Greetings, my name is David Colarusso. I'm the co-director of Suffolk University Law School's Legal Innovation & Technology (LIT) Lab. With one foot in law and the other in tech, I really want the open web to thrive. So I created a bot (@icymilaw.org) and this site to help folks discover great law-themed content while showing off what one can do with sufficiently open protocols.
If you like these, you'll ❤️ The Finite Scroll, an open-source client-side algorithmically-driven RSS reader. You might also enjoy this post: How and why I (still) use social media. It includes tips on how to make your own custom social media algo(s).
In addition to the RSS feeds below, here's the legal tech feed 
powering @news.bot.suffolklitlab.org (another bot of mine).
Note, the number of fire emoji represent how many standard deviations more popular a link is than the average link observed in its category.
News-like Links
A collection of links shared recently¹ by legal-type folks² with URLs that look like they point to news articles,³ sorted by popularity.
- Lula Wins a Record Fourth Term in Brazil in a Surprise Comeback 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva came from behind to win Brazil’s runoff election, halting a right-wing wave sweeping Latin America and defying predictions that the 80-year-old political veteran ha...
- Serbian leader Aleksandar Vučić ousted by student movement in seismic election 🔥🔥🔥Vučić’s 12-year reign looks to have been ended by record turnout of voters in election provoked by student-led protests ...
- Why the Future of the Amazon Could Depend on Brazil’s Election 🔥🔥Flávio Bolsonaro, the front runner in this month’s presidential runoff, is a strong advocate of environmental deregulation who has backed policies that scientists say could hurt the rainforest.
- Court Says Trump Violated Law in Los Angeles National Guard Deployment 🔥The ruling, which comes as the midterm election nears, could make it more difficult for President Trump to seize control of the National Guard.
- Public Colleges Are Passing the $50,000-a-Year Mark. For Locals. (Gift Article) 🔥At the University of California campuses in Berkeley, Irvine and Santa Barbara, students get an unwitting education in navigating the housing market.
- Is London really the most-taxed city? Banks accused of cherrypicking data† 🔥Lobby group’s figures, shared with John Healey, are misleading as they do not include major rival Paris, say campaigners ...
- U.S. Allies Race to Escape SpaceX’s Orbit 🔥Elon Musk’s blindsiding of Ukraine has spurred efforts by Europe and Canada to roll out satellites under their own control.
Blog-like Links
A collection of links shared recently⁴ by legal-type folks⁵ with URLs that look like they point to blogs/newsletters,⁶ sorted by popularity.
- Youth Protest in Serbia 🔥🔥🔥And some thoughts for America ...
- Weekend Update #207: The US-Russia Alliance Is Signed--In Ukrainian Blood 🔥Ukraine Seems To Get It This Time; Ukraine Keeps Steadily Progressing In The Land War ...
- Trump's Last-Ditch Election Lawsuits, Explained† 🔥Donald Trump’s efforts to federalize the midterm elections have been largely unsuccessful.
- NEWS: Bottom is Falling Out for Republicans, Students Defeat Putin-Backed Leader in Serbia, Musk Gets Sensitive Military Data, and More 🔥Good evening, everyone.
- In rare Sunday arguments, appeals court judges are skeptical of DOJ’s California election lawsuit 🔥The lawsuits in California and Alaska are expected to fail — but they also show how far A.G. Todd Blanche will go to advance Trump’s aims. And, for paid subscribers: Closing my tabs.
AI & The Law Links
A collection of links shared recently⁷ on Bluesky that look like they talk about AI & the law,⁸ sorted by popularity.
- ChatGPT Is Building Detailed Psychological Profiles of Its Users 🔥🔥🔥🔥Chatbots are building "algorithmic self-portraits" of users as they retain information for a hyper-personalized experience, a study warns.
- Ken Paxton sues ChatGPT-maker OpenAI† 🔥CEO Sam Altman and ChatGPT are top competitors to Elon Musk, the tech billionaire fueling Paxton’s U.S. Senate campaign.
- Major AI Models Are More Willing than Ever to Create Fake Election Images We reran our springtime disinformation tests on six AI image generators — only one company showed real safety improvements.
- Age Checks, AI Regulation and Censorship Put Internet Freedom Under Pressure† The global fight for internet freedom is getting harder, according to the latest iteration of the Freedom on the Net report from Freedom House.
- The Plausible Techno-Dystopian Future The problems caused by AI development are widespread and multiplying, but none involves a digital demon that kills us all.
