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Only lawyers really know how to vet lawyers for competency, I've found. More people use the quality of the jingle as a guide than any useful way to discern competence, partly because people broadly fail to understand what a lawyer is supposed to do (and this differs depending on context, civil proceedings and criminal proceedings and administrative proceedings concern sometimes vastly disparate interests and in turn, responsibilities and expected outcomes).

The best way, generally, is to survey other lawyers in the same field and jurisdiction and cross-reference to see if a firm or solo practitioner gets more recognition from their peers independently, btw. It's how lawyers find representation in fields they have no familiarity with. The jingles at best are entirely irrelevant and may even be an indicator that the firm relies on volume more than it really should.

edit: should mention that this generally applies for criminal or administrative cases. The civil arena is far too big and varied for me to suggest a heuristic that can be generalized since it concerns so much work that is wildly different and also, comparatively few court appearances (although I'd likely use the same method, but starting with my classmates, if I need to hire someone for a civil matter, if I have a classmate who practices in the field and in my jurisdiction).

Considering on how many people are routinely influenced by the sunk cost fallacy when making their decisions, perhaps even that awareness on when to fold is a part of the critical process a good academic goes through in the course their research. The economy and politics have forced me to pivot and without enough self-awareness to realize when to leverage some other skill or the ability to learn another set of skills based on my prior education, even if it meant moving or changing to a field that isn't immediately obvious. I think it's a useful sanity check at times.

That is sort of the point of a liberal arts education broadly, no? It's not a trade school (although I did spend my 20s at a glorified one and worked in what really was a fancy service industry gig - the law - that is partially obstructed by the sort of things at stake that we deal with, but is fundamentally a service and very much one that is customer-facing. I was one of the first few to quit from those in my graduating class that I kept touch with as well.) Owners of sports franchises, worth billions of dollars, fail to understand concepts like this. Those in charge of large companies, with externalities being constraints that we might not see in fairness but still having control of the narrative more or less, fail to demonstrate this. The government and policymakers either ignore or are ignorant of this on more occasions than one can count. Although it's hard to say what would've happened in the alternative, the initiative does alter the dynamics one would eventually have with their new situation, speaking personally. At least I'm not routinely putting in 75-80 hour weeks which is liberating in its own way even if it was routine enough that few bat an eye when put in that position at the start, judging from what my friends mostly ended up doing and not doing.

But the imposter syndrome thing does haunt as well. It takes a while to realize that one hears about plane crashes because planes not crashing do not make the news, after all, and the actual rate of crashes, incidents, and near-misses can be and usually ends up haphazardly reported at best if one doesn't dig into the official quotidian, and jargon-filled language of official reports, and I don't think that it's part of society's expectation for the average person even if it's both an apt analogy and something to look up if one has the time.

Carthago delenda est!

And settlements or jury verdicts in the billions, easily. Do it en masse and the state might as well as mortgage itself to pay for all the Section 1983 suits that are slam dunks since the 4th Amendment is still good law last I checked.

Ding ding ding ding. Not just that, but you have to affirmatively and unambiguously invoke your 5th Amendment rights. As in, "I wish to invoke my rights under the 5th Amendment of the United States Constitution to remain silent while my lawyer is not present, and I wish to explicitly invoke my 6th Amendment right to counsel." No weasel words, no maybes or I dunnos. Invoke your rights, and if they persist, invoke your rights again, and again, and again. It's the only way to save your ass before the lawyer arrives because the police are simply seeking to catch somebody, not the right person necessarily, and they will literally outsource the lying to the jailhouse snitch to make it happen, amongst other tricks. You can't explain your way out of a situation where the police feels that you are their best shot at getting a perp walk arrange ASAP. Your lawyer can though.

Nope, the most competent defense lawyers are probably the federal defenders, who is backed by the resources of the feds, and have a much lighter case load, so they're able to actually spend the necessary time to mull over the minutia. They don't get to pick their clients and are frequently forced into being generalists, but on the federal level a lot of the "small time" crimes are kicked down to the state level. The feds prosecute terrorism, the local prosecutors prosecute murder. The thing is, the public have no idea what makes for a good attorney in any particular field (and it's not the jingle or Cellino and Barnes would probably be Supreme Court justices before the firm broke up), and public defenders are among the very few who have no choice in selecting their clients, the strength of the case, and with 80-120 open cases at a time you either really believe that your clients are all innocent or you absolutely need to hold the state to account as a matter of principle or you won't make it through the misdemeanor docket, never mind anything more serious or more sordid (mental health, juvenile).

Public defenders don't get into the line of work as a backup option. At least at my law school, they didn't recruit, because frankly they can't beat private firms or even the prosecutors on just about anything but the possibility of being on the right side of history. The pay barely covers interest on your loans, even during trials you have to run out to fill the meter every 4 hours where I was at - only the police got free parking. Everyone in my class with my skillset ended up at an IP firm or doing in house work somewhere, mostly in the Seattle area but also down to California. I don't regret a minute of the work, but in the grand scheme of things it's impossible to make a difference on any scale when you are an active participant in the system which is inherently skewed and allows prosecutors so much leeway and so much coercive power that the police can totally get away with not outright lying in interrogations and just play on the ignorance of the accused and implied threats and achieve the same result. The lying is just the most fun a cop can have without planting a gun on someone.

Prosecutors are absolutely immune. Brady violations only invalidate the underlying case and in really egregious cases, ruin future careers in politics, but it doesn't create criminal liability going the other way. Police have qualified immunity, prosecutors have absolute immunity, as long as the charge is something that constitutes their quotidian work.

