Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

Jewel Kilcher and Garth Brooks singing the old Ian & Sylvia standard, Someday Soon – you remember, “Just out of the service, and he’s looking for his fun, Someday soon, going with him, someday soon.” I thought about this song after chatting with a National Guardsman in Reno airport a week ago, home to see […]

(Added: There are some excellent comments in the thread, well worth reading.) Walter Russell Mead and Tyler Cowen each point to this article in New York Magazine, describing a decision by US Magistrate Andrew J. Peck (SDNY) to allow the “use of predictive coding, a computer-assisted document review that turns much of the legal grunt […]

Among the many articles tracking the decline and, presumably shortly, fall of the law firm Dewey & Leboeuf, I found New York Times business columnist James B. Stewart’s “Dewey’s Collapse Underscores Law Firms’ New Reality” to be one of the most insightful as to the general shift in the business model of large, prestigious law […]

Law and Ethics for Robot Soldiers is the title of a new essay by Matthew Waxman and me; it will appear in Policy Review down the road, but we have posted to SSRN an annotated and footnoted version that we hope will be useful to students, researchers, and scholars. The regulation of lethal autonomous weapons […]

As Opinio Juris’ Peggy McGuinness explains, a New York state trial court (confusingly called a “supreme court” in New York) today turned down former IMF chief Dominique Strauss Kahn’s claim of civil immunity in a suit by the (former) Sofitel Hotel maid for acts that first got DSK charged criminally with sexual assault – charges […]

My classes uses A. Mitchell Polinsky’s short classic, An Introduction to Law and Economics, as one of the texts – this is the class’s introduction to the Coase Theorem applied to various basic areas of law.  Being a first year elective introductory class, we limit ourselves to chapters dealing with fundamental common law topics – […]

My introduction to law and economics for first year students – a non-technical introduction to basic law and economics – has a basic discussion of Prisoner’s Dilemma, including watching one of the Golden Balls Split or Steal episodes, in which a man and a woman talk it out and she successfully steals on him. We […]

If you are, like me, interested in “the social life of things,” then I commend the live video feed from the We Robot conference currently underway in Miami this weekend.  I have it up in a corner of my screen, and I am particularly struck by how many different areas of law will have something […]

In case anyone finds it useful or interesting, over at Lawfare I have posted up links all in one place to the leading speeches by the US government’s senior national security lawyers on targeted killing, hypothetical drone programs, covert action, and related national security law issues – Harold Koh (DOS), Jeh Johnson (DOD), Eric Holder (DOJ), Stephen […]

It’s always fun to find new ways to apply the Coase Theorem, particularly in situations of international relations.  So, we’ve seen it raised as a way of talking about bribing Libyan generals not to fight, how to avoid war over conflicting economic claims in the South China Sea, and lots of other situations.  There’s something […]

The Fear Index, Robert Harris’ recent techno-finance thriller, is pretty good airplane reading.  I won’t say anything about the plot except that it involves computers, finance, algorithms, and murder.  It kept me pretty entertained from DC to Houston and back again.

Duke University Law School’s Steven L. Schwarcz is one of the most astute academic writers on the “deep” structures of financial regulation – because beyond the immediacies of financial crisis, whether in 2008 in the US or today in Europe, looking to long-term regulatory structures requires that regulation and regulatory reform start from deeper commitments […]

Important parts of today’s robotics industry got a huge boost in the arm over the last decade (and more) through Pentagon programs, often driven by a desire to protect troops in the field.  Particularly as a technology for dealing with IEDs, as well as important tactical surveillance roles.  Those direct battlefield applications are distinct from […]

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal all carry front page stories today on the Justice Department’s antitrust accusations against leading book publishers and Apple, alleging price-fixing in the setting of prices for e-books.  (Here is an open I Business Times article, and here is the LA Times – not sure what’s […]

I will post analytically about this when I get a moment, but the General Counsel to the CIA, Stephen Preston, delivered an address today at Harvard Law School on the CIA and the Rule of Law.  Lawfare has posted up the full text, but here a bit of the introduction.  I want to commend Mr. […]