Law Review-like Links
A collection of links shared recently⁹ on Bluesky that look like they point to papers in law journals or the like,¹⁰ sorted by popularity.
- No links found
AI Paper-like Links
A collection of links shared recently¹¹ on Bluesky that look like they point to papers on AI,¹² sorted by popularity. Wondering why this section is on a site about the law? Well, I teach a course on AI & the Law, and it turns out that understanding this stuff is super important to figuring out what the law might have to say. So, I figured since I was sharing lists, I might as well share this one too.
- Why is AI-generated language so hard to understand? 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥There is a widespread sense that AI-generated text has recently become harder to understand. In this study, we investigate a set of psycholinguistic features that are known to correlate with human processing difficulty (e.g., object relative clauses, long syntactic dependencies, low-frequency n-grams). Using a novel corpus of AI-generated text across diverse domains, we find that AI models use these difficult features more often than paraphrases generated by round-trip translation. Compared with human writing, all nine frontier and near-frontier models use more inanimate subjects with animate verbs and more low-frequency n-grams, and most also use longer dependencies, more stacked nouns, and more reduced object relatives in conversation; we also demonstrate substantial variation across model families. We propose and test a hypothesis as to why: while human language is optimized for successful communication, AI-generated text is increasingly optimized for other goals like math, code, and reasoning, in which there is a pressure for \textit{information density} rather than successful communication. We provide a proof-of-concept for this hypothesis by fine-tuning a language model under a length penalty, which leads to a divergence from human-like linguistic behavior. Our findings highlight the axes of misalignment between linguistic processing demands in humans and LLMs, and point toward possible remedies.
- TasteVal: Measuring the Experimental Research Taste of AI Systems Against Human Experts 🔥We introduce TasteVal, a benchmark to evaluate the experimental research taste of frontier models. We define research taste as the ability to pick interesting problems to solve, design experiments, an...
- Functional Welfare for AI Safety AI welfare is generally treated purely as an ethical issue rather than also as a safety issue. We argue this is a mistake. Whatever their moral status, models exhibit welfare-like states that causally...
- Agentic Memory Management Is the Next Frontier of Information Retrieval Information retrieval has long been focusing on connecting people with information they need to complete their tasks. Recently, the meaning of this has changed dramatically as more and more AI agents ...
- Barbarians at the Gate:How AI is Upending Systems Research
The High Score
The 20 accounts most reposted by @icymilaw.org over the past week¹³ (the list below is updated every Sunday). High Score, get it? One Score = 20, as in, "four score and seven years ago." ;)
- ICYMI (Law) (@icymilaw.org)
- Law + Tech News Bot (@news.bot.suffolklitlab.org)
- Rick Hasen (@rickhasen.bsky.social)
- Leah Litman (@leahlitman.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Tech Policy Press (@techpolicypress.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social)
- Steve Vladeck (@stevevladeck.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Adam Cohen (My Personal Views Only) (@axidentaliberal.bsky.social) (promoted)
- CREW (@citizensforethics.org) (promoted)
- Harry Litman (@harrylitman.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@qasimrashid.com) (promoted)
- ghost malone ergo propter bones (@proptermalone.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie (@audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app)
- Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) (promoted)
- Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Marc Veldhoen (@marcveld.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Bradley P. Moss (@bradmossesq.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Jessica Pishko (@jesspish.bsky.social) (promoted)
- John Pfaff (@johnpfaff.bsky.social) (promoted)
- michael veale (@michae.lv) (relegated)
- Jonathan Ladd (@jonathanmladd.com) (relegated)
- Professa Murray (@kalimurray.bsky.social) (relegated)
- 🎃Darin S Pumpkins🎃 (@darinself.com) (relegated)
- Josh Chafetz (@joshchafetz.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Mark Copelovitch (@mcopelov.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Steve Peers (@stevepeers.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Katie Phang (@katiephang.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Dean Obeidallah (@deanobeidallah.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Roger Parloff (@rparloff.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Robert Black (@hurricanexyz.bsky.social) (relegated)
- davidrlurie (@davidrlurie.com) (relegated)
† This link was also in yesterday's digest. ¹ Approx. 1 day lookback. ² Attorneys, law profs, et al. ³ News-like links (law) ⁴ Supra note 1. ⁵ Supra note 2. ⁶ Blog-like links (law) ⁷ Approx. 3.5 days lookback. ⁸ AI & the Law ⁹ Approx. 1 week lookback. ¹⁰ Law Review-like ¹¹ Supra note 9. ¹² AI Papers et al. ¹³ High Score
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