"Of all knowledge work, law seems almost perfectly primed for AI because so much of the work involves reading, categorising, and pattern-matching across vast reams of documents."

"It is the type of work AI does well — and tirelessly. It was reported last week that Kirkland & Ellis, the world’s largest law firm, plans to spend $500 million building a bespoke AI system to power its practice. Meanwhile, New York firm Fried Frank has just launched an AI tool designed specifically for its private equity clients, and Slaughter and May has rolled out Harvey across all its practice areas...."

From "Why top lawyers fear that AI is destroying the 'expert’s edge'/When a US law school announced a ban on the tech, some in the industry said students would lack vital skills. The signs are that ‘Big Law’ is leaning in to AI" (London Times).

Meanwhile, at UC Berkeley School of Law there's a new policy banning using A.I. for "outlining, drafting, revising, translating or editing any work submitted for credit." And law firms are complaining because they want to hire new lawyers who are good at using A.I. to do law. How are the schools supposed to teach law now? What's the good of a ban that only restricts the students who are punctilious about rules and terrified of getting caught? Why do those poor souls bear all the burdens? And how effective are law professors going to be about detecting the violations and imposing consequences? Absolutely terrible I would guess.

"The word almost never spoken was the name of Ms. Harris’s actual hometown: Berkeley, Calif."

"That little yellow house sits on Bancroft Way in the university city known, fairly or not, for a hippy-dippy vibe where residents gamely embrace the nickname, 'People’s Republic of Berkeley.' Ms. Harris’s old neighborhood is now called Poets Corner for its preponderance of streets named for writers such as Chaucer and Byron. The neighbors, who tend a community garden and circulate a newsletter, have a theory about why Ms. Harris does not shout out her hometown much these days. 'Oh, people would definitely think Berserkeley!' said Anna Natille, who lives near Ms. Harris’s childhood home and was walking her pug, Figgy, past it last week. 'We have such a reputation for being on the far left, that we’re all a bunch of communists and socialists.' In other words, maybe not a great way to lure the country’s middle-of-the-road voters to the Democratic ticket.... 'Berkeley is viewed as the most liberal city in the United States, and we’re proud of that,' [[T]he mayor of Berkeley said. 'But maybe for some people in the red states, that may freak them out.'"

From "As Kamala Harris Claims Oakland, Berkeley Forgives/The vice president has virtually erased Berkeley, Calif., her hometown, from her campaign biography. The residents of 'the People’s Republic' say they get it" (NYT).

What if deception freaks people out? What if straight talk is a lure?

"According to FIRE Campus Advocacy Rights Director Alex Morey, under the First Amendment, Chemerinsky’s 3L dinner is considered a limited public forum..."

"... in which the government, or individual or group in charge of the forum, can open up the forum for speech in any way they decide. Morey said Chemerinsky and his wife, Catherine Fisk, opened up a forum and were able to determine its limits in the case of the 3L dinner.... 'This is a situation where students have to recognize that yes, they have First Amendment rights, but they also know those rights come with certain specific limitations,' Morey said... 'Schools should exact some kind of punishment on students who engage in misconduct, but I think that some level of understanding can be given when students are trying to exercise their First Amendment rights in good faith but are still learning how to do so,' Morey said. 'It’s a delicate balance, but we hope Berkeley can figure out the right way to find that balance.'"

From "FIRE calls Chemerinsky 3L dinner limited public forum, says free speech has limitations" (The Daily Californian/Berkeley's News)

"It’s not too late for the adults, like [Berkeley Law School Dean] Chemerinsky, to take control."

"But for too long they’ve given the extremists a pass, and an entirely undeserved moral legitimacy. If they want to save higher education, they’ll have to anger a lot of people they’ve never been willing to anger before."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, in "Welcome To The Party, Pal!/Erwin Chemerinsky discovers that higher education is a hotbed of antisemitism" (Substack).

A pleasant landing.

Ousted San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin announced his new job Wednesday: He’s spearheading a criminal justice center at UC Berkeley’s School of Law. https://t.co/dak0k2ZHo0

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) May 31, 2023

"I sort of keep thinking it’s all gonna end, but it doesn’t. It’s so impressive that it doesn’t end."

Said Michael Delacour, quoted in "Michael Delacour, People’s Park co-founder, dies at 85 Delacour hosted the first meetings to organize and build People’s Park at his Berkeley home in the 1960s" (Berkeleyside). 

"They tried to live as they had in Berkeley, in an improvisational community, their doors open to anyone."

