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  1. sahpa's avatar

    Agreed with the other commentator. It is extremely unlikely that Pangram’s success is due to its cheating by reading metadata.

  2. Deirdre Anne's avatar
  3. Mark's avatar
  4. Mark Robert Taylor's avatar

    At the risk of self-advertising:… You claim “AI is unusual in degree, not in kind” and “It is not clear…

  5. F.E. Guerra-Pujol's avatar

    Apropos of Sagar’s wish to foist the A.I. industry by its own petard, this article appeared in print in yesterday’s…

  6. Claudio's avatar

    I teach both large courses, like Jurisprudence and Critical Legal Thinking (a.k.a Legal Argumentation), and small seminar-based courses at Edinburgh…

  7. Charles Pigden's avatar

    Surely there is an answer to the problem of AI cheating which averts the existential threat. . It’s not great,…

What the departure of Justice Kennedy will mean for the super-legislature and the law

This is a pretty good overview

I doubt Roe v. Wade will be overruled, but it will be narrowed and the burdens placed on women seeking abortions will increase in some states (but not others):  this will actually mobilize voters for Democrats, which will be good in the long haul, since apart from the religious zealots, most Americans favor access to abortion.  

I also expect the major gay rights decisions authored by Kennedy (including those recognizing same-sex marriage, and finding sodomy laws to be unconstitutional violations of liberty) will survive, but as the decision in the baker case this past term shows, the new vehicle for anti-gay bigotry will be the First Amendment–this is more dangerous, since states can not opt to go their own way if the court lays down constitutionalized limits. 

The biggest change will come with regard to race-based affirmative action:  its days are now numbered at public and probably also private institutions of higher education.  Because admissions to selective universities is a zero-sum game, with (at least perceived) serious consequences in capitalist America, the ending of race-based preferences will actually mute some of the misdirected white anger that has been fueled by this perceived unfairness.  More importantly, various jurisdictions (including California and Texas during Hopwood) have lived through the absence of race-based preferences, and found alternatives that in some ways were superior, such as exploiting the segregated character of many high schools (the Texas "top 10%" plan) or the racialized nature of class divisions in many communities; both approaches broadened the reach of affirmative action in important ways.

On gerrymandering, it was already clear no solution was coming from the Supreme Court:  as with most issues that matter, the only lasting solutions will come from the legislative process–well that, and the decline of evangelical forms of Christianity, which seem to be the best predictor of reactionary social and political views.

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