Private prosecutions do exist, but not on a federal level, and anything falling under the purview of the CFAA - which is the umbrella that hangs over all computer-access-related crimes, is federal by definition. Besides, with parallel construction, they can always legally reverse-engineer a legally sound rationale that doesn't violate the 4th Amendment or what-have-you. However, while prosecutors are absolutely immune, the police are not and therefore are subject, occasionally, to federal-level liability either criminal or civil, although the prevalence of police perjury - testilying, as commonly known - is both an academic niche that has produced plenty of papers and have achieved virtually nothing in the real world. The term came into the public consciousness in 1994 and as late as 2018 I've heard it bandied about by cops in a courthouse. Prosecutors need the cops to investigate (public defenders' have a much smaller team of investigators if you're lucky, but even then anything technical is hopefully something you know enough about to find the right expert and conduct a competent cross examination. The police, of course, have the first mover advantage and so they can set up the fall guy who is already pension-eligible and move their assets out of their name before getting tossed in the gentlest way possible under the minivan. I wasn't involved with the case but the classic WA case involving the police using all of their tools available to rearrange the narrative surrounding a murder caught on camera and a federal prosecution is the Otto Zehm case. I had the luck to see what happened at sentencing and it was frankly sickening. https://www.spokesman.com/topics/otto-zehm/

So, police do get prosecuted, but only below the federal level, and extremely leniently, and if weren't for the video it probably wouldn't have happened. Ten years for a murder caught on video is crazy considering that the feds were giving out pleas of 8 years for "trafficking" 4 pills of Oxycodone before fent got into the supply (also thanks to the feds, as it was entirely supply driven) and ten years after leaving WA I still have former clients incarcerated for much more ambiguous fact patterns and convicted after multiple mistrials. As for the feds, now that Bivens is basically dead, even their own IG reports read like lurid crime novels written in the most lawyerly way possible. And if they're really in trouble, creating a moral panic always works. It had worked so far.

So uh, is the site onlyfans?

No, not state's rights. Due process of law and non-delegation are what's being ignored, and in turn, situations where actual harm is being caused without any avenue of redress is commonplace, particularly post PATRIOT Act.

This isn't the 1970s anymore. With the courts holding onto Chevron deference and the reorganization post 9/11 that effectively armed agencies to make them literally judge jury and executioner (not in that order) in some cases, as well as the continued inaction by congress to at least not allow Bivens to be whittled away to nothing, fundamentally what exemplifies agency action is no longer the idealized "do-gooders" but instead, ICE using tactics that would certainly be outside of what's permitted by the police to effectuate rules that it created and interpreted and enforced based on the barest of congressional mandates - and the abdication is on purpose - that results in American citizens being deported with little recourse or redress (provided that they make it back into the US somehow); CBP routinely fails to notify or deliberate skips notification for hearings prior to seizing what it deems contraband - never mind civil forfeiture (which it partakes in certainly), but administrative forfeiture; FDA rubber stamping DEA's requests which has no requirement to take into account any harm DEA's scheduling and enforcement processes may create to ordinary, law-abiding patients, and all this is on the record, whether it be from the inspectors general of the agencies themselves or during the rulemaking process, printed in black letter and online in the federal register. Post PATRIOT Act, DHS effectively is a paramilitary force that only partly answers to any court, and by large acts as enforcement for the executive branch. They do not serve judicial warrants but pretend to do so, use ruses to circumvent the 4th Amendment and refuse to answer FOIA requests, and agents have literally gotten away with murder not because the facts do not support such claims but because of a jurisdictional issue. It enables congress to write the vaguest of laws and let the agencies fill in the blanks as they wish, and they do so with gusto, frequently in ways that make no sense to the ordinary American or even English speaker in their selectiveness and choice of wording to the extent where multiple cases brought by states have litigated the wrong term of art before the process was mooted due to a change of administration. Agencies are frequently putting out non-binding, contradictory guidance on matters of importance, like, say, if crypto is a security. They also ignore parts of black letter law - asylum law has been broadly ignored by the Trump and the first half of the Biden administration, and in fact the distinct impression I get, having litigated such issues against DHS subagencies, is that the administration lacks full understanding of the complexities the agencies have created by themselves when it comes to rulemaking to the extent where terms that have no differentiation in plain English refer to entirely different things on a routine basis and somehow the term "admission" has at least six distinct definitions, sometimes used in conjunction in one paragraph, all of which are terms of art.

I can only comment on the agencies I directly dealt with as an attorney and in the best of times, when the law (or really, custom) is followed correctly, absurdities happen routinely that cause real harm. That's just one agency. The practices of the SEC, FAA, and a myriad of others that are more or less in a state of regulatory capture is frequently written about, but not having direct experience dealing with their homespun processes, feel free to start by perusing each agency's Inspector General Reports to get a sense of the tip of the iceberg. It has nothing to do with states' rights - we are talking about federal agencies, as there is actually recourse and remedies against state agencies, but not against federal agencies. Even if you believe that agencies are all acting on good intentions, it is creating bad - and frequently kafkaesque - outcomes.

Administrative law covers a lot of areas of concern, but it's when agencies, with next to no regard to due process as we ordinarily understand it and acting as brownshirts of whichever administration in power, make a mockery of basic human rights and back it up with loaded guns and pretensions of police, we're in a place that the congress that drafted the Administrative Procedures Act never anticipated and arguably, never intended, yet, here we are. Judicially my interpretation of the constitution is of the kind that believes not in the Borkian judicial restraint (which begs the question why does the court even exist) but an engaged court that is willing to fix things that have gone awry, feel free to label it however you want, as long as I'm grouped in with the pro-immigration anti-nationalist faction.

