My bottom line: overrated but still good.

Her bottom line: The Jungle would have made for a better movie.

I’m of the view that Michael’s passing, as untimely as it is, is the one opportunity his family and his children have to preserve his asset legacy.

—Charles Koppelman

It is ridiculous for Anderson to claim that he removed his footnotes because he was “unable to find a good citation format for web sources.” As I mentioned in my previous post, there are many authoritative citation standards which can easily be found in style manuals and websites. Even Wikipedia itself gives you nine different citation formats (including Chicago and MLA) for each entry. Anderson says his publisher insisted on a timestamp for each URL, which Anderson found “clumsy and archaic,” so he cut out the footnotes. WRONG! And don’t even get me started on the whole “write-through” thing.

• “A more powerful version of the Friends List feature could allow users to construct very different identities or “personas” for each list.” (55) … “It could, for instance, perform basic network analysis on a user’s Friends network to inform them of what clusters may already exist, and perhaps to create default Friends Lists for them automatically to help them along.” (59) … “It could push the Friends List feature as a way to manage privacy and inspire users to utilize it to preserve social contexts.” (60)
• “Another option would be to help users visualize actual disclosures. That is, Facebook could be designed such that users were informed whenever Friends actually accessed their photos, videos, or Wall.” (63)
• “Instead, defaults should be modeled after the norms of distribution. Contextual integrity is violated when information does not flow through the network as users expect it should. The obvious solution is to design the network such that information flows consistent with user expectations and norms.” (66)

These ideas are not deeply original, but they all move the ball forward in the way that scholarship ought to. Saving Face is also a pleasure to read: it opens with a true story about a college student and her grandmother, and it finishes with a spot-on Seinfeld reference.

What makes all of this noteworthy is that the author, Chris Peterson, wrote Saving Face as his college senior thesis. (It was prepared nder the supervision of Ethan Katsh at UMass Amherst.) It’s a remarkably mature paper for one so young.

(Yes, you could save another $10 buying the non-Energy Star version, but why would you go and do a silly thing like that?)

This introductory text explores the historical origins of the main legal institutions that came to characterize the Anglo-American legal tradition, and to distinguish it from European legal systems. The book contains both text and extracts from historical sources and literature. …

Two great themes dominate the book: (1) the origins, development, and pervasive influence of the jury system and judge/jury relations across eight centuries of Anglo-American civil and criminal justice; and (2) the law/equity division, from the emergence of the Court of Chancery in the fourteenth century down through equity’s conquest of common law in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The chapters on criminal justice explore the history of pretrial investigation, policing, trial, and sentencing, as well as the movement in modern times to nonjury resolution through plea bargaining. Considerable attention is devoted to distinctively American developments, such as the elective bench, and the influence of race relations on the law of criminal procedure.

I took Professor Langbein’s course of the same name in law school; our course materials consisted of a sequence of photocopied packets that had clearly been assembled with the aid of scissors and glue. It was one of the best courses I’ve ever taken, and the materials—an eclectic mixture of monograph excerpts, primary source documents, and modern variations on older themes—were a true labor of love. Langbein wove the disparate materials into a compellingly complex narrative. Readers of the book will have to do without his inimitable lecturing style, but fortunately the published version comes with extensive notes that provide the necessary explanatory context. I expect that this volume will quickly become the standard law-school text on Anglo-American legal history.

The only unfortunate thing is the price: a stunning $159. Yes, it comes with “over 200 illustrations, many in color, including medieval illuminated manuscripts, paintings, books and manuscripts, caricatures, and photographs,” but that price is insane. With some casebooks, I can almost understand why they’re so expensive: obviously, no one would read them voluntarily, so sales will be low. But this beauty of a text ought to be a quarter of the price and out on display at the front table of every good bookstore.

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Relatedly, I’m sorry about the, ahem, infrequent updates here of late. This will change.

(UPDATE: The blog has not moved; I have moved. Physically. Interstate. http://laboratorium.net will still work for all your Laboratorium needs.)

The Quigley Complaint alleges that the Defendants are attempting to obtain control of the company by means of materially false statements in proxy materials. In the Complaint Quigley contends that the Karkus Defendants have concealed Mr. Ligums’ participation in the proxy contest … .

