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).
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.
- Justice Dept. Prosecutor Says Inquiry Into Fed Chair Could Be Resurrected 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
- A Federal Worker Was Fired for Filming DOGE. Now She’s Running for Congress 🔥🔥🔥🔥Alexis Goldstein, a former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employee, was fired this year for recording DOGE’s incursion into the agency.
- Mystery of Welsh medieval cemetery deepens 🔥🔥🔥Skeletons and artefacts unearthed from the site near Cardiff Airport are baffling archaeologists.
- Military Tensions Flare in Strait of Hormuz 🔥🔥Several vessels were struck amid Iranian threats, while the U.S. sent in destroyers and fought off further attacks.
- Smith College under investigation for admitting transgender women, US Department of Education says - The Boston Globe 🔥🔥Smith College in Northampton changed its admissions policy to include self-identified transgender women in May 2015.
- Internal ICE records reveal widespread use of force in detention centers 🔥The reports detail how guards have increasingly used chemical agents and physical tactics on detainees, including groups demanding adequate water, food and medical care.
- U.S. Revokes Visas of Board Members at Costa Rica’s Top Watchdog Newspaper 🔥
- Reform pledges to open migrant detention centres in Green-voting areas 🔥The Green Party has accused Reform of ...
- The rising cost of fertilizer and fuel prices is pushing some farmers to the brink 🔥In the Mississippi Delta, a crucial agricultural region, farmers say their patience is wearing thin. Reeling from the effects of tariffs, they must now also navigate rising fertilizer and fuel costs.
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.
- BREAKING: Iran Ceasefire Erupts, U.S./Israeli Strikes Imminent, Iran Targets Gulf States, Trump Threatens to "Blow Iran off the Face of the Earth" 🔥🔥Good afternoon everyone.
- Breaking: Rhode Island's Child Advocate sues to block DOJ subpoena on Rhode Island Hospital 🔥A federal judge in Texas ordered the hospital to turn over information about gender-affirming care provided to minors by May 14. Another in Rhode Island set a May 12 hearing.
- Mifepristone Is Back In Court 🔥Last Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, decided to shut down access to the abortion drug mifepristone, and not just for women in Louisiana, whe...
- Breaking: Supreme Court Over the Dissent of At Least Justice Jackson, Breaks Its Usual Procedural Rules to Allow Louisiana to Minimize Black Voting Rights in the Middle of an Ongoing Election #ELB 🔥Talk about adding insult to injury. After the Supreme Court’s disastrous ruling in the Callais case last week effectively killing off a key part of the Voting Rights Act protecting minority voters, th...
- Important Update: Judicial Nominees Refuse to Say if Trump Can Run Again, Trump Suggests Running, Hegseth Caught Lying Under Oath 🔥Good evening, everyone.
- A Judge Calls Out Trump’s Self-Dealing 🔥Order in Trump $10B IRS suit threatens to expose the administration's series of collusive lawsuits.
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.
- Chinese Court Rules Firms Can’t Lay Off Workers on AI Grounds† 🔥🔥🔥A Chinese court ruled that companies cannot terminate employees just to replace them with artificial intelligence systems, as authorities juggle the need to stabilize the domestic labor market with a global race to develop AI technologies.
- The AI Termination Ban: Why Chinese Courts Just Made It Illegal to Replace Workers with Robots† 🔥🔥🔥Chinese courts ruled AI adoption can't justify firing workers, forcing tech companies to budget for expensive transitions that could increase global gadget prices.
- How ChatGPT conversations became evidence in criminal investigations | CNN† 🔥🔥As the law stands now, your AI conversations can find their way from a computer into the courtroom.
- ‘Skywalker turned Darth Vader’: Galloway on Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit | CNN† 🔥🔥NYU professor Scott Galloway weighs in on the escalating feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, arguing the real issue isn’t personality but the urgent need for AI regulation.
