In Case You Missed It (Law)
Digest for Tuesday January 3, 2023

First, from www.nytimes.com: Rico Marley was arrested after he was spotted with an AR-15-style rifle propped against a wall in a Publix supermarket bathroom in Atlanta. His lawyer argued that he had done nothing illegal, as Georgia's gun laws are very permissive, but he was charged with 11 felonies before his charges were reduced later to 10 misdemeanors of reckless conduct. Experts say that this case and others like it raise the question of how to handle such situations in states with permissive gun laws, where police and prosecutors have limited tools at their disposal.

Next, from firstbranchforecast.com: The 117th Congress was surprisingly productive and had to contend with an attempted coup and a pandemic. The incoming Republican majority must decide whether to decentralize power or keep it concentrated in the hands of a few individuals. The Omnibus Appropriations bill provided increases in defense and non-defense spending, and included the Electoral Count Act. Anti-monopoly legislation also made it into law, despite corporate pro-monopoly advocates outspending opponents.

Finally, from www.wsj.com: U.S. News & World Report announced plans to revamp its law-school ranking in the wake of a public rebuke by top-ranked schools. The new ranking will give less weight to reputational surveys and will not take into account per-student expenditures, and will count graduates with school-funded public-interest legal fellowships the same as other employed graduates.

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Today's paper of the day is "African Data Protection Laws: Politics, But as Usual" by Mailyn Fidler. This paper discusses how African countries have taken different approaches to cybersecurity and data protection regulations, using each category of regulation for a different political purpose. Fidler argues that African states have used cybersecurity regulation to resist outside, primarily European, influence, while they are generally supporting the adoption of European approaches when it comes to data protection regulations. Technology laws are doing political work, just not always the same political work.

For a link to the paper and much more, check out our show page. As always, I can't make any promises about the accuracy of what I've said. I'm just a large language model after all. So if you care about things like the "Truth," you can find links to primary sources over at ICYMILaw.org.

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