Law articles feature analysis and commentary related to censorship, policy, technology, media, economics, public health, and social life.
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When the federal government sent $9,000 to Patty Myers to pay for her husband’s funeral, she got angry. “I didn’t want to take a penny. It felt like hush money, like they were paying me to keep quiet about how my husband died in the hospital.”
The Hospital Protocol Killed Their Loved Ones and They Want Justice Read More »
Free speech is more than a slogan. It must be an operational reality for everyone. It can be closed down by forces other than edicts from government. It can be suppressed also by arbitrary private actions that reflect regime priorities. Ever more workers and especially intellectuals today work in an environment of fear that leads to self-censorship.
Like a Tweet, Lose Your Job Read More »
Suing vaccine makers is notoriously difficult by design. Alone among private producers, they are indemnified against nearly all harm thanks to government privilege. That makes them mostly off-limits for legal liability from vaccine injuries. Eliminate that provision and the companies would not likely even be in business at all, which tells you all you need to know. However, deceptive claims are a separate issue. Finally we might have here a perfectly crafted legal position to hold these run-amuk companies accountable.
Was this Deceptive Trade? Paxton v. Moderna Read More »
The European Commission announced its first list of designated Very Large Online Platforms – or VLOPs – that will be subject to “content moderation” requirements and obligations to combat “disinformation” under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). As VLOPs, the designated services will be required “to assess and mitigate their systemic risks and to provide robust content moderation tools.”
Meet the VLOPs! The EU Extends its Censorship Powers Read More »
Big Media and Big Tech fell completely out of sync with material reality, smearing criticism that had previously been normal, and explicitly banning topics from social media such as discussion of a possible lab leak, or vaccines not stopping viral transmission. Polite society agreed with such bans, stayed silent, or even, as in the case of the Virality Project and its partners, led the censoring. A cadre of North American and European anti-disinformation elites meanwhile had been slowly convincing NGOs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that their biggest problem was not too little but too much online freedom, the solution to which was more corporate and government control in order to protect human rights and democracy.
The Censorship-Industrial Complex Read More »
Discovery and depositions from Pfizer and the White House would be the most valuable insight of the three years – insight into the power structures that orchestrated lockdowns, censorship, forced vaccinations, school closures, economic upheaval, government overreach, and the merger of corporations with the state. The media’s blackout may delay negative press coverage for the country’s most powerful forces, but the ramifications of the lawsuit could prove far more consequential than an undesirable headline in the New York Times.
Berenson v. Biden: The Potential and Significance Read More »
Unlike the PREP Act and the other emergency pandemic powers, this one is set to expire at the end of September. In other words, absent any action, PAHPA and all its authority to wage biomedical warfare are finished, thereby providing House Republicans with tremendous leverage to clip the agency’s wings. How can Republicans move on from this disaster and reauthorize the agency that is responsible for the worst tyranny in American history?
Congress Has a Leverage Point on Pandemic Policy Read More »
Society is not a machine that anyone can control. It has no pause button. Attempt to treat it as if it does and you end up creating something distorted and possibly terrible, certainly the end of material and cultural progress but probably something much worse. It was utter folly for anyone to imagine that what they thought they were doing should ever be done. It is even more egregious that so many played along when they should have refused the pause.
They Hit the Pause Button and the Music Stopped Read More »
In 2021, 87% of Stanford Law students graduated with big law positions or federal clerkships (a near-guarantee of subsequent big law employment) in hand. Clients pay over $500 an hour for fresh graduates, thanks to a cartel-like hiring apparatus that constrains law firm recruiting in the name of prestige. Most of them receive these job offers after just one year of law school, leaving them ample time to engage in campus activism.
The Structural Privilege of Elite Law Students Read More »
For decades, the US has tried to export and universalise bedrock American values like the rule of law, civil liberties, political freedoms and democratic practices. Now it is internalising some foreign policy vices like selective justice against unfriendly regimes while running protection for friendly ones.
Democracy Under Stress in America and India Read More »
They have little interest in traditional liberal values such as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of conscience, and in fact are often implicitly contemptuous of those values and think them to be dangerous. And they are fairly comfortable with the idea of the authorities bossing people around so long as it is for their own (purported) benefit. They, in other words, see themselves as being something like Plato’s class of ‘guardians’, who possess the wisdom to coordinate society as they see fit.
What Happened to the Human Rights Lobby? Read More »
The lawless government that went into overdrive three years ago, even if its roots extend far back in time, has finally ensnared the president who was manipulated into pulling the trigger. So yes, the lockdowns and this apparently political Trump indictment are connected. They are all signs of a loss of government restraint, taking us back before the days of the Magna Carta.
The Emergency Is Not Over Read More »
