Nicholas Mignanelli

The second talk in the Yale Law Library’s Critical Legal AI Literacies Series: Chaz Arnett on “AI and the Permanence of Racism,” library.law.yale.edu/news/critica...

Deadline extended: abstracts due Oct 31

Poster reads: March 12–14, 2026; Queer Bibliography in the South: Space, Place, Community; University of Georgia, Athens, GA.

Your challenge for this weekend is to put in an abstract for Queer Bibliography 2026. It's what all the cool kids are doing.

The theme is Space, Place, Community (widely understood, certainly not limited to the South). CFP: shorturl.at/XAVJ0; Submit: forms.gle/XD7FgrrStp3j...

Athens GA and online

The first talk in the Yale Law Library’s Critical Legal AI Literacies: Emily Bender on “Large Language Models and the Lawyer’s Search for Meaning” library.law.yale.edu/news/critica...

Attending Rare Book School at UVA and staying on the Lawn (Jefferson’s “Academical Village”), not far from the room where a young Edgar Allan Poe lived during his brief time as a student here in 1826

Window Treatments For most of us, stained glass and churches go hand in hand. The medium’s nectar luminosity and capacity for narrative imagery have long been used to invoke the divine. But where we may see a display o...

My latest piece for Daily Nutmeg (the obsession with Tiffany glass continues): dailynutmeg.com/blogs/blog/c...

RBMS 2025 Queer Bibliography Meet-up! Thursday, June 26, 4 to 5 PM, at the Blue Orchid, 130 Court St., New Haven, Connecticut 06511.

Coming to #RBMS2025 this week? Interested in queer and LGBTQ+ library work and bibliography? Join us for a casual meet up on Thursday afternoon at the Blue Orchid!

Please repost and share the flyer widely!

#QueerBibliography 📚

The Artist House, Key West (c. 1890), one of the most hauntingly beautiful homes I have ever stayed in…

Guest Post: A Thought on Legal Technology and Silicon Valley Guest post by Nor Ortiz I’ve recently been thinking about how interconnected exactly the futures of Silicon Valley and the legal technology industry are.  The past couple of years have been qu…

An important piece about legal tech’s entanglement with the impending AI bubble ripslawlibrarian.wordpress.com/2025/05/12/g...

Typical A.B.A. J. slop, at least somewhat better than the puff pieces for vendors and the lazy editorials

If outlets must continue publishing pieces like this, they should consult the critics, or at least a few folks who aren't actively excited to outsource their scholarly work to machines. Failing that, do just a bit more reading beyond the enthusiasts' output: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Librarian here- yes Gen AI is not a search engine and Google is not a database.

Say it after me: Chat GPT is not a search engine. It does not scan the web for information, it just generates statistically likely sentences. You cannot use it a search engine, or as a substitute for searching.

Now. Please never use an LLM for information searches ever again.

Information literacy and chatbots as search By Emily This post started off as a thread I wrote and posted across social media on Sunday evening. I'm reproducing the thread (lightly edited) first and...

4) I need some information and I wish to just pose my question to an all-knowing oracle.

DO NOT DO THIS. Chatbots, even if they could reliably return "the" correct answer, are not a good tech for information access.

buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

>>

LLMs are nothing more than models of the distribution of the word forms in their training data, with weights modified by post-training to produce somewhat different distributions. Unless your use case requires a model of a distribution of word forms in text, indeed, they suck and aren't useful.

Tips For Identifying AI Use — TechTonic Justice

“Most of the time, government officials, landlords, employers, educators, and others who use AI to make decisions don’t announce it. This guide is meant to help you figure out if AI is being used and what you can do about it.”

www.techtonicjustice.org/resources/ti...

Spring on the New Haven Green

WHOOF. Going to have to add this one to the "Boolean tools are powerful but easy to misuse" example bank (I maintain that searching for "haunted house" when searching for Stambovsky v. Ackley is the best example of this, but this one has more material consequences).

Maybe “democratizing” law (legal information) isn’t just about broad access but necessitates shared governance as well

Happy Nowruz 2025 A small newsletter about legaltech

The latest issues of Lawyer Ex Machina is out. More AI Fabrication Follies, the SEC drops its suit against Ripple, and more. #lawsky #lawlibrarians #legaltech buttondown.com/LawyerExMach...

Tapping this sign again. By @emilymbender.bsky.social

buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

"As OpenAI and Meta introduce LLM-driven searchbots, I'd like to once again remind people that neither LLMs nor chatbots are good technology for information access."

Hopkinson’s Judgements in the Admiralty of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia 1789) and Kirby’s Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Superior Court of the State of Connecticut (Litchfield 1789). Hopkinson beat Kirby by a few months, but there’s no evidence to suggest either was aware of the other’s project.

Also the third volume of case law published in the United States!

Connecticut folklore makes the @nytimes.com

Circa 1755 portrait of Sir William Blackstone

The Yale Law Library acquires the notes of an American (colonial Maryland) student who attended Blackstone’s 1758 lectures at Oxford library.law.yale.edu/news/new-acq...

An email. Subject: "A document you requested is now on CourtListener" Body headline: "Your Wish Has Been Granted!" The remainder of the email then shows the details of the filing, including the name of the case, a link to the document, and closes with, "You requested it on March 3, 2025. 1 person was waiting for it. Somebody paid $0.20 to make it available to all of us."

Our new "PACER Pray and Pay Project" is launched! This project lets you "Pray" for PACER documents you want, and has a leader board where other people can "Pay" for the most-wanted items.

When your prayer is granted, we let you know! Details below and here: www.courtlistener.com/help/pray-an...

The more vendor AI demos I attend, the more I think the end result, if not the end goal, is further dissociation from information. A lot of our technology already removes us from active processing, and this next step allows yet another step back while it all flows by.

“Kirby’s on My Mind: A Material Culture Approach to Critical Legal Information Literacy,” my essay about teaching the foundations of legal research with rare law books, is now out in the Journal of Legal Education and posted to SSRN: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

I agree, and when scholars narrow their cites to a select group of similar scholars, either unintentionally (imperial scholar) or intentionally (in this case), a disservice is done the reader and the field