Alex Sarch

Autumn is a good time for a jab 💉🛡️

Gotcha, yes a recipe for anti-fun!

What are the ways in which you're thinking it would be unfun more specifically? (Trying to collect as much nightmare fuel before lunch as I can, I suppose...)

Actually, the rest of that section also screams "SCOTUS is losing legitimacy in the eyes of the District Courts"

Ouch SCOTUS

Love this

Philosophy is structurally unable to acknowledge that "I dunno, man, maybe?" is objectively speaking the correct answer to most of our questions.

Opinion | We’re Trapped in Trump’s Reality. This Is How We Escape It.

Good read. Besides rejecting short-termism, we also need to reject the nihilistic worldview on which there are no principles only power and any lie or harm is ok if it helps your side. Rhodes is right we need a vision of a valuable & fair future worth sacrificing for www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/o...

Was reminded of Bentham’s argument that fear of crime can be a worse harm than crime itself. Everyone can be affected by fear of crime but relatively few people experience serious crime. And fear of crime can easily be manipulated for nefarious purposes.

Free & Equal – Elise Sugarman’s “Supposed Corpses and Correspondence” with a précis from Gabriel Mendlow PEA Soup is pleased to announce our discussion from Free & Equal, on Elise Sugarman’s “Supposed Corpses and Correspondence” with a précis from Gabriel Mendlow. Critical Précis…

Hi Crim Theorists: Great discussion happening rn at PEASoup of Elise Sugarman's fantastic paper in Free & Equal abt correspondence btw mens rea & actus reus--and what it shows abt culpability, diff prosecution strategies & more. (Online debate can be good actually!) peasoupblog.com/2025/08/free...

I defy you to name a worse topic for your neighbors at the cafe table next to you to be loudly pontificating about you while you're trying to get work done than the importance of investing in innovation to the future of the company.

Yes the world is nuts right now. Unrelatedly, AI has some very fun uses. Here is Perplexity's pretty great rhyming summary of my lecture handout on fraud under the UK's Fraud Act 2006.

Will it help my students remember the elements of s.2 fraud better? Let's find out next term...

YouTube video by Modo de Usar Frank O´Hara reads "Having a coke with you"

This is a treasure:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDLw...

Opinion | Trolling Democracy

Explaining to the normies that memes are political propaganda and it’s taking over (present tense) the Republican Party in the year of our lord 2025…

I imagine it’s needed, but man

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/o...

It has been overshadowed because the law is silly and there’s so much other lawlessness, but there is no legal justification whatsoever for the president deeming this not to be an enforceable law, and companies relying on that representation do so at their peril.

Saddened to read about the attack on protesters at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law yesterday (where we have close project partners).

Authoritarian tactics hit close to home wherever they're used.

Faculty statement: readers-attend-gcb.craft.me/dmm5PvKWlJ9h2M

Thoughtful article: "Addressing Deskilling as a Result of Human-AI Augmentation in the Workplace"

4.4 especially interesting discussion of how AI can reduce work satisfaction (esp for creatives) and how augmentation can be a first step towards substitution.

ceur-ws.org/Vol-3901/sho...

An Old Solution to the Nationwide Injunction Problem - Harvard Law Review Samuel Bray’s Multiple Chancellors: Reforming the National Injunction addresses what has increasingly become the recipe for legal challenges to federal policies.  File suit in...

The best solution for nationwide injunctions is for Congress to provide for such requests to be adjudicated by three-judge panels, as proposed by former 5th Cir judge (and my former colleague) Gregg Costa.

Congress can still do this after today’s decision.

harvardlawreview.org/blog/2018/01...

Seems right. Though isn't that just how it goes when the methodology is analogical and historical? Some of originalism's defenders say it better constrains judges and leaves less room for implementing the court's own political or policy preferences. But maybe it just makes it easier to hide them.

Jackson seems right on the impact of CASA. Kavanaugh's attempt to soften the blow by pointing out that preliminary class-wide relief can still be granted on a regional or national basis isn't very convincing. As Jackson points out, it means anyone's rights can be threatened if they haven't sued yet.

And I'd add, reinforce that the law on the books still matters beyond the law in action. Just bc a law prohibiting X is not enforced, that doesn't mean X is legally permitted. That still matters e.g. for shaping the arguments that can be made in the public sphere. (What's enforced isn't everything!)

Opinion | JD Vance Said the Iran Strikes Set Their Nuclear Program Back ‘Substantially.’ He’s Wrong. The strikes probably only delayed Iran’s nuclear ambitions — and reinvigorated them.

James Acton is smart and worth listening to on nuclear stuff
www.politico.com/news/magazin...

A.I. Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You.

Some good stuff here. I liked the point about how many jobs aren't so much about just producing text but standing behind the words and taking responsibility for them.

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/m...

And I bring this up in part bc I'm seeing students making plausible arguments but then hedging at the end of their analysis and adding these general case cites as a basis for softening their conclusions. That's how it connects to lack of confidence. But agree it's not a new prob as such!

Maybe they think this sounds good? If it were journalism, maybe I'd agree such general case cites sound nice. But for criminal law analysis, the main thing is to get them to intelligently discuss the offense elements. So these general cites (almost certainly due to AI) are one example I'm seeing.

Agree it happened previously but to me it seems like a step-change in terms of degree. For example, I'm seeing an uptick in students adding at best vaguely related case citations to support a very general proposition that doesn't advance the analysis (e.g. fraud can be criminal even without harm).

Undermining trust in one's own judgment seems like a worrisome and maybe under-appreciated second-order danger of over-reliance on AI (even when it's otherwise done responsibly, etc).

Even the ones who know the law and do the analysis, I often see them not following the argument where it leads. Instead there's a tendency to insert superficial sludge just because it feels safer. They don't trust their judgment even if they've got it.

I'm increasingly worried about one second-order effect of students relying on AI so much: that it undermines their CONFIDENCE to be able to distinguish smart-sounding but mediocre sludge from actually persuasive writing.... 1/3

When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it's time to rethink the hype | Gary Marcus The tech world is reeling from a paper that shows the powers of a new generation of AI have been wildly oversold, says cognitive scientist Gary Marcus

"ChatGPT, Claude and Deepseek may 'look smart–but when complexity rises, they collapse'." I try to get my students to see that the point of the exam is not to produce text that looks smart but to actually BE persuasive to a smart human. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...