In the American case, the interpretation of the CFAA under Van Buren (2021) would provide at least the defense that one does not violate the law if there is no meaningful authorization scheme in place to determine what constitutes "exceeds authorized access". This may sound pedantic but when reporting on the decision much of the non-specialist media seemed to have failed to appreciate that in order to determine what conduct exceeds authorized access, it's necessary to be able to determine where authorized access starts and ends in every case as a factual matter, and the courts essentially threw out the theory that one can simply use a non-technological solution (like a very broad ToS) as a backstop and require some sort of notice and specificity. I don't think the mere fact that such a technological scheme can be erected is relevant since in theory you can put in some sort of basic authorization scheme - including basic HTTP authorization - around pretty much anything accessible via the protocol, but anything beyond a showing of actually putting such an authorization scheme in place, there's no real way to determine the unimplemented intent of some company in a way with any certainty. It's Orin Kerr's "gate-up-gate-down" theory - you need to have a gate in place to start with, instead of just a space where a gate can go or the assumption where a gate should be to figure out whether the gate is up or down, and without that determination one cannot meet all of the elements required to prove a violation of the statute.

I wouldn't even consider this "hacking" really. If prosecuted a defense attorney familiar with both the technology and the admitted niche area of computer crime law can readily conduct some very effective cross-examination against whoever the state is bringing out as a witness. The government does frequently rely on the lack of tech-competent and accessible counsel as a way to exert coercion (and usually resulting in a plea), and it doesn't help that the layperson has a very difficult time figuring out what qualities constitute competency when looking for attorneys (hence the enduring popularity of jingles since being memorable is frequently mistaken for being competent), but they are out there.

The key part is that it's a private company offering something that is opt-in. If the federal government mandated it, it's almost certainly a 10th Amendment violation (via commandeering). It would also effectively make the currently de facto second class citizenship of those who entered without inspection including DACA recipients into de jure second class citizens and under current law, for life. It would fall squarely into the small part of the opinion landscape in the US where both the right and the left would have reasons to hate it.

Don't forget that he indirectly and in hindsight contributed to the independence of Peru as well. Most of the fighting of course did not happen on the seas, but just as air superiority matters a great deal, naval superiority in the 1820s mattered as well, and the upper hand he gave to the expedition from Chile/Argentina made it a war that was effectively centered on the land war aspect and led to in part and a few years down the line, Peru's independence from Spain as well.

Somewhat ironically, the Irish diaspora (the Flight of the Wild Geese, which happened in 1691 and scattered the Irish Catholic military aristoracy across Catholic Europe and their descendants, just Europe in general, likely had a larger cumulative role in effectuating much of the independence movements. After all, O'Higgins is not exactly a native Spanish surname. Informally the scions of Irish Catholic families of importance, with their paths of advancing in Britain blocked, filtered out across the continent for the next hundred years or so and ended up having certainly an outsized influence on the makeup of military administration and colonial administration by way of the makeup of the officer corps of the nations where they ended up settling, stretching from Spain to France to Austria to Russia. They were not exactly mercenaries but really a true diaspora before the concept really solidified in today's terms. One can argue that it was certainly an early and self-inflicted 'brain-drain' through policies instituted by the post-Williamite British state that may have had longer term consequences (the loss of Minorca and the loss of America came in fairly rapid succession, for example) to the British and the distinct and separate traditions allowing them to be less attached to a sovereign but a cause. Much more on this needs studying, but what is certain is that policies made out of fear undermined the British and aided continental powers for generations. Look at the names etched on the Arc de Triomphe and you'll notice how many of the names are distinctly not French, including that of Dillion (Arthur Dillion, related to the Viscount Dillion, who also fought for the American side during the revolution), Clarke (whose father served in the Dillion Regiment), MacDonald (whose ties to Flora Macdonald during the Jacobite Rising precipitated his family's exile, but nevertheless served as officers first under Dillon before later siding with Napoleon and taking independent command, primarily in Switzerland) are just some of the prominent names inscribed. Sectarianism's long tail etched in stone right there.

I would like to be pedantic and mention that instead of outright bribery as we know today, the sort of coercion (in the broadest sense of the word) that enabled the rotten boroughs involved some far more innovative and long-term thinking like ensuring that the demographics of boroughs in question, if anyone still lived there, to essentially to owe their ability to live and by extension, ply their trades and all that. You are effectively voting so you can have a place to live, in many cases. Old Sarum is the classical case and almost certainly the most egregious one in a prima facie manner but thanks to the manifold of coercive measures implemented it took until the implementation of secret ballots to truly ensure that the old rotten boroughs age was finally no longer a serious concern, and that took another... 40 years? (I realize that I'm focusing on the descriptor on pocket boroughs specifically, which is a subset of the broader rotten boroughs phenomenon, but the subset's primary differentiation comes from how they were attained and not how their existence determined the makeup of parliament, considering that large landowners were able to have "in their pocket" the votes of multiple constituencies that they could exert indirect coercion over quite readily). Yes, it's amazing looking back that one did not follow the other somehow, but baby steps man, baby steps. It beats no steps at all when there's not really a better alternative on the table, even if it's a long way from ideal.

