Alex Sarch
@should-b-workin.bsky.social
Law Prof at University of Surrey School of Law Criminal law, white collar & corporate crime, legal philosophy https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/alexander-sarch https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=151482
Oh man, this is heartbreaking to read. As a parent of small kids, I can't even imagine how awful it must be to be subject to processes like this. www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...
Hundreds of Thousands of Anonymous Deportees
Amid the president’s fast-moving deportation campaign, the stories of most people being swept up are missed.
theatlantic.com
Whenever dealing with hyper-technical UK grade descriptors or academic promotion criteria, I always want to shout Aristotle at them: Precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions people! We must look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits!
Actually, the rest of that section also screams "SCOTUS is losing legitimacy in the eyes of the District Courts"
Philosophy is structurally unable to acknowledge that "I dunno, man, maybe?" is objectively speaking the correct answer to most of our questions.
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...
Opinion | We’re Trapped in Trump’s Reality. This Is How We Escape It.
nytimes.com
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.
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...
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…
peasoupblog.com
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...
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...
Opinion | Trolling Democracy
nytimes.com
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.
Howard French@hofrench.bsky.social · last yr.The original second term power grab. Without protest. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/u...
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...
ceur-ws.org
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...
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...
harvardlawreview.org
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.
Evan Bernick, a finite mode with a smol hooman and a lorg floof@evanbernick.bsky.social · last yr.And conservatives find analogies when it's stuff they like, deny analogies when it's stuff they don't. The level of abstraction goes up, goes down. Here, it goes down because they don't like universal injunctions because they think they give judges too much power. Therefore this is new and illegal.
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.
James Acton is smart and worth listening to on nuclear stuff www.politico.com/news/magazin...
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.
politico.com
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...
A.I. Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You.
nytimes.com
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
"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...
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
theguardian.com
Incredible. Exactly the kind of dangers we tell our law students they risk from over-reliance on AI in writing their assignments -- except with vastly higher life-and-death stakes. www.propublica.org/article/trum...
DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to “Munch” Veterans Affairs Contracts
We obtained records showing how a Department of Government Efficiency staffer with no medical experience used artificial intelligence to identify which VA contracts to kill. “AI is absolutely the wron...
propublica.org
Our latest “Digital Authoritarianism” in @uchilrev.bsky.social Online. @ariezra.bsky.social and I explore the two-step destructive dance to silence and terrorize critics. We need to see this damage to democracy for what it is. lawreview.uchicago.edu/online-archi...
Digital Authoritarianism | The University of Chicago Law Review
Antidemocratic forces rely on intimidation tactics to silence criticism and opposition. Today’s intimidation playbook follows a two-step pattern. We surface these tactics so their costs to public disc...
lawreview.uchicago.edu
pretty shitty that young people now have to learn with both a 24/7 torrent of entertainment microtargeted to their neuroses in their pocket and a learning environment full of chirpy little prompts to press a button and fake their homework so they can spend a little more time in the neurosis torrent
Move fast+break things & creative disruption (themes we're starting to see echoed in uni management speak) means not respecting stakeholders enough to go through the normal processes of identifying and collaboratively solving problems and justifying the proposed changes to those affected by them.
Mar Hicks@histoftech.bsky.social · last yr.As many of us people who study or work in tech tried to tell y’all, move fast & break things was always about POWER, not progress.
Thought UK friends might be curious to see some empirical research on whether adopting rightwing policies actually helps mainstream political parties. Hint: it doesn't (Thx to a lovely colleague for these) What else to do instead? Maybe defend an alternative vision or just change the convo?
My favorite bit from this was abt how analytics-driven creation only recreates past successes."Jurassic Park was at least new, interesting, and exciting, Jurassic World was just a bunch of eye candy on a screen, re-hashing a familiar formula. Dopamine, not depth." www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-age-of...
The Age of the Surefire Mediocre
Why have so many aspects of our lives converged toward boring sludge?
forkingpaths.co
