Reed Smith, the large Pittsburgh-based law firm, has announced a fundamental restructuring of its policies with regard to associate performance and promotion. According to an article in AmLaw Daily: The firm has revamped its associate model, doing away with associate classes based strictly on entry date in favor of three associate groups that will have […]
Author Archive | David Post
Going Rogue, Going Rouge
So here’s a cute little copyright (or trademark?) problem (or, depending on your viewpoint, an outrageous rip-off). According to Entertainment Weekly (and the Gateway Pundit) start-up publisher OR Books has announced plans to publish Going Rouge: Sarah Palin An American Nightmare, a collection of essays about the former Alaska governor with a title — and […]
Domain Bullying
A posting over on the Big Government blog details recent attempts by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to shut down the website at AFTExposed.com (which, as you might guess from the name, doesn’t have very nice things to say about the AFT). The AFT’s General Counsel has sent the operators of the offending website […]
And Speaking of Copyright
VC readers in New York City might be interested in this talk I’m going to be giving at lunchtime this coming Thursday, Oct. 22. It’s co-sponsored by the Copyright Society of the US and the Internet Society’s NYC chapter, and is my (latest) attempt to get people to think about how we might fashion a […]
Copyright Kerfuffle:
You probably read about the little copyright flare-up that accompanied the recent posthumous release of Michael Jackson’s new single, “This is It.” The song is, apparently, almost identical to an earlier song “I Never Heard,” co-written by Jackson and rock-and-roll legend Paul Anka many years ago but never released. Anka immediately gave an interview in […]
God Bless America:
You might have missed this, assuming that, unlike me, you don’t comb the NYT sports pages for odd little items like this. According to a report in Saturday’s paper, Irish tenor Ronan Tynan, a “a fixture at Yankee Stadium for years with his stirring rendition of God Bless America” during the 7th inning stretch, was […]
More Soccer News:
Congrats to the US National Team, which punched its ticket to World Cup 2010 with a wonderful victory over Honduras last night (no small feat – the Hondurans were 8-0 in WC qualifying matches before their loss yesterday). But the real drama is down in South America, with the Argentines. Argentina is on any soccer […]
A Milestone Day for the Internet?
On January 1, 1983, not a single one of us noted a very important thing happening: the DoD’s “ArpaNet” network was implementing the switchover to the TCP/IP inter-networking protocols for the then-quasi-experimental “Internet.” You would have had to be awfully prescient to recognize what we recognize today — that the transformative global network was as […]
The Lowly Comma, Revisited
In the Writing Guidelines I distribute to students, I use the following example to illustrate the principle that “everything you put on the page matters”: Everything – every word, every bit of punctuation, every decision to begin a paragraph with one sentence rather than another, every decision whether to use “shall” or “should” or “may” […]
Getting it Right
As I’m settling in to watch some more fabulous Champions League soccer tonight (and for those of you who know what I’m talking about, if you have a chance to see replays of yesterday’s Arsenal-Olympiakos and/or Barcelona-Kiev games, don’t pass it up; spectacular stuff, that) it occurs to me that nothing about soccer is more […]
The ESPN Effect:
Some 15 years ago or so, my buddy Roger and I were talking on the phone as we did pretty much every week , and the subject turned, as it usually did, to baseball – this was before I got the soccer bug and started to put baseball matters behind me. We were chatting about […]
Should Lawmakers, Um, Read the Laws They’re Voting On?:
Sounds like something you’d ask in a third-grade civics class. But an odd editorial in today’s Washington Post, takes to task “a group of well-meaning professional activists — and, so far, over nearly 60,000 online petitioners” who have demanded that members of Congress sign a pledge “never to vote on any bill unless they have […]
Moosical, the Musical:
So I thought I’d pass this along, seeing how today is “One Web Day” . . . one of the interesting things about writing a book is that readers do all sorts of interesting things with it. I posted, a while back, Ken Liu’s lovely “moose” characters that he was inspired to put together after […]
School Supplies:
With horror, I’m beginning to realize that classes (at my law school, anyway, and at many others as well) are actually starting up again this coming week, bringing summer ’09 to an end, alas. Time for my annual plug for my “Writing Guidelines” — if you’re a beginning law student, or a returning law student, […]
Jefferson, LIncoln, Wilentz, Gates, and Slavery:
I’m with co-blogger Randy Barnett on this: Sean Wilentz’ recently-published essay on Lincoln, historiography, politics (and many other things) is a magnificent piece of argumentative scholarship, well worth reading by anyone interested in Lincoln, US history, slavery, Thomas Jefferson, the Civil War, . . . One issue – tangential, admittedly, to the main debates, but […]