Wait, what? US as in the United States? That's simply not true. Even if we disregard that "legality in the US" is at best a moving target considering that federalism creates jurisdictional differences as a feature and therefore there are few things that are entirely outlawed in the US across the board everywhere, but considering that the most efficacious painkillers are also the most controlled, while deliriants that, prior to processing, extraction of active ingredients, and pairing with other psychoactive substances at minute doses, have little health benefits but great potential to create harm (thinking of belladonna and datura as a start), are legal to grow and aren't even subject to scheduling. Criminalization's link to health is effectively ret-conned and a poor ret-con at that. What turned Laudanum from something acceptable to give to babies to something of a moral hazard far worse than a health hazard was the same rationale that turned a nation of with no provision for immigration controls for the first hundred years of its existence into one where entire ethnicities, nationalities, and places of origin served as the basis for exclusion and continues to do so under the thinnest of guises: moral panics based in racism and perpetuated by those empowered and enriched via the propagation of such policies.

Lying about efficacy will do nothing but only bolster what was never a legitimate rationale to begin with. This is a country that failed to learn lessons from prohibition, that managed to kept the Mann Act on the books even though the legislative intent - that of the fear over 'miscegenation' was hardly a secret, a country where congress never bothered to even get rid of the chapter in the US Code that contained the Chinese Exclusion Act and therefore leaving the ugly legacy plain to see for all. Why lie about your cause when the truth that undergirds the reality is far uglier and far more disconcerting to begin with? And of course, for once, Oscar Wilde was wrong and the truth may not be pure but certainly simple: prohibitionist policies began in racism and are sustained by moral panics while protected by the state agencies that now benefit financially from its existence. All this has a paper trail, both online and in print, in the federal register, in the US Code, in congressional records and archives. If that's not enough to justify resistance, your real reasoning will still be more persuasive than having to make up something to justify a position against a line of thinking that has goalposts with wheels built in from the start.

Or hell, even if it's not "fun" (since what is fun is ultimately subjective as well), as long as it is not harming anyone else, what is really the problem?

I did a lot of psychedelics, I don't know if fun was ever the word I'd use to describe most of it, but I don't regret any of it. It opened up a lot of the back of my brain in a way I never could conceive and really allowed me to think and analyze things in ways that I wouldn't have access to without. That in itself is well worth the experience, in my subjective reckoning. When I no longer felt that psychedelics were able to provide me with what it once did, I stopped. That was that. That surely is enough, right?

If only that was the bar exam. Now it's all UBE so what you end up with is 2/3 multiple choice questions that bear little relationship to actual law you'll be practicing, and 1/3 are answers to absurd hypotheticals that you'd answer in a formulaic fashion, situations that you will pretty much never see IRL and certainly will never be in a position where you can't look up the law, except this one time.

Oh, and the software that's used to conduct the test is practically malware in the way it operates. At the NY State Bar exam I took there were about 100 people who didn't finish because the crappy software crashed and you had to handwrite the whole thing from the first question on. If it crashes your computer, you might as well leave since you won't have time to finish.

Really, the bar exam has virtually nothing in common with the actual practice of law. It's a separate skill, like taking the SATs. Although, there are so many legal niches that it's unlikely that testing real law would really resemble how legal practicecs work today anyway. It's pretty much an arbitrary test that might fry your computer. Hopefully they at least they should have released a newer version of the software in the intervening years.

The ordinary client does not know how to properly evaluate the competency of an attorney anyway, DEI or not DEI. And no, the jingle is not correlated to performance either in motion or trial practice. Hell, Cellino and Barnes literally had a new Barnes and kept the jingle and nobody even seemed to notice.

You can work, but you can't get paid for said work unless it's during a school break. At least that was ABA rules around ten years ago, and followed assiduously by everyone from private practitioners to the federal government. Nobody will hire you when you study for the bar (although if you apply outside of the legal field, you can. I worked in a kitchen when I studied for the bar). Although you'll have to have a body of work in order to get someone to pay you anyway, so if you're not the type who'd go from law review to big law or teaching, you can rack up a lot more hours if you're willing to do the unpaid busywork that comes with, say, the Public Defender's office, or the Prosecutor's Office. Internship + externship + paid work added together with a summer's head start I managed to cram in almost 3000 hours before I took the bar and had a job waiting for me right away, but please don't do that, because you'll get burned out really quickly and possibly become very jaded about the work. I spent one spring doing only juvenile cases and it totally fucked me up. And this was after I had worked on two capital cases (neither got the death penalty, thankfully), and in the early days of Facebook I scraped the personal details of residents of two counties for peremptory challenges during voir dire (hung jury, both murder cases). I don't think anyone in my class came even close to how much work I put in. I practiced for 6 years and then quit.

You forgot the quotes around "benevolent". It's "benevolent" to those who conform to what the state wishes to present as their archetype. Meanwhile, migrant workers are effectively indentured servants and prop up, mostly out of sight, the country in a manner not dissimilar to Qatar or Bahrain or certain sectors of the US. If public housing needs second class citizens in order for it to work, it's not worth it. One might as well as cite the excise-farming era of Singapore between Raffles and Clementi Smith as the actual golden age upon which the modern prosperity was founded, but it doesn't fit the official narrative of course. During this time, there was "public housing", but not run by the de jure government but the de facto native-place associations that the administrators, who had next to no knowledge of the local languages, called secret societies. They are in fact akin to Landsmanshaft in the Yiddish tradition. Everything since then requires a lot of qualification just to peel back the revisionism and certainly does not serve as a good example unless one thinks second class citizenship is worth the perceived order and functionality the nation projects to the world.

