Randy Barnhart

This is Exciting: The Digital Public Library of America

In early December of last year, Professor Robert Darnton of Harvard University was interviewed by Rhys Tranter, a PhD candidate at Cardiff University. Darnton warned that "commercial interests are exploiting digital technology in order to fence off large parts of our cultural commons," but that the Digital Public Library of America is "an answer to that threat."

To the question, how does the Digital Library of America compare with the idea of a Digital Republic of Learning, Darnton replied in a way which should excite everyone. To him, the Digital Public Library of America is more than a gleam in his eye and no mere utopian dream. The Library is taking shape now and may emerge fully fledged by 2020. The general idea for the Library is "to make available, free of charge, the cultural heritage of our great research libraries," but in a non-commercial way, unlike Google's book project, which has been tangled up in the courts over copyright.

Money, of course, is necessary, but Darnton stated that major American foundations "are enthusiastically supporting this idea." As for the technology, the Library is working with computer scientists who say that "this is not even difficult, they can design the infrastructure for this new library." Of course, "digital" means that it will be a "distributed system," not some colossal structure rivaling the Pentagon. Indeed, it won't be one big database, either, but a system of linked databases "scattered all over the United States in a way to make them perfectly compatible: the user won’t even know where the book, or the pamphlet or the manuscript is located."

The first "beta" will or should be available by April of 2013. As with Google, copyright will be an issue, but over 2 million books already in the public domain and in special collections in many heretofore inaccessible research libraries will be made available.

Darnton says that the Digital Library project has the best law school professors working on the copyright issue, devising legal strategies to deal with it in order to make "at least some of these copyrighted books available" to all readers. In "ten years, we will have a library greater than the Library of Congress, which is the largest library in the world, available free of charge to everyone." This is exciting!

Junk Science Versus Junk Doubt - Part 1

Lawyering is not just reading cases, briefs, contracts and other documents. My practice invites, if not compels, me to remain abreast of wider social, political and regulatory policies which impact not only the public, but the specific rights and rules implicated in a lawsuit for personal injury or death arising from defective products, whether it be defective autos and tires or dangerously defective drugs and workplaces.

Hence, the recent book, Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, by David Michaels, {amazon, barnes&noble} is important and should be widely read and discussed. Consider the Table of Contents from the book, which shows the range and depth of the social and political problems caused by the self-interested manufacture of wrongful doubt:

Introduction: "Sound Science" or "Sounds Like Science"?
The Manufacture of Doubt
Workplace Cancer before OSHA: Waiting for the Body Count
America Demands Protection
Why Our Children Are Smarter Than We Are
The Enronization of Science
Tricks of the Trade: How Mercenary Scientists Mislead You
Defending Secondhand Smoke
Still Waiting for the Body Count
Chrome-Plated Mischief
Popcorn Lung: OSHA Gives Up
Defending the Taxicab Standard
The Country Has a Drug Problem
Daubert: The Most Influential Supreme Court Ruling You've Never Heard Of
The Institutionalization of Uncertainty
The Bush Administration's Political Science
Making Peace with the Past
Four Ways to Make the Courts Count
Sarbanes-Oxley for Science: A Dozen Ways to Improve Our Regulatory System

In the introduction, the author relates a maddening instance of manufacturers' callous disregard of public, that is, human, safety. The "aspirin manufacturers delayed the FDA's regulation [requiring a warning on the link between aspirin intake by children and Reye's syndrome] by arguing that the science establishing the aspirin link was incomplete, uncertain, and unclear." Before the regulation was enforced, many children died; after the regulation was enforced, "less than a handful" of cases are reported in any given year.

In this series of posts, I will be considering the author's facts and arguments, putting them in the context of a trial lawyer's practice focused on product defect and the liability for injury by those defective products. The legal system, and your rights to recover for injury caused by negligent and reckless conduct, is in may ways shaped by wider concerns such as the use--rather, the misuse or abuse--of science by irresponsible and profit-hungry manufacturers.

For many years now, the big corporate interests have made a concerted effort to paint the proofs of defective products by trial lawyers as junk science, but the real story is the junk doubt that these corporate interests have manufactured and instilled on the part of policy-makers, legislators and judges. Time to expose the doubt and uncertainty for what it really is - JUNK.

