Recent quotes:

An Epic Train Trip on the Trans-Siberian Railroad Changed My Life - Bloomberg

The conductor, who spoke no English, didn’t seem worried; every day, he lounged shirtless at the car’s entrance, cigarette in hand. Nearby, a sign said “No Smoking” in Russian and English. At last, a European passenger confronted the conductor, miming her dissatisfaction and pointing angrily at the sign. The conductor’s response was also silent: He went inside his berth, produced a screwdriver, and removed the sign from the wall.

I see therefore I think

For example, in the seven or so seconds, on average, that it took students in the study to solve a logical reasoning problem, researchers recorded at least 23 eye movements. Among other clues, ocular activity indicated which data students absorbed, or disregarded, to arrive at their conclusions. The study builds on previous findings by Bunge and fellow researchers that track cognitive changes in students during mentally challenging learning tasks. For example, a 2012 study found that a three-month LSAT course strengthened the circuitry in the brain's frontoparietal network and boosted the reasoning skills of two dozen young adults, compared to pre-law students who did not complete the course.

As A Poor Kid From The Rust Belt, Yale Law School Brought Me Face-to-face With Radical Inequality

. A student survey found that over 95 percent of Yale Law’s students qualified as upper-middle-class or higher, and most of them qualified as outright wealthy. Obviously, I was neither upper-middle-class nor wealthy. Very few people at Yale Law School are like me. They may look like me, but for all of the Ivy League’s obsession with diversity, virtually everyone—black, white, Jewish, Muslim, whatever— comes from intact families who never worry about money. Early during my first year, after a late night of drinking with my classmates, we all decided to stop at a New Haven chicken joint. Our large group left an awful mess: dirty plates, chicken bones, ranch dressing and soda splattered on the tables, and so on. I couldn’t imagine leaving it all for some poor guy to clean up, so I stayed behind. Of a dozen classmates, only one person helped me: my buddy Jamil, who also came from a poorer background. Afterward, I told Jamil that we were probably the only people in the school who’d ever had to clean up someone else’s mess. He just nodded his head in silent agreement.

The Law School with the Most Influence Will Surprise You

For the Ravel Influence Score, we developed a measure that looks at both quantity and quality of work. Using data from Ravel’s platform we weighed the number of rulings a judge wrote and the number of times those decisions were cited in other opinions. In short, this is an approach that judges judges by way of other judges.

Jaywalking as a crime

She and her children were struck by an onrushing van, and her 4-year-old son was killed. The driver, it was later discovered, had alcohol and painkillers in his system. He had two previous hit-and-runs on his record and was visually impaired in his left eye. The driver pleaded guilty to fleeing the scene of the accident and served six months in prison. Nelson, soon after the funeral was held for her son, was charged with second-degree vehicular homicide, reckless conduct, and crossing a roadway in an inappropriate manner—in other words, jaywalking. These charges, in collaboration, carried a penalty of up to three years in prison. In the end, Nelson was sentenced to 12 months of probation, for doing nothing more than trying to get her children home.

Bread and courts in Hungary

In his opinion, “to be a judge of the Constitutional Court in Hungary is an entirely different matter from being one in Denmark or in the Netherlands.” His favorite example is an international meeting he attended while serving as an ombudsman. The Swiss ombudsman had to ascertain that seven refugees had washing machines and driers and could have daily showers while the ombudsman from Azerbaijan had to make sure that 300,000 refugees had at least 300 grams of bread and a liter and a half of water. Translating that into differences between constitutional courts, I assume he means that in Hungary people must be satisfied with less legal redress than the citizens of European countries with greater means enjoy.

VCs betting on lawsuits

For better or worse, the lawsuit-finance market continues to grow. Hedge funds and others speculating on litigation are making more and larger bets. Some corporate lobbyists warn that the new financial engineering encourages wasteful courtroom warfare, but investor demand for fat returns—and big law firms' appetite for business—guarantee the spread of litigation finance.

Here's How Sprite Tries to Buy Off Reporters With Free Tickets

Here's the thing: Because the approximate value of these tickets is so high and they are not conventional media passes, our legal counsel has made us aware we must create a formal agreement with any outlet to which we are providing the tickets. So, we propose an agreement with very minimal asks.

First-Year Law School Enrollment in U.S. at 40-Year Low

Total enrollment at the 204 law schools approved by the association fell 7 percent from a year ago and 18 percent from the 2010 high, the ABA said. The number of total students is the lowest since 1982, when there were 169 approved schools. Almost two-thirds of the schools reported drops in first-year enrollees, and about 20 percent of those saw declines of more than 20 percent, the ABA said.

Who will judge the comics?

A judge walks out of the courtroom, laughing loudly. A colleague asks, "What is it you laugh about?" "Ah, I just heard an excellent anecdote," the judge says, sweeping tears of laughter. "An anecdote? Tell me!" "Are you crazy? I just sentenced a man to ten years for that anecdote."

Pianist asks The Washington Post to kill a concert review (below) under the E.U.’s ‘right to be forgotten’ law

Some of the pieces, such as Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2, sounded less like light solo piano works than an attempt to rival the volume of a concerto with full orchestra. This scherzo became cartoon-like in its lurches from minutely small to very, very large. It’s not that Lazic isn’t sensitive – or profoundly gifted. […] he can do anything he wants at the keyboard, detailing chords with a jeweler’s precision, then laying little curls of notes atop a cushion of sound like diamonds nestled on velvet. […] The sheer technical ability was, at first, a delight.

Idiot lawyers quote idiot academics: excluding fracking technology, fracking doesn't pollute.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found no evidence that fracturing shale causes groundwater contamination.[…]The team identified eight clusters of fugitive-gas-contaminated groundwater, and found that each of the clusters was attributable to either a failure of annulus cement, faulty production casings, or well failure. The team did not find any evidence to suggest that a vertical migration of hydrocarbon gas from depth to groundwater through intervening layers of geological formations had occurred […] Thus, none of the contamination was due to hydraulic fracturing or horizontal drilling techniques.
This indenture was clearly written at four in the morning by a junior associate at a law firm, and whether or not it allows Caesars to do what it wants to do is pretty much a matter of dumb luck. If the junior associate had written "or," we wouldn't be here. He wrote "and," so we are. If he'd written "I AM SO TIRED AND I HATE BONDS," it probably would have made it into the final indenture as easily as the "and" did. Who was checking? The entire edifice of modern financial capitalism is built on 100-page documents drafted by exhausted 26-year-olds and read by nobody. The reason disputes like this always bring out people talking about how important it is to dig deep into the documents is that nobody ever does.
“There are simply no known long-term toxic effects from taking serotonergic hallucinogens,” he explained. “From a medical perspective, psilocybin is a remarkably safe compound.” The Drug Enforcement Agency takes a different view. As a condition of Dr. Ross’s Schedule I license, the compound is stored in a restricted area inside a two ton safe. “It’s the only drug in the safe,” Dr. Ross elaborated, “and Monday through Friday, we take the drug out once a day and weigh it. Three people have to sign off on it.” That security is a stark reminder that distribution of psilocybin without a DEA license is a federal crime carrying penalties of up to 20 years in prison for a first offense.