Companies are owned by people too. The idea that somehow the decision to engage in a consensual pooling of resources to organize an entity to conduct business somehow degrades a person is a wild take. In fact, the existence of companies as separate entities is in some way an insulation from the sort of state intervention upon the individual and their right to association that you describe. That's not a higher standard. That's higher barbarism, at best. Courts have the power to compel, coerce, and enforce through, however removed, the use of force upon the individual who may or may not have voluntarily assented to such power. Why would anyone hire anyone in the first place if you can't downsize when needed? You'd leave, if the state lets you, and in many places, it simply won't.

Which btw is a terrible analogy. The west even while there was a "frontier" had laws and in fact was subject to the actual US military attempting to actively subjugate Native Americans. Laws absolutely existed - even every western had a sheriff or two - and to various degrees they were carried out in ways that we would certainly view as unacceptable today broadly speaking. The "wild west" if anything was characterized by enforcement by extremely punitive measures carried out sporadically for perceived deterrent effects. Law enforcement was organized both on a local and federal level - they just had a habit, that in some ways continues today, to be focused more on "a bad guy" instead of "the bad guy", hence the lynchings that went on against minority groups, but just because lynchings are extrajudicial didn't mean that the participants were not frequently part of said law enforcement (a posse comitatus, if you will). That's not really anything close to what the labor landscape looks like today, or the internet, or any of the other oft-seen but rarely critiqued comparisons made today.

Yes, although there's nuance to that:

If it's for something personal, then sure. It allows me to edit the code to fix small bugs or otherwise tweak it to my own needs.

If it's for something that actually handles my money in any way, then only if I can audit the code myself and the libraries it uses. I err on the side of over due-diligence for sure, and I'm fairly confident in my abilities in auditing code in a few languages that luckily are also commonly used enough that they are ubiquitous - Python, JS, Go, Solidity, etc. If your open source project is written in Brainfuck, I mean, props, but I'm not going to use that for anything production worthy.

Eh, the article is extremely unclear as to what the context is surrounding the assertion since opening statements should be finished on the day after the jury is empaneled, and so "when it's their turn" could refer to either opening statements (which is aimed at essentially nobody but more of an outline of the case from each side for the jury) or cross examination (which might be a bit early, but not impossible, but certainly would be directed at Ellison specifically).

It's impossible to tell without transcripts or at the very least better reporting, but the whole "it was someone else's fault" defense tends to work better when that someone else openly admits that it's their fault instead of the other way around. Federal prosecutors, in any case, don't fall for that anymore, although it is still very very very occasionally seen in state courts where a witness given immunity testifies that they were the guilty party when the issue involves identification and the act can only involve either/or and not both potential codefendants and there are no witnesses. Those are the types of cases that the feds would much rather decline prosecution to let the state prosecutors have their shot if they don't think they can get a plea anyhow. Cases where the feds are willing to go to trial on are almost always cases where defense ends up trying to mitigate instead of going for a straight acquittal on all counts, especially since this is really just a fraud/money laundering case and there's little chance of the government making their case too complicated for the jury. SBF not taking a plea is frankly idiotic but then again, the first murder trial I've been part of the defense for, we worked our asses off and got a hung jury, prosecutor offered a manslaughter 2, time served, which is as close to a win for us as we can get outside of acquittal, but the client adamantly refused and retrial on the same evidence got the kid 28 years so, lead a horse to water, etc.

Federally, not since 1981. On the state level, some states do provide for a process that is recognizably analogous but still differ state to state, sometimes greatly. Also, states differ as to how direct a route a citizen-initiated complaint can directly affect the actions of the judicial system - some states use prosecutors as a gatekeeping mechanism, while others allow it as a process distinct from the prosecutorial system and so would skip over the gatekeeper and directly go to the judge. I don't know about most states, but I know that it's a mechanism that New Jersey, Washington, New Hampshire, and Idaho recognizes.

This is a sufficiently niche field of even criminal law that would require you to hire a lawyer to handle anyway. And usually there's some statutory limitation on what sort of prosecution a private individual can initiate. It's generally just not worth the trouble.

The DMCA does allow for a separate, federal, and civil cause of action to recover damages if the filer of the takedown notice knowingly and materially misrepresented the operative parts of the notice. 17 U.S.C. § 512(f) is where this cause of action resides. However, to prove "knowingly" and "materially" at the same time is a pretty high bar, although it might be possible to get a default judgment if they simply don't respond. Still, this is a limited remedy that most people won't be able to take advantage of since it involves potentially costly litigation and no punitive damages. It's not a prosecution of any sort, but it's sadly the best (only) option on the books that counts as relief, however limited it is.

Oh god, the NYC transit issue is like the largest rancid lasagna of projects - multi-layered, affects tons of people, and so deeply entrenched across legal and technical aspects alike. I've literally lived in an unrecognized breakaway Narco-state of a Narco-state that broke away and has de facto control on the China-Myanmar border, and on the block where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding in that boat when he was caught in 2013, but living and commuting in NYC, even as a (entry level, public interest) lawyer who worked in the financial district my final choices were an obviously illegal apartment in Chinatown in a basement with a low, uneven ceiling or a place in Flatbush that literally shared a wall with the tunnel leading into the Parkside Q station, which during weekdays also meant that the B was shaking up the place too so that none of my furniture stayed in place. NYC was great for the friends I had and the stuff to do and even the ultimately soul-crushing job that at least made a difference but man, I'll take the Narco-state-in-a-Narco-state any day now, all things considered.