History Through A Supreme Court Justice's Lens

Excerpt from an NPR article (link follows):

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has sparred for years with Justice Antonin Scalia on the printed pages of legal opinions. The two have even debated about constitutional interpretation in public. And now Justice Breyer has taken his argument to the printed pages of a book written for popular consumption.

In his first interview about the new book, Breyer's targets are the ideas of originalism and textualism advocated by Scalia — the notion that the framers of the Constitution meant what they said and no more — and that the provisions of the Constitution are limited to what they covered back in 1789.

Breyer's book, Making Our Democracy Work, A Judge’s View, is a combination of history and legal philosophy. It argues that there are no easy, color-by-the-numbers answers to many legal questions and that to suggest there are is an illusion.

via www.npr.org

This book by a sitting justice is perhaps worth more than all the blabber by the politicians every time they have to vote on a Supreme Court nominee. I may get this on my iPad.

From amazon: "Justice Breyer discusses what the Court must do going forward to maintain that public confidence and argues for interpreting the Constitution in a way that works in practice. He forcefully rejects competing approaches that look exclusively to the Constitution’s text or to the eighteenth-century views of the framers. Instead, he advocates a pragmatic approach that applies unchanging constitutional values to ever-changing circum-stances—an approach that will best demonstrate to the public that the Constitution continues to serve us well. The Court, he believes, must also respect the roles that other actors—such as the president, Congress, administrative agencies, and the states—play in our democracy, and he emphasizes the Court’s obligation to build cooperative relationships with them."

Book - A Colossal Failure of Common Sense

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense—The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers by Lawrence G. McDonald
 
McDonald tells his own story of breaking into the securities industry in Massachusetts and achieving his life’s dream becoming a bond trader at one of Wall Street’s legendary investment houses.  McDonald and his colleagues in the distressed assets department watched with growing alarm as Lehman’s Mortgage Bond Department put together deal after deal involving subprime mortgages, “Alt A Loans” and “Liar Loans”.  Lehman mortgage bond packagers found the way to con the rating agencies to rate packages of  junk loans as top-rated bonds.   McDonald is a bit full of himself and some of his story seems too complimentary of his close circle of colleagues at Lehman.  At one point he loses much of his credibility when he says the mortgage salesmen in California, Arizona and Florida were the cause of Lehman’s failure.  Certainly, the mortgage brokers were writing loans for people who had no means to pay them off after the rates were adjusted.  However, Lehman and the other big institutions provided the money the brokers used to make the lousy loans.  Lehman failed because its senior management was blinded by the enormous profits generated by the mortgage bond people and management’s refusal to look behind the operation to detect the enormous risks which were being undertaken.

Book - The Big Short by Michael Lewis

Lewis examines the roots of the sub-prime mortgage bond packaging which led to the demise of several Wall Street Investment Banks and the recent recession.  He is is a good writer as he proved in his first book about Wall Street, Liars Poker.

Lewis does a good job explaining the details of Derivatives, Credit Swaps, Collateralized Debt Obligations (“CDOs”) and other poisonous, artificial “securities.”  Lewis demonstrates that these vehicles were little more than Las Vegas inspired gambles. He portrays the few Wall Street and West Coast ‘outsiders’ who predicted the failure of the subprime mortgage bonds and the investment houses who would fail because of their investments in them.  A very good read.

amazon   |   barnes&noble

 

Love Your Local Public Library

"No Cable? No Problem!" says the Denver Public Library. And who says libraries just have dusty old books? Check out these video selections from the SyFy Channel (f/k/a the Sci-Fi Channel):

• Andromeda
• Battlestar Galactica
• Being Human
• Caprica
• The Dresden Files
• Eureka
• Farscape
• Ghost Hunters
• The Invisible Man
• Merlin
• Mystery Science Theater 3000
• Painkiller Jane
• Sanctuary
• Stargate Atlantis
• Stargate Universe
• Swamp Thing
• Tripping the Rift
• Warehouse 13

Book: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

No matter how many legal documents (motions, cases, depositions) I have to read, there's always time for a good mystery:

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larson (2010 USA)

This is the third of the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series written by the late Swedish author, Steig Larson. It is the best of the bunch. Larson was a wonderful writer and story teller. The mystery leaves the reader guessing at each turn of the page. We were lucky to find an English Language version in Paris last year. It is now available in the USA of course. A thoroughly enjoyable read. It is lamentable that Larson died so early and so soon after his publishing his three fine novels.

amazon   |   barnes&noble