I have some very well-placed cynicism about the state of the profession, but the day I feel most optimistic about it is always the day I robe up and send another cohort of good people out to make a difference in the world.

BREAKING: We just won a preliminary injunction in our case with @freedom.press requiring the Trump administration to follow the Presidential Records Act and preserve records for posterity. This is a huge win against their absurd stance that the law is unconstitutional.

The discontent is mutual, it appears

in very different ways, I think of both Google and the CDC as examples of the kind of information resource that's been so ubiquitous to our daily lives for so long that we trained ourselves to think of them as neutral entities, and a lot of people still do even though we see clearly that they're not

Amazing that after decades of hype about tech in education, we still have to get Larry Cuban back out reminding everyone that tech has *never* transformed the classroom or helped reform teaching - and no, AI doesn't make it different this time larrycuban.wordpress.com/2026/05/16/l...

“Fewer than 2 in 10 Americans think artificial intelligence will have a positive impact on the country over the next decade, and more than twice as many expect negative results, the study found.” share.inquirer.com/e1lXNd

Color me shocked

Every time I teach the MOVE bombing, students are shocked. And when I teach the aftermath involving an anthropologist who hoarded some of the remains and used them as teaching tools, they are even more shocked. And I teach in Pennsylvania. Even some students from Philly are unaware of this history

*laughs in archivist* It always amuses me at how little historical material is actually not only digitized but also made available online compared to what lay people think.

now thats an anecdote with a punch, from Gillian Tett www.ft.com/content/c0ae...

I get an average of three requests daily to fill out "AI in libraries", "AI use by faculty" or "AI in law schools" surveys. I'm not going to answer any more of them unless they include questions about de-skilling and ethical concerns because everything else is just push polling.

California Bar Proposes Rule Requiring Lawyers to Verify Every AI Output — and Five Other AI-Focused Ethics Changes | LawSites www.lawnext.com/2026/05/cali...

If this is what the people in charge of the tech think we are supposed to be teaching students in the name of "prompt engineering", they're just flat-out failing at tech development

I don't think people fully understand yet just how fragile university-hosted digital resources are after external funding ends (especially if the lead academic retires or moves or is made redundant).

"One simple line to draw is between using AI as a tool and using AI as a substitute for cognition." Correct, but the problem in education is that students do not yet have the capacity to draw those lines. That's why they're students. scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/04/29/g...

When I first started as a law librarian, my mentor insisted I needed to regularly attend the #asilam A decade and a half later, I give that same advice. It's always a valuable learning and connecting experience, and I always come away with some hope besides

"The errors are the latest example of a professional services firm grappling with the use of cutting-edge technology to speed up laborious research and cut down on staffing while also trying to maintain quality standards." There's your problem right there.

The University of California system and California State system together enroll 770,000 students. 770,000 That's three quarters of a MILLION students in a PUBLIC education system that ranges in quality from good to world-class. This is a miracle.

If you or someone you love operates a law library, my Pornography: A Legal Research Guide is now available from Hein! home.heinonline.org/catalog/?id=...

Time to #TalkAboutHumanities -- Linguistics is the study of how language works and how we work with language, and linguists end up very sensitized to language use and how it shapes our social world.

All reading is valid, but it's also nice to have more data for when vendors insist I need to switch to ebooks over print www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

From Michael Milken to Sam Altman, perhaps we should interrogate why our economic system seems to structurally incentivize the rise of grifters….

Historians sue DOJ over opinion dismissing Presidential Records Act

Kudos to whoever designed the loading screen for the @inquirer.com app. The rotation of Philly-themed designs for the I makes me not care how long it takes for my article to appear

We are not talking nearly enough about the damage done by constantly telling people that their labor, their intellect, their creativity, and their identity can be replaced by an app

Errors present in 45% of AI generated reports of news stories 🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

Bondi clocks in at 38.37 Scaramuccis

"As one recent example, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at New Orleans issued a $2,500 sanction against an attorney who admitted to using vLex and Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel to draft her arguments" www.abajournal.com/news/article...

Analog as a privacy feature" is a great mental shift. In 2026, e-readers track everything from reading speed to highlighted passages for ad targeting. Print isn't just tactile; it’s an encrypted offline database that doesn't report back to a mother ship. Happy stealth reading!

Lies, or did someone use AI to do their research again?

Educated crop circles

If you’re similarly less than delighted with their track record in the past few years, please sign and share with University of Pennsylvania alumni, faculty, students, and allies, to encourage them to liveup to their motto. alumni.standforcampusfreedom.org/petitions/qu...

It turns out when you try to serve slop on a product people pay for, no one wants it. www.404media.co/disneys-open...

There are both good and bad reasons when deciding whether or not to go to law school. The one I heard today is the silliest though: "It won't prepare you for an AI future."

Daily summary of my cumulative professional association news blasts: 1) AI is Everywhere So You Have to Use It 2) How Lawyers are Using AI (After Spending 54% of Their Time Fixing Errors) 3) Students' Brains Are Deteriorating Faster

Too many students are convinced by their own universities, by some of their teachers and professors, and by the AI companies themselves that ‘using ai to study is getting ahead of the game’ But the process they seek to get ahead of is the point.

One thing that AI evangelists seem to assume, particularly legal AI evangelists assume, is that the thinking and analysis is quick, and the writing is just tedious busywork that slows us down. But the writing IS the thinking and analysis. You work out the thinking and analysis by writing it down.

Plese repost & share! *THE OPEN ACCESS COMPANION TO THE CANTERBURY TALES*, a free, scholar-produced onlyne resource for teachinge and learninge *The Canterbury Tales* at the universitye level: opencanterburytales.lsusites.org

This is amazing. When the government kills a crucial report, independent scientists decide to write it anyway and release it outside of government channels. That’s science serving society, even when our political leaders don’t.

I believe that's 36.73 scaramuccis if you count as of today, or 39.1 scaramuccis as of March 31

They're the same partners who have been concerned for decades about the analytical gap in new associates because they grew up with the Google search box instead of indexes and digests

"Women adopt AI at rates 25% lower than men. This isn’t a guess. It’s the finding of a Harvard Business School meta-analysis examining eighteen studies, over 140,000 participants, across multiple countries." "Every AI Company Is Building a Different Wife" abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-built...

Library and Archives Canada wraps up digitization of 6 million Indian day school records Records now easier to search and request www.cbc.ca/news/indigen...

All my alma mater had to do was follow its own motto for one year instead of caving immediately

I can’t believe you lefty Luddites hate tech so much that you embrace mRNA vaccines, heat pumps, electric bikes, hybrid work, renewable power (and awesome advancements in storage), space telescopes, and hot/cold running water but reject the planet destroying plagiarism enrich the worst people bots!

The DOJ has asked states to agree to sign a secret agreement “in connection w/ handing over their full voter files.” The agreement says that “the DOJ will ‘test, analyze, & assess states’ [voter rolls]’ & send each participating state a list of voters who must be removed within 45 days.” 2/5/26 …1/

Working on Restoring Justice kept me grounded this past year, so I share it w/ excitement & some nervousness. Written w/ Meredith Elizalde, whose son Nick was killed in a shooting at his high school, we argue for a right to restorative justice. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

I finally got around to watching this presentation and it's both an excellent summary of what GAI is and why lawyers should think twice about outsourcing legal work to it. Off to watch the rest of the speaker series now library.law.yale.edu/news/critica...

English-only California: the golden state with Spanish place names removed. First map I ever commissioned, to commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, whereby the US made Mexico give up its northern half, adding California and the Southwest to the Union.