I like reading the Volokh Conspiracy. I disagree with them on at least half of what I read, but their posts and the comments almost always teach me something about the law, and interacting with lawyers, especially when they are wrong, helps take away the halo I seem to hold for them.
And many of them were former hackers, certainly Eugene Volokh got his start that way.
I write this now, because when I have submitted links to HN from the VC, the links seem to go dead pretty quickly, and I think that's a shame, because often what they write about certainly seems well targeted to the hacker community.
That said, regarding Professor Kerr, while I find his posts very informative, I have often detected a weird skew to his analyses.
I am not a lawyer and pretty ignorant and I am certain his analyses are just a zillion times better than anything I could say, but for example, in the Jones GPS case, Professor Kerr was very attached to the raw search and seizure aspects of the case, and seemed to ignore what the implications of his analyses would be in a world of very cheap government installed ALPR devices.
In general, I think Prof. Kerr is just a lot more pro law enforcement than I am. I find that he is often very dismissive of the defendant's case. For example, he seems to take for granted that Aaron violated the CFAA. With that being said, I still think he is Volokh's best contributor.
Is Kerr being dismissive of the case, or is he stipulating things to make his two points (that prosecutors didn't stretch the CFAA or wire fraud statutes to make a case against Swartz, and that they weren't unusually vindictive with Swartz in negotiating a plea)? It was up to a jury, not Kerr, to decide actual guilt or innocence.
>that prosecutors didn't stretch the CFAA or wire fraud statutes to make a case against Swartz, and that they weren't unusually vindictive with Swartz in negotiating a plea
Yes, he was definitely doing that and he was right to. I am not saying he ought to play jury, just address some of the counterarguments.
I like reading the Volokh Conspiracy. I disagree with them on at least half of what I read, but their posts and the comments almost always teach me something about the law, and interacting with lawyers, especially when they are wrong, helps take away the halo I seem to hold for them.
And many of them were former hackers, certainly Eugene Volokh got his start that way.
I write this now, because when I have submitted links to HN from the VC, the links seem to go dead pretty quickly, and I think that's a shame, because often what they write about certainly seems well targeted to the hacker community.
That said, regarding Professor Kerr, while I find his posts very informative, I have often detected a weird skew to his analyses.
I am not a lawyer and pretty ignorant and I am certain his analyses are just a zillion times better than anything I could say, but for example, in the Jones GPS case, Professor Kerr was very attached to the raw search and seizure aspects of the case, and seemed to ignore what the implications of his analyses would be in a world of very cheap government installed ALPR devices.