- Elon Musk went to court. The judge wasn’t amused.† 🔥🔥Elon Musk’s outsize reputation, provocative remarks and his friction with a federal judge have dominated the trial in his case against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
- Musk Warns of Killer AI — While He and the Rest of Silicon Valley Cash In on AI That Kills 🔥In his lawsuit against OpenAI, Elon Musk evoked a “Terminator” scenario. He said nothing about the people AI is already killing.
- Congress Has One Chance to Require a Warrant. It's About to Miss It. 🔥Claudia Ruiz examines data broker loopholes, FISA 702, and AI surveillance, highlighting threats to privacy, civil liberties, and Fourth Amendment protections.
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.
- Vaccines, Religious Liberty, and the GVR as Doctrinal Signal In Miller v. McDonald, the Supreme Court vacated a decision upholding a vaccine mandate for lacking religious exemptions, remanding for reconsideration ...
- Beyond Public Law: Recognizing a Tort Remedy for Hate Speech in Canada This article argues that Canadian private law should be updated to recognize a cause of action in tort for hate speech directed against identifiable group ...
- The Metaphor is the Key: Cryptography, the Clipper Chip and the Constitution† Part I of this Article describes advances in encryption technology that are increasing personal privacy, particularly electronic privacy, but reducing the U.S.
- From McCarthyism to Bostock: The Judicial Evolution of Anti-Discrimination in Employment for Sexual Minorities in the United States In the context of McCarthyism, the U.S. federal courts and the Federal Civil Service Commission applied a broad "efficiency" standard to assess the su ...
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.
- AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights† 🔥🔥🔥As artificial intelligence (AI) tools become widely adopted, large language models (LLMs) are increasingly involved on both sides of decision-making processes, ranging from hiring to content moderatio...
- HG-DAgger: Interactive Imitation Learning with Human Experts† 🔥Imitation learning has proven to be useful for many real-world problems, but approaches such as behavioral cloning suffer from data mismatch and compounding error issues. One attempt to address these ...
- Superposition Yields Robust Neural Scaling† 🔥The success of today's large language models (LLMs) depends on the observation that larger models perform better. However, the origin of this neural scaling law, that loss decreases as a power law wit...
- LLMs Can Get "Brain Rot": A Pilot Study on Twitter/X We propose and test the LLM Brain Rot Hypothesis: continual exposure to junk web text induces lasting cognitive decline in large language models (LLMs). To unveil junk effects, we designed a novel con...
- Agentopic: A Generative AI Agent Workflow for Explainable Topic Modeling Agentopic is a novel agent-based workflow for explainable topic modeling that leverages the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing topic modeling approaches such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and BERTopic often lack transparency on how topics are assigned or group...
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) (promoted)
- Professa Murray (@kalimurray.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Lawfare (@lawfaremedia.org) (promoted)
- Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social)
- Mark Copelovitch (@mcopelov.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Andy Craig (@andycraig.bsky.social)
- Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Steve Vladeck (@stevevladeck.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (@ebonyteach.blacksky.app) (promoted)
- Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) (promoted)
- Michael McDonald (@electproject.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Jo Wolff (@jowolff.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Jonathan Ladd (@jonathanmladd.com) (promoted)
- Doug Lindner (@douglindner.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Michael C. Dorf (@dorfonlaw.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Jen Taub (@jentaub.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Daniel Gilmore (@gilmored85.bsky.social) (promoted)
- Jeffrey Vagle (@jvagle.me) (promoted)
- Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Peter Stefanovic (@peterstefanovic.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Orin Kerr (@orinkerr.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor.bsky.social) (relegated)
- T. Greg "86 47" Doucette (@gregdoucette.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Prem Sikka (@premnsikka.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) (relegated)
- Mini-War Hat (@kenwhite.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Justin Hendrix (@justinhendrix.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner.bsky.social) (relegated)
- CREW (@citizensforethics.org) (relegated)
- Anthony Michael Kreis (@anthonymkreis.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Adam Cohen (My Personal Views Only) (@axidentaliberal.bsky.social) (relegated)
- Fionna O’Leary (@fascinatorfun.bsky.social) (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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