When it comes to consulting, I don't have direct personal knowledge but from what I gather from cousins I grew up with who did work for McKinsey and smaller, more niche firms, it's really the same issue presented in a different context as the issue of clients picking the lawyer with the best jingle (Cellino and Barnes, anyone?) instead of the actual most competent lawyer, since clients almost never have the frame of reference required to even understand what sort of metrics they should be looking at, and if that data is even available and where to get such data. It's a bit like advanced metrics versus back-of-the-card metrics in baseball. I always practiced defense, never civil work (admin/criminal only), and in a variety of state and federal jurisdictions where the need was greatest and resources lacking. In part it's because I find IP work distasteful and frequently petty, even though it was a subject matter I was well versed in enough to get offers of employment at even though I literally never wrote for law review and interned only in criminal defense. With that comes with the territory where essentially by the time I got my limited license right after my second year's finals ended I was already racking up bar complaints and paid internship offers at about the same rate, since other attorneys noticed really quickly that I had a useful affinity with tech generally but especially in spotting evidentiary bullshit in computer crime prosecutions and those involving cell phone forensics. It didn't hurt that the first time I sat at the attorney's table in a felony trial I had the facebook data of every juror in the pool that was public - and in 2012 just about everything was public - and managed to get a hung jury, which just ended up with the prosecutor waiting until I was back in class to do the retrial on the same evidence and ending up with a first degree murder conviction. Literally all I did was focus on using preemptory challenges on those who are openly either related to, friends with, or had positive comments about the police who nevertheless claim to be impartial - not exactly rocket science or learning Brainfuck. By the time I graduated I had recorded a ridiculous number of internship/externship hours, managed to get several CFAA counts dropped on computer crime related cases only to have the jury convict on wire fraud anyway, and got not-guilty verdicts in around 10% of all cases that did go to trial, which was followed by sometimes weekly bar complaints filed against my supervisor and I for not being able to use black magic to jedi mindtrick the jury or something. If this was baseball, I'd have a 1-10 record but witha BABIP of .800 or something since before 2021, defending against a CFAA criminal charge was ludicrously difficult thanks to the law being drafted pre-internet by senators who watched Wargames starring Matthew Broderick, which was also released half a decade before I was born. One can never tell if the police and prosecutor really didn't understand technology or were just intentionally screwing with the court by presenting gibberish evidence and hiring incredibly incompetent experts, but at one point during cross I realized that the police officer testifying did not understand DHCP and so the entire basis for attribution was based on an assumption that open hotspots assigned permanent IPs to clients connecting, full stop. We lost the case anyway since wire fraud was an even easier charge to convict on. Even today, just reading dockets and filings and receiving the occasional (and always baseless) DMCA notice by way of Github, it appears that not only are prosecutors hiring experts without expertise, but in civil cases, large companies - particularly in DMCA related litigation - are hiring attorneys who don't know how CDNs work at all and are conducting ridiculous direct and cross examinations or making nonsensical jurisdictional claims that actually end up undermining their own cases. Since the standard for jurisdiction is purposeful availment of service within the jurisdiction, basing jurisdiction on geolocating a CDN IP from your office will obviously come back with one in the US, even though the defendant, who is almost always overseas, would have the exact opposite view if they showed up in court to defend themselves, not to mention that since CDNs aren't hosting the content through intentional selection of server location but a caching-based automated process, every time the court goes in depth on the meaning of purposeful availment, the purported copyright holder is essentially sabotaging the viability of their future cases while arguing to nobody currently.

Hell, I got a DMCA notice from a white shoe fancy IP firm that predicated its takedown notice on my use of the word "scrape" which then proceeds to misstate the fact, the law, and showed blatant lack of knowledge of even the word "hosting". For the record, "scrape" does not have a legal definition under the cited statute and there's no case law in either jurisdiction that would make the word itself the basis for a claim of infringement per se. Actually, I'm pretty sure they didn't even look at the code I wrote and may have even inadvertently claimed copyright on something they only had a license to, while another part of the claim may be an admission of a prima facie violation of the CFAA as interpreted post van Buren. Since the code in the repo is meant to fix the shitty app they bought that basically was impossible to use, I'm not counter-noticing it officially since the remedy for that is just restoring the repo and if they want their paying customers to not be able to use functionality they paid for, so be it. But if a company the size of the NY Times is able to hire legal representation that is so incompetent to a degree where I've seen pro se petitions by prisoners that are better informed than the notice that certainly was billed at a rate that cost about as much the entire misdemeanor representation of a low level assault charge that goes to trial, clearly there wasn't anything close to oversight or due diligence applied. I doubt any attorney would risk their bar card to defraud the court in such a blatant manner, I can only surmise that it's incompetence, aided by the fact that lawyers who code and know the specific law and have specific experience with the law is likely a small group, but I know personally some very competent and in fact some very good IP attorneys in NYC. But if a corporation this size can't adequately figure out who's actually good at what they purport to do, I guess it's many times harder for the individual.

(Although really it's not. Consults are typically free, and simply asking every attorney you consult who they'd hire if they're in your shoes and crowdsource those actually practicing is usually enough to figure out who to hire)

There's a lot of incorrect data floating around, but then again, that's not really a problem limited to Experian (I've seen it with all credit reporting agencies), and it's not even limited to private entities. I would even say that it's less of a concern when it comes to the ramifications. About 15 years ago the police showed up at my parents' house looking for "me", and as it was a Friday evening, it took until Tuesday before it transpired, after my mother went to the courthouse in befuddlement, that due to a clerical error of some sort, somehow the LA Sheriff's Office looking to serve a failure to appear warrant on someone whose name is similar to mine but otherwise did not match my age, SSN, or anything else ended up getting served to me, and out of sheer dumb luck it happened during winter break, whereas 49 out of 52 weeks of the year I'd be 3000 miles away at school or 6000 miles away doing fieldwork. The confusion was already apparent by Monday because I spent the whole day in a holding cell with 30 other people at the courthouse and was promptly shuttled back to the Twin Towers jail with zero explanation, and it took literally Tuesday night around 11:30pm, after 3 hours of sitting on a bench, handcuffed, in silence for no discernable reason except that they can. In the interim, I did not have access to medication that I needed and quickly fell into medical distress that was entirely ignored. Luckily I didn't have a seizure, but that easily could have happened. A little bit of due diligence would have prevented this, and if I had a seizure the lawyers I consulted at the time said that I may be able to bring a claim against the sheriffs, but since I didn't, it didn't matter.

