Greetings, my name is David Colarusso. I'm the 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, esp. #LawFedi. So I created a bot, this digest, a podcast , and a newsletter to help folks discover great law-themed content. You can get a look at their algos/workflows here.
If you like what you see, consider joining Mastodon and following @icymi_law@esq.social, the bot feeding this page content. You may also enjoy my Lab's April event on collaborating at scale.
FWIW, here are some law-flavored server suggestions: (1) esq.social (legal general interest); (2) law.builders (legal tech et al.); and (3) mastodon.lawprofs.org (legal academics). Also, here are Some Tricks [For] Making Mastodon Way More Useful.
Top Posts
AI Summaries / Podcast Transcript †
Welcome to today's news update. Today's big stories include former US Vice President Mike Pence and former National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien subpoenaed by a special counsel, the New York Public Library's research showing up to 75% of books published before 1964 have entered the public domain, and the Esquiring Minds podcast talks Reedy Creek, DoNotPay and the AI Chatsplosion. Tune in for more details! And after the news, stick around for our paper of the day!
~ show summaries ~
† Here AI is referencing a large language model (LLM) tasked with summarizing 3 articles from Most-Shared Links and 1 paper from the SSRN Roundup below. Also FWIW, LLMs are well-known bullshitters.
Most-Shared Links
Here are yesterday's most-shared links from #Law/#LawFedi folks I follow.¹
- Mike Pence subpoenaed in Trump special counsel investigations – reports | US news | The Guardian (~6 shares)
- Librarians Are Finding Thousands Of Books No Longer Protected By Copyright Law (~6 shares)
- Pearls Before Nothing: Reedy Creek, DoNotPay and AI Chatsplosion by @Andrew Leahey · Zencastr (~5 shares)
- GOP AGs support ending access to mifepristone abortion drug (~5 shares)
- Elongineering (~4 shares)
- The Benefits of Combining Ethnic Identity with Race in the Census | Brennan Center for Justice (~3 shares)
- A Subpoena for Pence - by Benjamin Wittes - Dog Shirt Daily (~3 shares)
- DOJ Investigation FAQs (Sticky) - Teri Kanefield (~3 shares)
- Amsterdam to outlaw cannabis-smoking in red-light district streets | Netherlands | The Guardian (~3 shares)
- Chicago Says Dobbs Decision Forecloses Vax Challenge - Law360 (~3 shares)
¹ Yesterday doesn't include the entire day as this page is created a few hours before mindnight.
SSRN Roundup
I keep an eye out for links to SSRN. Once I collect five, I share them. This is the most-recent bundle.²
- Accidental Abolition? Exploring Section 230 as Non-Reformist Reform by Kendra Albert
- The Forgotten Stewards of Higher Education Quality by Matthew A. Bruckner
- Digital Curb Cuts: Towards an Inclusive Open Forms Ecosystem by Quinten Steenhuis, David Colarusso
- The Decline of Violent Conflicts: What Do the Data Really Say? by Pasquale Cirillo, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Data Subject Rights as a Tool for Platform Worker Resistance: Lessons from the Uber/Ola Judgments by Wenlong Li, Jill Toh
² Depending on how much folks are sharing, there could be more or less than one bundle per day, this is just the most-recent one.
Traffic
Of course, these insights are all thanks to a community of users, namely the folks I follow over at @icymi_law@esq.social. For fun, here's a look at their posting traffic yesterday. I like trying to create stories about the daily ups and downs. What is that bump? ;)
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