In addition, however, Quigley presents a variety of evidence that Mr. Ligums has extensive personal and professional connections with other members of the Karkus group.

Quigley notes—and Mr. Ligums acknowledges—that the website for Mr. DeShavo’s construction business includes a testimonial from Mr. Ligums. Further, Mr. Ligums also testified that his son holds a $ 300,000 recorded mortgage on Mr. DeShavo’s home. Quigley asserts that it is also relevant that Mr. Ligums is Facebook “friends” with Mr. DeShavo and one or more of Mr. DeShavo’s children. Quigley also highlights—and, again, Mr. Ligums acknowledges—that Messrs. Leventhal, DeShazo and Karkus were invited to Mr. Ligums’ daughter’s wedding.

What do you want to bet it was an associate, rather than a partner, who had the bright idea of checking on Facebook? The court? It was all for naught, though, as the court dropped a footnote:

For purposes of this litigation, the Court assigns no significance to the Facebook “friends” reference. … Regardless of what Facebook’s apparent popularity or usefullness may say about the nature of 21st century communications and relationships, the site’s designers’ selections of icons or labels offer no substance to this dispute. Indeed, the Court notes that electronically connected “friends” are not among the litany of relationships targeted by the Exchange Act or the regulations issued pursuant to the statute. Indeed, “friendships” on Facebook may be as fleeting as the flick of a delete button.

I wouldn’t endorse it as a general hard-and-fast rule, but this seems like a sensible conclusion. There’s a reason I refer to Facebook “friends” as “contacts” in my scholarship. The social reality of a Facebook friending is, on average, a lot less significant than a $300,000 mortgage.

On a very broad note, I don’t see this as a story about the goodness or badness of Andrews or Barreiro—and I’ve been dismayed by some of the nastiness about her in comments here and elsewhere. Rather, I think this matters because the story Andrews told was basically about the subprime crisis, and the book casts him as a sort of everyman, lured in by cheap credit and a likeable scoundrel of a mortgage broker. That may be what happened to many, or most people in the mortgage crisis—but the back to back bankruptcies strongly suggest that this is not what happened to Andrews. That said, I think the story told with the bankruptcies included would still be a story well worth telling.

It may seem puzzling that a civil lawsuit could yield monopolies. Traditionally, class-action lawsuits cluster a group of people who have suffered the same kind of harm as a result of alleged wrongful conduct. And under this settlement, authors who come forward to claim ownership in books scanned by Google would receive $60 per title.

But the settlement would also create a class that includes millions of people who will never come forward. For the majority of books — considered “orphan” works — no one will claim ownership. The author may have died; the publisher might have gone out of business or doesn’t respond to inquiries; the original contract has disappeared.

Google would get an explicit, perpetual license to scan and sell access to these in-copyright but out-of-print orphans, which make up an estimated 50 to 70 percent of books published after 1923. No other provider of digital books would enjoy the same legal protection. The settlement also creates a Book Rights Registry that, in conjunction with Google, would set prices for all commercial terms associated with digital books.

His preferred course of action: reject the settlement and create a public scanning project:

There are alternatives. Separate from the Google effort, hundreds of libraries, publishers and technology firms are already digitizing books, with the goal of creating an open, freely accessible system for people to discover, borrow, purchase and read millions of titles.

It’s not that expensive. For the cost of 60 miles of highway, we can have a 10 million-book digital library available to a generation that is growing up reading on-screen. Our job is to put the best works of humankind within reach of that generation. Through a simple Web search, a student researching the life of John F. Kennedy should be able to find books from many libraries, and many booksellers — and not be limited to one private library whose titles are available for a fee, controlled by a corporation that can dictate what we are allowed to read.

I agree with his diagnosis but disagree with his prescription, in that I think the settlement is salvageable. The op-ed, having put its finger on the orphan works issue, then whistles its way past the problem of what we’ll do about orphan works without some kind of legal framework to immunize scanners and distributors. The settlement, whatever its concentration-of-power flaws, does genuinely help bring this lost generation of books back into the public sphere.