"But things started to go missing, and it was unclear whether their neighbors also believed in communal sharing or if they were taking advantage of the Kingstons. Kahalu’u is on the island’s windward side, and Maxine, like many Chinese people who believe that wind disturbs one’s qi, or life-force equilibrium, found the constant gusts distressing. She couldn’t think.... In the seventies, publishers had begun responding to America’s social realities by offering challenging, textured depictions of what it meant to be part of a minority. 'The Woman Warrior,' which was marketed as a memoir based on Kingston’s upbringing, seemed to adhere to typical preconceptions—the cascading effects of patriarchal traditions, the stern and unaffectionate immigrant parents, the children caught between duty and dreaming. But, unlike most ethnic coming-of-age tales of the time, it seeded doubt about its own authenticity.... By the end, you don’t know which, if any, of these stories are true, or whether they constitute a reliable depiction of Chinese-American life.... I thought about what Kingston had said.... A writer is always alone.... These sketches of her life weren’t for anyone but her. They were not... 'a story to grow on'.... 'It’s really enjoying my present life... I am really enjoying going to buy that winter melon. I’m deeply into it..... I’m so sane in my work. That’s why it’s fiction.'"

From "Maxine Hong Kingston’s Genre-Defying Life and Work/The Asian-American literary pioneer, whose writing has paved the way for many immigrants’ stories, has one last big idea" (The New Yorker).

"'No one is disputing how the courts have ruled on this,' john a. powell, a Berkeley law professor with joint appointments in the departments of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies, told me."

"'What I’m saying is that courts are often wrong.' Powell is tall, with a relaxed sartorial style, and his manner of speaking is soft and serenely confident. Before he became an academic, he was the national legal director of the A.C.L.U. 'I represented the Ku Klux Klan when I was in that job,' he said. 'My family was not pleased with me, but I said, Look, they have First Amendment rights, too. So it’s not that I don’t understand or care deeply about free speech. But what would it look like if we cared just as deeply about equality? What if we weighed the two as conflicting values, instead of this false formalism where the right to speech is recognized but the harm caused by that speech is not?'... In the nineteen-seventies, when women entered the workplace in large numbers, some male bosses made salacious comments, or hung pornographic images on the walls. 'These days, we’d say, That’s a hostile workplace, that’s sexual harassment,' powell said. 'But those weren’t recognized legal concepts yet. So the courts’ response was Sorry, nothing we can do. Pornographic posters are speech. If women don’t like it, they can put up their own posters.' He drew an analogy to today’s trolls and white supremacists. 'The knee-jerk response is Nothing we can do, it’s speech. ‘Well, hold on, what about the harm they’re causing?’ What harm? It’s just words. That might sound intuitive to us now. But, if you know the history, you can imagine how our intuitions might look foolish, even immoral, a generation later.'"

From "How Social-Media Trolls Turned U.C. Berkeley Into a Free-Speech Circus/Public universities have no choice but to welcome far-right speakers seeking self-promotion. Should the First Amendment be reinterpreted for the digital age?" by Andrew Marantz (in The New Yorker).

Is "self-promotion" a special right-wing motivation? Is there some idea that a left-wing speaker promotes his ideas, but a right-wing speaker promotes only himself — that left-wingers are earnest and sincere and bring substance to the campus milieu but right-wingers are demagogues who belong in the hinterlands, braying to some mob?

There's a lot about Milo Yiannopoulos in that article, by the way.

As for john a. powell, he's saying things that are scarcely new. They were standard fare in the legal academy a quarter century ago. That is, it's already "a generation later." His sarcasm at "It’s just words" sounds straight out of "Only Words," the book Catharine MacKinnon published in 1994, and "Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, And The First Amendment (New Perspectives on Law, Culture, and Society)" a collection of essays some Critical Race theory lawprofs put out in 1995.

These ideas have been pushed for a very long time, and there's still an intense effort to clear the campus of competing ideas about freedom of speech. I was utterly surrounded by those left-wing views back in the early 90s, and I find it wonderful that they're still so outré that a lawprof today presents them as intriguingly new. What a miracle that Americans still believe in freedom of speech!

ADDED: The NYT has a very similar article today, "The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to an Audience" by a philosophy professor, Bryan W. Van Norden. He wants elite institutions to embrace forthright viewpoint discrimination — justified by portraying the ideas he finds offensive as "ignorant":

Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has complained that men can’t “control crazy women” because men “have absolutely no respect” for someone they cannot physically fight. Does this adolescent opinion deserve as much of an audience as the nuanced thoughts of Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, about the role of “himpathy” in supporting misogyny?...

There is a clear line between censoring someone and refusing to provide them with institutional resources for disseminating their ideas... What just access means in terms of positive policy is that institutions that are the gatekeepers to the public have a fiduciary responsibility to award access based on the merit of ideas and thinkers. To award space in a campus lecture hall to someone like Peterson who says that feminists “have an unconscious wish for brutal male domination”...  is not to display admirable intellectual open-mindedness. It is to take a positive stand that these views are within the realm of defensible rational discourse, and that these people are worth taking seriously as thinkers.

