Stevens, Justice Scalia’s remarks are never posted on the Supreme Court’s website) from about 25:00 where Justice Scalia introduces some of his remarks about the role of the courts in promoting, or harming economic liberty.

The judge stands a potential bulwark between the state and the citizen, as free economic actor. Or, alternatively, as the implementor of the state’s destruction of a free economy. Because if the judge is a good judge. that is to say, if he honestly applies the Constitution agains the legislature, and legislation against the Executive. he will produce the result, either economic freedom or economic bondage, that the Constitution and the laws prescribe. Of course there is the possibility that he will produce economic bondage when the Constitution and the laws do not require it, or economic freedom when the Constitution and the laws do not permit it. That is to say, there is always the possibility that he will not be a good judge. The criterion of good judging always being not to produce the best result, but to produce the result the Constitution and laws demand. For the good judge is the servant of the people. He is the servant of what the people have democratically adopted in their Constitution and in their laws. My remarks today will examine this judicial role. When is it legitimate to check legislative or executive action. And how, by that standard, have American judges fared, in preserving economic liberty. Why have they sometimes fallen down on the job.

Let me begin with constitutional law. I have long been an advocate of the proposition that it is not for judges to write their own policy preferences into the Constitution. That type of judicial activism is incompatible with our system of  separated powers in which the legislative powers is entirely vested in congress. Indeed it is not compatible with democratic government at all. Unelected life tenured judges possess no democratic legitimacy. Economic liberty is not an exception to this rule. In a democracy, if the basic law, so permits, the legislature may decide to replace the free market with central planning, however unwise it may be. …

Fortunately for those who believe in efficiency and justness of free markets, the American constitution contains some powerful protections for economic liberty. That is, I should clarify, for negative economic liberty. Not the freedom from want, as enshrined in so many progressive constitutions. This latter variant of freedom from want, implies a necessary alteration of the traditional notion of liberty, as freedom from constraint.

Later, Scalia refers to John Locke as the “guiding light of American independence.”

Scalia notes that the structural provisions of the Constitution are most fundamental to protecting economic liberty. He mentions the doctrine of enumerated powers, the Due Process Clause, the takings clause, and the contracts clause.

“Our Constitution provides property owners with relatively few substantive rights. Almost all of our private rights in the Constitution are in the Bill of Rights, which was an afterthought  . . . . Judges cannot enact atextual rights to enact their preferred policies.”

I did not have time to finish the rest of the speech, which I hope to do soon.

I am currently reading a book about Augustus, the first Roman Emperor, and the author included this interesting discussion of the “contracts” Gladiators signed:

Most gladiators (the name comes from the Latin for sword, gladius) were slaves, but some citizens joined a gladiatorial troupe of their own free will. The profession gave asylum to social outcasts, the dispossessed, the bankrupt, and men on the run. Free fighters were much sought after, presumably because they performed with more zest than those who did so under compulsion. A volunteer won a bonus if he survived to the end of his contract. The contract was a fearsome document, threatening any who broke it with burning, shackling, whipping with rods, and killing with steel. In effect, it made a temporary slave of the signatory.

Seems like a fair contract!

The Library of Congress displays the contests of President Lincoln’s pockets the night he was assassinated in Ford’s Theatre:

The night Abraham Lincoln was shot, he was carrying: a pocket knife, a watch fob, an Irish linen handkerchief, a brown leather wallet, a crisp new Confederate five-dollar bill, two pairs of gold-rimmed spectacles (one held together with string), and eight newspaper clippings, some of which echoed remarks from one of his campaign speeches – that a country divided against itself cannot stand.

Now why would he have a Confederate note?

There is also the curious matter of the five-dollar Confederate bill, which Dimunation said, repeating an old joke, was so Lincoln was “prepared for all contingencies.” The president is believed to have acquired the bill as a souvenir (of a war won? or what could have been?) when he visited Richmond and Petersburg, Va., just as the Civil War was drawing to a close.