For the Balkinization symposium on Diego Zambrano, How Americans Enforce the Law (Stanford University Press, 2026).James E. Pfander In How Americans Enforce the Law, Diego Zambrano sets out to document and to explain that distinctively American legal institution: the private lawsuit aimed at the enforcement of public law. In a book length treatment of the subject that combines careful study, elegant theorizing, and inspired description, Zambrano provides an exceptionally readable and engaging…

Not all citations are equal. To be an “Author Cited” by the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) is to hold some prestige. This post shares the results of a project that captured and counted the Authors Cited works found in the judgments by the SCC from April 2021 to April 2026.

In the Newsletter this weekElsewhere this week: Solutions for Flensburg - PadborgAnalysis: Wunderline turns to farce, and accountability collapsesBullshit Meter: Croatia - Greece trains on an EU funded coast lineGood week: Battery trains for Niedersachsen, new tracks for BrandenburgAlso a good week: Portugal starts building a broad gauge high speed lineUnexpectedly good week: New high speed line opens in European TürkiyeBad week: More than a Renfe AVE 100 power car in danger of going up in…

When Wrzlbrnft sent this news story to me, he warned me it was bullshit. Complete and total garbage. All it would take for anyone to realise this would be to 1) look at the topography along that proposed route, and 2) look how few existing railways there are anywhere along there.Yes, the EU wants to better connect the Balkans by rail, but the main infrastructure will be Ljubljana - Zagreb - Beograd - Skopje - Thessaloniki, with branches to the ports on the Adriatic, if anyone can afford to…

I was pointed towards this film on the official Talgo YouTube Channel:It claims Talgo's trains for DSB are "Reliable".The truth is these trains are the least reliable in DSB's entire fleet. This is not really bullshit, but more like gaslighting.Sometimes it is better for a manufacturer to say nothing at all. This should be one such moment.

I'll confess, I haven't been following local politics as much as I should. Like many, I'm frustrated with the gridlock and dysfunction on the city council, which seems to be a majority view (though of course, fracturing badly on the "who is to blame" question). But I don't have big opinions on many of the local issues of the day. And since everyone is a Democrat (at least at the municipal level), I don't even have that heuristic.So I'll do my best, but I'm still quite persuadable. Have at me in…

TrumpWatch 2026: Democrats Have a Rich Bounty from Which to Choose Another day, another pollster announcing that Donald Trump has hit a record low for their poll. The latest is Fox, where the President is at 36% approval against 64% disapproval, putting him 28 points underwater. Click here for full story

Well, shit. I just learned that the white and red cross in the Maryland flag was actually adopted by Confederate sympathizers in the state during the Civil War (I still, after 20 years, have to remind myself that I’m south of the Mason-Dixon Line) and legislation was passed banning its display on grounds of treason. 15 years after the war, during a 150-year celebration of the state’s founding, it was combined into a design with the heraldic banner of Lord Calvert, which had been adopted by the…

Abracadabra, the defi project behind the Magic Internet Money (MIM) stablecoin, is shutting down. It blamed its string of hacks: $6.5 million theft in January 2024, $13 million in March 2025, and $1.8 million in October 2025, which altogether left about $21 million in bad debt. According to the shutdown proposal, 22 million MIM are in circulation, backed by just $900,000 in "actionable backing" which puts the supposedly dollar-pegged token at about $0.04. Two wallets voted on the proposal.In…

Alternate title: Dog bites man According to this recent report (see also here) from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group (Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, and David E. Weinstein, “The Anatomy of Tariff Pass-Through into Consumer Prices“), Trump’s tariffs raised consumer goods price inflation in the U.S. by [only!] 2.6%. File under “Department of Underestimation.” Amiti et al. 2026

This one has received a lot of commentary online already – from the Daily Mail, 13 October: An Oxford University lecturer who was in a relationship with Tory peer Michael Gove is facing trial on child abuse image charges. Dr Lola Salem… was charged by Thames Valley Police in May this year along with Henry Hopwood-Phillips, a historian and geopolitical analyst. They both wrote for the The Critic magazine as freelance contributors. Hopwood-Phillips, 39, founded a Singapore-based political…

Our review of The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, by Fred Kaplan, first published in January 2020. The Bomb is a page-turner. It’s interesting on several levels: as an account of nuclear strategy, as a case study in bureaucratic politics, and as an exploration of game theory applied in real-world scenarios. I have no particular interest in military history, but this didn‘t stop me enjoying it a lot. ★★★★☆ This book was a birthday present from site contributor…

Sometimes you see a figure that makes you uncertain whether to laugh or cry, so you do a little of both. The Global Linkages Lab at Brown University–specifically, Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan, Can Soylu, and Muhammed A. Yildirim–have sought to track down “every occasion on which the President attached a number to a US tariff, whatever the channel: speeches, interviews and press gaggles, Truth Social posts, executive orders and proclamations, and White House fact sheets and statements.” Some…

Andy Harris, Maryland’s embarrassing right-wing Congressman, did a rare town hall meeting with his Democratic opponent on Tuesday evening. After the debate, he took questions from reporters, and as typical for people who claim First Amendment rights and do who do not like it when they cannot withhold First Amendment rights from other people, his interaction with a young reporter went comically downhill fast: Harris: “This is a two-party (consent) state; I’m not giving you authority to film me.”…

In this edition Survey shows rural frustralian with missing connectivity Aussie MVNO brand Boost plans 2026 launch EonFibre plans new data centre service Reseller delays focus for ComCom number porting update Feds survey reports gaps in rural service, including for 111 callsMobile coverage on farms has deteriorated since the 3G network closed in March 2026, according to a Federated Farmers survey.Half of the farms surveyed have coverage on less than half of their property. Nearly two in three…

