Literally a publication for eight-year olds 40 years ago

Includes fascinating implications that I've not seen discussed elsewhere.

You can read my take on Trump's illegal invasion of Venezuela here: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

Best thing I’ve read this morning, from a human rights lawyer in Mexico. Translation is in the ALT-text.

I feel like I haven’t even been properly lied to about the purposes of this war

The closest comparison for the Grok thing we can imagine right now is if cereal made a bunch of people ill and the news put a microphone in front of some cereal boxes at the grocery store and was like “well they didn’t admit guilt, not sure who else we can ask”

Betcha a shiny nickel this is because they told their LLM to redact all the initials used to identify minor victims and so it also redacted S.D.N.Y.

Say what you want about law reviews and all their flaws, but law review editors won't let this slip for one second. An interesting read featuring GSU's own @andrew.heiss.phd. www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

Wrote an issue spotter with "Dan" and "his longtime boyfriend, Evan" to draw out arguments about a standard that creates different rules for "family members." I'm only two exams in, but thus far, both students have assumed "Evan" is a woman. The power of heteronormativity!

Chapter 8 is up! We'll be taking a break for the holidays - expect Chapter 9 circa January 15!

I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork

I'm super-excited about this free Tech Law coursebook from @crootof.bsky.social and @bjard.bsky.social being freely published, and not just because Ashkan Soltani and I have a journal article of ours reprinted in it! (See Chapter 7)

Update: Informed the school and asked for a follow-up. Just learned it was deemed an "extremely serious breach." Consequences TBD.

Chapter 7 is up!

Sort of noteworthy that in a field typically full of complex hypotheticals and heavy on fact-specific circumstances, I've really not seen any serious IHL/LOAC voices argue these strikes are anything but virtually certainly unlawful

Christmas is coming, and the Black Friday sales signal we’re in peak gift-buying season. When you’re picking out gifts for friends and family this year, there’s a whole slew of tech products that are better to avoid. I put together a guide to help you through it.

Well. Guess it was just a matter of time. Received a nice email from a PhD student, asking me to review their draft chapter, which relied heavily on my work and arguments. Par for the course. Except I never wrote half of the articles they cited to, nor the quotations they attributed to me.

Same.

The Against Generative AI bibliography over on my blog is now updated with full dates for each piece, making it easier to find new information (added almost daily): catherinedenial.org/blog/uncateg...

Chapter 6 is up!

Chapter 5 is up!

No surprise given @charliesavage.bsky.social long track record here, but grateful for the most sophisticated piece of journalism yet on this issue. If you read one thing today, make it this: The Peril of a White House That Flaunts Its Indifference to the Law www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/u...

Chapter 4 is up!

The history of ELSI demonstrates that systematic ethical oversight strengthens rather than constrains beneficial innovation. AI development now stands at a similar inflection point, but with higher stakes and faster timelines.

Chapter 3 is up!

one of the most important conversations tech companies should have about every new feature and product is "how can this be abused" and in OpenAI's case they apparently decided to make that the selling point for their new app this is a million lawsuits and ruined lives waiting to happen

I’ve had experience with a lot more generals and admirals than the average left-leaning critic of the military-industrial complex and 21st century wars. There’s an occasional jerk or narcissist, but generally they are thoughtful, committed, allergic to bullshit. Hope my sample is representative.

Waymo dodges a ticket b/c tickets lack a field for robot drivers. Imagine if it got points for a moving violation, and every cars' points went to one AI's license, those could add up pretty quickly. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Been looking forward to reading this for a while!

"The Internet Archive isn't scraped by AI—they prohibit the bots from training on their massive trove of data. So from the perspective of AI, the Internet Archive simply does not exist."

I like this -- they fed AITA posts where the humans voted "asshole" to LLMs and found that the bots would almost always tell you that you're not an asshole. ^^; No wonder they're so popular! www.businessinsider.com/reddit-aita-...

🚨 New Publication 🚨 ISP Fellows Rebecca Crootof & @bjard.bsky.social have launched their Technology Law coursebook! First chapters now live: 📑 TOC: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... 📘 Ch.1: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... 📘 Ch.2: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... New chapters drop twice monthly.

Nightstand Pile Files: Re-reading @jackbalkin.bsky.social's "Old School / New-School Speech Regulation," on governments' various techniques for controlling and surveilling speech. I read it nearly every year. And every year it feels more and more relevant. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Chapter 2 is up!

It has been 10 days now since the Trump administration conducted a lethal strike on a boat in the Caribbean. In that time, the administration has not even attempted to present a legal justification for this premeditated killing of people outside of armed conflict.

🧵 The summer of 2025 has been AI's "cruel summer"—wrongful deaths, dangerous therapy chatbots, medical misinformation, facial recognition failures. These aren't isolated glitches but predictable harms from systems deployed without adequate oversight. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Nightstand Pile Files: Re-reading @rcalo.bsky.social's excellent "The Scale and the Reactor," on what techlaw and STS scholars can learn from each other. Aside from informative and prescriptive, it is jam packed with delightful phrasings and analogies. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

My school doesn’t offer a degree in Outlook, even though odds are very good that a majority of my students will be required to use it in their professional lives, and many of them will use it poorly/incorrectly.

We’ll release new chapters biweekly with updates to our front matter and table of contents at docs.google.com/document/d/1.... Chapter 1 introduces our "techlaw uncertainties" approach at docs.google.com/document/d/1.... We welcome your feedback!

Second, I’m thrilled to share the first excerpts of the Technology Law coursebook I’m co-authoring with @crootof.bsky.social. We’ve built these materials across courses at three institutions, beginning with the seminar we taught with @jackbalkin.bsky.social at Yale Law School in 2016.

The United States has committed every moral atrocity that has ever been committed. I can’t prevent that. What I can do is say that it should not do so, and if it does so, we should call it what it is, condemn it, hold ppl accountable for it, and deprive them of power.

As many know, @bjard.bsky.social and I have been drafting a Technology Law coursebook for a few years. We've used it to teach classes at three institutions, including Yale Law School, and others have used chapters in their techlaw classes. We're excited to share the current version more broadly!

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

syllabus time, teaming up for the herculean efforts of reinventing writing assignments. here, some prompts for required weekly low stakes 250-500 word reflections/ process pieces that have proven relatively conducive to real writing in lit class. please share any similar suggestions in thread.

i keep coming back to this.

Anyone working on inserting secret "sleeper" viruses in their novels that can be activated only inside LLMs? Perhaps along the lines of Snow Crash.

Current measures of #CivilianHarm do not adequately account for the aggregate impacts of protracted armed conflict on civilian populations, exemplified by the war in #Gaza. Fionnuala Ni Aolain offers the concept of cumulative civilian harm as an analytic tool: www.justsecurity.org/115407/cumul...

Tech companies only have five ideas: robot slave (actually just human slaves), hallucinatory counter-reality, untaxable money, The Everything App, and Clippy