Law

Here’s the proposal, which I suspect many will reflexively condemn as heresy, but which I promise to unpack if given the chance: Those, like me, who believe that “ordinary meaning” is the foundational rule for the evaluation of legal texts should consider—consider—whether and how AI-powered large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude might—might—inform the interpretive analysis. There, having thought the unthinkable, I’ve said the unsayable.

Now let me explain myself.

According to Wikipedia,

A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure, conceived by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970, that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not – in other words, a query returns either "possibly in set" or "definitely not in set". […]

This is an all-too-common situation in forensic applications, though the reason has nothing to do with the Bloom filter hash-function method. To take a simple example, suppose that a video recording shows that someone is 6'1", give or take an inch.  If a suspect is is 6"1', they're "possibly in set" — though it's not strong evidence of guilt, since there are lots of people that size. But if they're 5"4', then they're "definitely not in set", at least if the measurements are accurate.

In my opinion, a more complicated version of the same thing applies to forensic speaker identification.

The "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of proof adds an additional asymmetry in criminal cases.

This software license is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it! Writing this software and associated documentation files (the "Software") was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This Software is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and syntax.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the mind, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of incoherence. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this software digitally or intellectually.

In economics, Gresham's law is a monetary principle stating that "bad money drives out good". For example, if there are two forms of commodity money in circulation, which are accepted by law as having similar face value, the more valuable commodity will gradually disappear from circulation.

Even if they were such a thing as a cookie banner law, and there is none, companies in the USA would not have to comply in their country.

...And you know what's worse? It's unnecessary. A cookie banner is not required at all, even in the EU.

Think of it as an invisible geometric shape perceptible only to lawyers—a conceptual pane of glass that might not have kept the rain out but could, for legal purposes, be used to define the original limits of the car’s interior. This is the close, and defining it is ultimately just a form of connecting the dots: drawing an imaginary line from the corner of an open window to the edge of a nearby wall to the front gate of a home garden, and so on.

Breaking the close thus constitutes entry into a “protected interior” or “specified enclosure".