October 2025
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University of South Dakota abandons effort to fire professor for remarks about Charlie Kirk murder after federal court reinstates him
A news account here. I’m sorry he apologized, but I understand his reasons. There was nothing to apologize for. Here’s what Professor Hook wrote about Mr. Kirk: :Apparently he was a hate spreading Nazi. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the idiotic right fringe to even know who he was,” Hook continued. “I’m sorry…
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Book authors may be entitled to compensation in the settlement with Anthropic…
which used pirated copies of books to train its LLMs. Details here, including how to look up to see whether your books were used, and also how to file a claim. In my case, Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton, 2013) was used.
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Chemerinsky on Trump’s latest attempted “extortion” of the universities
A propos yesterday’s post, Erwin Chemerinsky weighs in at the NYT. (Thanks to Gregory Mayer for the pointer.)
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Trump’s latest attempt to coerce universities: his proposed “compact”
I have only found the full text on Reddit, so I link to that. Put aside that conditioning federal funding on adopting the government’s viewpoint is a textbook First Amendment violation (at least in the old days!). I’d like to call attention to one provision in particular (some of the provisions are actually banal, requiring…
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Amusing annals of philosophy blogs
The philosophy blogosphere, perhaps like the profession itself (and certainly like cyberspace), has divided into camps. This blog, as longtime readers know, is not friendly to the “wokerati,” but the “safe space” blog (whose provocations I mostly ignore) tried to run a thread on the death of John Searle. Predictably, given its audience, it devolved…
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New blog URLS, for Prawfs, Legal Theory Blog
The new Prawfs site is here, and at the link they collect new URLs for other law blogs which had to migrate from Typepad. Feel free to add other new URLs for law-related blogs in the comments.
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Another violation of the First Amendment rights of faculty, this time at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
A petition in support of the faculty member whose legal rights were clearly violated.
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Thank God for judges, redux
A federal judge lambasts the authoritarian Trump for his violation of the First Amendment rights of non-citizens.
The phrase ‘Does the fact’ naturally invites howls of derision: it’s a fact that every child knows that the Japanese…