the Zealous

29 Aug 22


When I was a young law firm associate back in the day, I was second chair on a complex, lucrative (for our client) and acrimonious technology/patent license negotiation. We were holed up in a conference room with buyer's counsel, in the dead of a typical brutal Colorado winter, groping our way towards final agreement. The legal negotiations were excruciating. We were the smaller party going up against a huge computer manufacturer, and the buyer's counsel, on the junior side of the experience scale, simply kept repeating the same mantra that corporate policy forbids any flexibility, even on what clearly should be uncontentious points.

14 Aug 22


An exposition on the use and abuse of dictionaries in recent US Supreme Court jurisprudence, by Mark A. Lemley, Chief Justice Webster, 106 Iowa L. Rev. 299 (2020):

The Supreme Court has a love affair with the dictionary. Half of its decisions in the 2018 Term cited a dictionary, often as the primary or exclusive means of defining a statutory term. The Court regularly upends decades of precedent and ignores congressional intent (and sometimes common sense) in favor of a chosen dictionary definition. The Solicitor General may long have been the “tenth Justice,” but in the twenty-first century the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court may as well be, not John Roberts, but Noah Webster.

30 Jul 22


Justice in the dark web is explained in this piece from Analyst1, Dark Web - Justice League (2021):

When it comes to the rule of law, access to justice for all and a fair trial are both fundamental in any democratic society. But what if the Dark Web community has its own justice system that believes in the same values?

Every day there are dozens of cases all over the Dark Web that escalate to this underground justice system and patiently wait for the high-ranking authorized cybercriminals (usually members of a forum administration) to solve the dispute and assign a winner and loser.