Except that I did end up going to law school, and during my internships, which was extensive (your local public defender's office can absolutely use a law student who is tech/code literate, and attorneys and judges absolutely notice when you appear every afternoon if you treat the whole endeavor as less grad school but more trade school), it turned out that data error of some sort that resulted in some sort of loss of liberty, however temporary, is common enough that I'd say between 1-2% of bond hearings involved a case of mistaken identity. Bond hearing is the first opportunity for the defendant to face a judge and while the percentage is obviously low, misdemeanor bond hearing dockets are cattle-calls and a public defender and intern would be sorting and prepping between 30 to 100 individuals (higher after holiday weekends) usually in the span of 2 hours, every single day the court is in session. I didn't go to law school in CA and the demographics are pretty dissimilar, but the sort of error and the ramifications are striking in similarity. It adds up pretty quickly.

Then leveraging my experience and language skills, I ended up moving into immigration removal defense at a private firm a few years later and as it turned out, ICE had data errors that, at least during the mid-Obama years, was even more prevalent, except immigration enforcement is administrative law, not criminal law, and federal administrative law, by virtue of its non-inclusion in the Constitution (who knew Jefferson and Madison could not literally see into the future, eh?), allowed for far more shenanigans with far fewer tangible consequences and most importantly, no entitlement to counsel except very narrow and exceptional circumstances, and in 1 circuit only (9th Cir, cases where the detained had severe mental disabilities). And then I began to see cases of US citizens, who are not subject to immigration enforcement, getting detained on administrative grounds and unable to get themselves out of the situation because administrative agencies almost never act in the capacity that places someone in non-judicial detention, except immigration enforcement (ICE/CBP, basically). Since it was not a judicial matter, there's no allegation of a crime, and without protections afforded by the Constitution or access to counsel, ICE was removing US citizens who had paperwork (that they would regard as false) and an abbreviated version of due process in immigration "court". I still don't know how they determine where to remove US citizens to, since some are native-born and some derived their citizenship from parentage, both requiring no paperwork since it doesn't involve naturalization. The US does not have a national ID system that is mandatory (non-citizens can get SSNs of course and many Americans do not have passports, and almost nobody routinely carries their birth certificate on them, which ICE routinely ignores anyway even if you manage to produce one). Immigration court proceedings do catch a number of erroneous detention cases, but we really can only rely on limited datasets to determine how many US citizens get removed to god-knows-where. Generally you'd have to make it back into the country to even make your case known to attorneys. Catholic Charities is probably the largest immigration legal service provider in terms of size and scale in this country by virtue of them being present just about everywhere and colleagues there sharing anectodal experience say that the number is "higher than anybody should be comfortable with", but there's so little transparency or accountability that the only thing that's certain is that it happens often enough that if you practice in this niche it's likely that you'll see cases, and there's very little that could be done to hold the agency accountable.

Oh, and somehow my erroneous arrest ended up requiring me to explain to the state bar even though it is not linked to any actual case since it was an actual case of mistaken identity/lack of due diligence. It might still be in the system somewhere. Although it doesn't affect me today in any meaningful way, thanks to the kafkaesque system we have, having even an erroneous record of jumping an NYC turnstile, and afaik only an NYC turnstile (unless there's a subway system elsewhere in NY state), is sufficient for a legal non-citizen to face removal proceedings, thanks to careless wording and judicial deference and intentional congressional vagueness in statutory wording and New York State's shambolic legislative system unable or willing to alter the otherwise inconsequential nomenclature of the law. Small data errors can and have literally led to the upending of lives. I guess when there's a potential Sword of Damocles hanging over just about everyone, it's almost comforting to know that most of the time database errors only lead to small inconveniences in the grand scheme of things.

For the most part, if you can make money for other people, you can use that skill set for yourself.

Also, if you're somewhere where it's legal or at least accessible, it's not actually 100% true that at a casino the house always wins. It will take a little bit of effort to get started and you do need a small bit of infrastructure (but a cheap VPS or a SoC would actually do, depending on what you focus on), but it's not only possible, but can be fairly profitable to bet on sports. You do need some money in the bank to start, but there's a fair bit of resources on Github that can help you with data collection, analytics, etc. And places like the sportsbook subreddit or one of many forums out there where you can get a lay of the land.

I have no CS degree, hell, I haven't taken math since I failed AP Stats in 11th grade (tbf my teacher had a stroke in class 3 weeks before the test and died before he got to the hospital and it screwed up everyone and nobody in the class passed since this was just before we could bring cell phones to school, but still, that year was a wash). I haven't taken a formal math class since and I went to 8 more years of school after that. 3.5 years later I'm up 161 units which is just about viable (5%+ ROI is generally considered viable).

