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Between 2009 and 2020, Josh published more than 10,000 blog posts. Here, you can access his blog archives.

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A List of Campus Shootings

February 27th, 2012

The Times has a complete list here. I count 16.

Constitutional Faces (or more precisely Constitutional Gadgets): “FBI Turns Off Thousands of GPS Devices After” Jones

February 27th, 2012

SCOTUS cases have repercussions, even if–as in Jones–we have no idea what the hell the Court held:

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling overturning the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices has caused a “sea change” inside the U.S. Justice Department, according to FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann.

Mr. Weissmann, speaking at a University of San Francisco conference called “Big Brother in the 21st Century” on Friday, said that the court ruling prompted the FBI to turn off about 3,000 GPS tracking devices that were in use.

These devices were often stuck underneath cars to track the movements of the car owners. In U.S. v. Jones, the Supreme Court ruled that using a device to track a car owner without a search warrant violated the law.

After the ruling, the FBI had a problem collecting the devices that it had turned off, Mr. Weissmann said. In some cases, he said, the FBI sought court orders to obtain permission to turn the devices on briefly – only in order to locate and retrieve them.

 Plus Justice Scalia’s trespass test is giving them tzuris!

For instance, he said, agency is now “wrestling” with the legality of whether agents can lift up the lid of a trash can without committing trespass. The majority opinion in U.S. v. Jones held that the agents had trespassed when placing the GPS device on a car without warrant.

He said the agency is also considering the implications of the concurring justices – whose arguments were largely based on the idea that a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of their movements, even if those movements are in public.

“From a law enforcement perspective, even though its not technically holding, we have to anticipate how it’s going to go down the road,” Mr. Weissmann said.

Hrm.

Justice Breyer, Part of Jury for Pritzker Architecture Prize, Awards Prize to Chinese Architect

February 27th, 2012

I guess Justice Breyer is an expert in architecture! The Times featured the award of the prize to Wang Shu. The jury citation is here. I see Breyer as a very Elsworth Toohey-esque architect critic.

Study Shows That Predictions From The Gut More Accurate

February 27th, 2012

If you trust your feeling, your prediction will be more accurate:

“When we rely on our feelings, what feels ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ summarizes all the knowledge and information that we have acquired consciously and unconsciously about the world around us. It is this cumulative knowledge, which our feelings summarize for us, that allows us make better predictions. In a sense, our feelings give us access to a privileged window of knowledge and information – a window that a more analytical form of reasoning blocks us from.”

“In 2012, there is no such thing as ‘unavailable.'”

February 27th, 2012

At ATL, Brian Tannenbaum writes about lawyers who want to get out of the office. Brian says you should never reply to emails immediately–wait 12 hours.

1. I never respond to an email immediately unless it requires an immediate response. If you respond to everything immediately, you are only training people to think that you respond immediately. When they send an email at 8:30 a.m. and by 8:42 you haven’t responded, they will stalk you. Back off, respond within 12 hours.

If I can answer the email in a minute or less, I reply right away. If it takes a few minutes of thought, I leave it unread, and get to it when I can.