A sub-series within Big Tech's War on Users Back in June I wrote Wait. Florida? because Florida had just become the first state to sue OpenAI over ChatGPT, and I had to read it twice. I said the broken clock was right, and I was still looking at it sideways. Yesterday it was eight more. Per Bloomberg Law, attorneys general from Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Iowa, Kansas, West Virginia and Nebraska each sued OpenAI on Wednesday, separately, in their own state courts. Bloomberg calls it a…

One thing that stands out is how capricious the Twitter right is about Trump, vacillating between supporting him and hating him. They cheer his deportations, then blame him for “affordability.” Some of these grievances are legitimate. Home prices, adjusted for inflation, are way higher than they were 30–50 years ago. Insurance, healthcare, and other expenses have also gone up. Nothing seems to have gotten easier as far as affordability is concerned. If you cannot get a good-paying job that lets…

by Alex Friedmann, Trevor Reese, Lucretia Stone, Cesar Hernandez, Jeshua Noel, Patrick Irving, Erin Kuhn-Brown and Kory McClary, Prison Journalism Project October 15, 2026 The failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee last month has thrust the death penalty, and the various flawed methods of enacting it, into the national spotlight. The number of people … Continue reading "After Christa Pike’s Botched Execution, People in Prison Have Something to Say"

It’s been a few months since our last update, but a lot has been happening. We’ve been on the road, making connections, and continuing to lay the groundwork for Artist Corporations. Here’s where things stand and what’s coming next.The first Colorado A-Corps: July 2027In June, Colorado passed the Artist Company Act, creating a new kind of LLC designed around creative work and artist control. The law went into effect in August, but there’s been an open question about when the first A-Corps would…

For the Balkinization symposium on Diego Zambrano, How Americans Enforce the Law (Stanford University Press, 2026).Nick Bagley and David SchleicherWhy do Americans love private rights of action? Because we really, really love them, as Diego Zambrano shows in his compelling new book, How Americans Enforce the Law. Today, more than 10,000 statutory private rights of action allow Americans to sue over things as serious as wage theft and as trivial as pet leases. They have an ancient pedigree,…

A couple of recent stories for those following the AI boom. Frank Landymore writing for Futurism.On Tuesday, Character.AI filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, marking the beginning of an ignominious end for a once-buzzy startup valued at a billion dollars. Its bankruptcy filings, which were picked through by 404 Media, encapsulate the critiques of the AI industry’s model. It gained a huge user base with a highly engaging product, but racked up exorbitant compute bills while failing to monetize all…

an interesting read throughout

I rarely ever promote a partner sponsored article, but this one does touch on important aspects around data sovereignty which I wished government design-makers better understood. There are numerous risks to data being hosted (held?) in an external data centre, especially if that data centre is foreign owned. Why I posted this, is because I also want to mention what was not said in the article. Access and leaking of the data is one thing, as is the holding of your own encryption keys, but like…

What kinds of catastrophes would you hope to survive? Is preparing for an economic meltdown even on your To Do list? Can you protect yourself from extreme events with judicious investment decisions? Is it even worth trying? If it’s a giant meteor heading towards Slough then you’d want to go in the first impact. Slough might gain something aesthetically, but it wouldn’t leave a future to relish. But what about a more modest society-rattling scenario? Some kind of economic collapse, say. How…

Top House Republicans Have Abandoned All Hope Top congressional Republicans have privately told Politico reporters that holding the House is a lost cause. Five leaders said the situation is dire and that the House has all but slipped away and it is too late to fix the situation. One of them said that they were trying to save as many seats as possible, but it won't be enough. A senior House Republican said that Donald Trump was not helping them. He said: "President Trump has made this election…

Those are the words of Mike Bracken, the former head of the United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service (GDS), as he reflected on his departure back in 2015. “We now have a different set of ministers, a different group of permanent secretaries, and you have to win these arguments over again. Just because you’ve won them once doesn’t mean you’ve won them permanently, especially in a system that will roll back to what it knows… If government continues to not look at institutional reform as a…

The documentarian Alex Gibney has never shied away from controversy. His filmography includes Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, Taxi to the Dark Side, and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Musk, a three-hour-and-45-minute look at the world's wealthiest man, continues Gibney's immersion in the universe of hot topics. Yes, you read that right. Musk runs for almost four hours, serving as a comprehensive look at a career that began with Zip2, a company that provided online…

The latest craven betrayals of Dumpty Trumpy and his brain trust will not make Ukraine submit to Russia’s terms. They will only kill more people. May these grifting war mongers choke on the billions they plan to earn from Russia, an ally of Iran, the country they are fighting an illegal war against.

Guilfoyle tried to blame AI for damning texts in effort to save her job: Guilfoyle told the White House the money-requesting texts were not legitimate, but had instead been generated by artificial intelligence. Uh-huh. “AI did it” is the new “I was hacked”. But also, this KRON4 bonus content: “I will not allow false accusations to define my decades of public service,” she added, although it’s unclear what exactly she was alluding to. “There were no real decades of public service, there was some…

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 337-340: DESPITE HIS UNQUESTIONED INTELLECT and experience, Kurusu was an unfortunate choice in a public relations sense. To the outside world, Kurusu was known only as the man who signed the Tripartite Pact, having been photographed next to Hitler at the height of German-Japanese friendship. He was actually strongly opposed to the pact but was obliged to sign it as Japan’s ambassador to Germany in the autumn of 1940.…