It's nice to work from home, hang out with likeminded fans in groupchats and reddit, and watch sports and make money. Now, it is still gambling. I've lost 32 straight picks in a row once - then Brentford beat City and made half of that back. It's not for the faint of heart, but it is a viable option if you are into sports, or statistics, or just hate making front ends as I do. Just don't buy anyone else's picks, they wouldn't be selling picks if they're actually making money.

It's not really a legal grey area, congress deliberately writes vague laws so that administrative agencies can interpret and fill in gaps during their rulemaking process, which would then receive deference from courts if challenged and effectively become judge, jury, executioner. At this point I'm surprised that they haven't delegated out all the naming of post offices to some agency.

Too bad the press release here is also hot garbage. For one, it's heavily based on speculative notions of what happened. Secondly, the withdrawal notice IS regulatory, and LedgerX is the legal entity that made the request. Changing it would look far more suspicious than following procedure. Also, what sort of regulation could have stopped this is very much an open question, since the whole phenomenon of affiliates, subsidiaries, and everything that led to FTX and FTX.US offering different products to different customers is entirely a product of anticipating or compliance with regulations, keeping in mind that FTX doesn't only operate in the US and some amorphous world but actual countries with their own regulatory frameworks. And the revolving door is effectively inevitable - those who are engaged in the field with any expertise on specific regulations is going to be a very small pool, and this goes for a lot more industries than CEXes, especially in technical fields and it doesn't even need to be rocket science. Courts and attorneys are setting a lot of junk precedent that will never be relevant or end up counterproductive because they don't know how CDNs work and some of the opinions from DMCA suits against absentee defendants are entirely based on infringement arising out of Cloudflare IPs while defining incidental (non-purposeful) availment of service as insufficient. Without a revolving door, it'll become farcical because you'd end up the equivalent of asking a dentist to do brain surgery. Without competent counsel, and facing down regulatory pressure, you will just lose the industry all-together, which is the apotheosis of an unregulated market because all activity is either underground or out of jurisdiction. The US is a big market, but nobody wants to go through what Ripple is going through, and calling it a regulatory failure when undercollateralized derivatives were offered on ftx.com but not ftx.us wasn't some 4D chess move but self-preservation, like Binance eventually did. I also can't figure out the logic behind the rationale that can include both "CFTC failed to regulate" and "CFTC should regulate more". 100 x 0 = 0. CFTC has acted incompetently before - like treating all holders of a token as an active member of a DAO in an enforcement action, seemingly forgetting that I can send anyone a few tokens, or hell, an offensive NFT for that matter, and there's not much you can do to stop that even if you catch it.

Although reading bettermarkets I can't help but notice that its critiques are almost always on the regulators and their incompetence and the solution is... more regulation. They depict what can only be described as a fantasy world where crypto - that is all crypto, which is not a monolith - is the boogeyman while in reality, crypto is given the exact opposite of the too-big-to-fail treatment.

> The key to that influence campaign is to buy as many former public officials and regulators as possible to gain access to their expertise, inside knowledge, and networks developed when they were supposedly working in the public interest. The importance of those revolving door hires cannot be overstated because they not only enable ready access to current policymakers and regulators, but also to the inside knowledge that enables crypto to precisely tailor and target their strategies to be optimally successful.

Are they deliberately misleading the reader or genuinely talking out of their ass? You hire regulators for compliance, because the tech moves too quickly, and optimally successful strategy? Even MEV bots get salmonella. Not to mention that academia has much of that covered. Then, I checked out their CEO's litigation record on courtlistener and found that until last year he was at some big law defending predatory lenders. Well, there you go.

India claims sovereignty over the Andaman Islands including the Sentinel Islands. Just because the islanders don't know/refuse to engage with the state doesn't stop the state from asserting their claim.

Although, there are entities that are de facto sovereign and even have had the wherewithal to keep it with arms. Myanmar is home to more than one of these, actually. There's the Shan State (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shan_State), and within their de facto sovereign areas there are pockets of smaller administrative units that are armed and are also de facto sovereign, accepting nominal de jure Burmese authority over the authority of the nationalist minority independence movements, such as the Wa State with (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Wa_State_Army). Alas, the tribes here in the US don't quite have that kind of firepower, nor the desire to refight the latter half of the 19th Century.

That's not to say that the relationships between tribes, the federal government, and state governments is any less complicated and at times contentious. The Supreme Court tends to favor tribal sovereignty as almost akin to that of a state, but not in all circumstances and where "full faith and credit" ends when it comes to tribal judicial authority when it comes to civil matters seldom actually represent actual "full" anything. Although tribes do have sovereign immunity so without congressional approval one can't simply litigate out every issue by suing the tribe, so the ambiguities are likely to persist.

There are no clean hands here. Binance does sketchy things that screw over their customers. FTX apparently does too (although anyone else have their referral income dry up suddenly in July-ish?). This happens because it's blatantly clear that the tech is moving quicker than the legislature by years and the only 'tool' they can wield is punitive, with arguments designed via circular logic that would only justify more regulation, but have no clue what and how to regulate in a manner that actually protects consumers and minimize potential side-effects that may last for decades - because it's likely impossible thanks to congressional ignorance and the narrow mandates of executive branch agencies largely focused on punitive measures uber alles.

This might have gotten a bit personal, but effectively this is a lobbyist fight. Whoever wins, we lose. Keep your crypto in self-custody and remember that what the state and those with billions to spend on gaining influence are ultimately corseted by the myopia that comes with power. There are people who use crypto everyday now - I am one of them - and maybe the preoccupation over schoolyard slights and performative regulatory capture will simply result in more and more people moving crypto off the CEXes.