Neither is true: These views are specious, and those who espouse them are, at best, ignorant, at worst, sophists. The invincibly ignorant and the intellectual huckster have every right to express their opinions, but their right to free speech is not the right to an audience. 

You can't fight in here. This is the Empathy Tent!

At Berkeley, fights break out in the "empathy tent." "The empathy tent was reportedly in place to offer protesters a calm place to unwind amid the choas around them," the NY Post reports.

"Black-clad antifa attack peaceful right wing demonstrators in Berkeley."

That's a WaPo headline. Surprised?

Their faces hidden behind black bandannas and hoodies, about a 100 anarchists and antifa — “anti-fascist” — barreled into a protest Sunday afternoon in Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park.

Jumping over plastic and concrete barriers, the group melted into a larger crowd of around 2,000 that had marched peacefully throughout the sunny afternoon for a “Rally Against Hate” gathering.

By paragraph 3, the bad people disappear into an abstraction:

Shortly after, violence began to flare. 

The passive voice begins to flare:

A pepper-spray wielding Trump supporter was smacked to the ground with homemade shields. Another was attacked by five black-clad antifas, each windmilling kicks and punches into a man desperately trying to protect himself....

By the way the police gave way to "antifa protesters — armed with sticks and shields, and clad in shin pads and gloves," and the Berkeley police chief, Andrew Greenwood, offered a lame defense: “No need for a confrontation over a grass patch.”

"Richard Dawkins' Berkeley event cancelled for 'Islamophobia.'"

BBC reports.

[KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California], which is not affiliated with the University of California, said in a letter - which Mr Dawkins published online - that it does not support "hurtful" or "abusive speech."...

[Dawkins] said harsh statements he has made in the past have been directed at "IslamISM" - apparently referring to those who use the religion for political objectives - and not adherents of the faith.

"I have criticised the appalling misogyny and homophobia of Islam, I have criticised the murdering of apostates for no crime other than their disbelief," Professor Dawkins writes. He also pointed out that he has been a "frequent critic of Christianity but have never been de-platformed for that"...

"You’re well taken care of here. They got resources and... I don’t know there’s just something about the place. They call it the vortex."

"I’ve left. I’ve been to Arcata and Santa Cruz and I’ve tried Florida. I’ve been around America. Ain’t nowhere like Berkeley, man.... I sat out here before like depressed and starving but still too proud to hold my head up and ask somebody for food. I’m just sitting here with my head down. I look up, and there’s this guy handing me like French toast in a box. I was like, ‘Thank you, man.’ I had my headphones in. I put it down, I put my head back down, and when I look back up I see his fist in my face and he had ‘LOVE’ tattooed on his knuckles and he was trying to give me knuckles and I thought that was pretty awesome, man. And just shit like that happens all the time, man. You see a lot of manifestation out here. Manifestation is what I like to call it. When you need something, it just comes to you. As long as you need something important. Something that you actually need, you’ll get it. I don’t know if that’s manifestation or blessings. I guess it’s all the same."

From "How people living on the streets in Berkeley find their food."

"But the scene has changed... and political activism is going out of style. The thrust is no longer for 'change' or 'progress' or 'revolution,' but merely to escape..."

"... to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been... The flourishing hippy scene is a matter of desperate concern to the political activists. They see a whole generation of rebels drifting off to a drugged limbo, ready to accept almost anything as long as it comes with enough 'soma.' Steve DeCanio, an ex-Berkeley activist now doing graduate work at M.I.T., is a good example of a legion of young radicals who know they have lost their influence but have no clear idea how to get it back again. 'This alliance between hippies and political radicals is bound to break up,' he said in a recent letter. 'There’s just too big a jump from the slogan of "Flower Power" to the deadly realm of politics. Something has to give, and drugs are too ready-made as opiates of the people for the bastards (the police) to fail to take advantage of it.' ... Meanwhile, like most other disappointed radicals, he is grimly amused at the impact the hippies are having on the establishment. The panic among San Francisco officialdom at the prospect of 200,000 hippies flocking into the Hashbury this summer is one of the few things that ex-Berkeley radicals can still laugh at. DeCanio’s vision of the crisis was not written as prophecy, but considering the hidden reality of the situation, it may turn out that way: 'I can see Mayor Shelley standing on the steps of the Civic Center and shouting into TV microphones, "The people cry bread! Bread! Let them turn on!"'"

From "The 'Hashbury' Is the Capital Of the Hippies," by Hunter S. Thompson, published in The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 1967. (You can also find that essay in this collection of Hunter S. Thompson essays, which I recommend.)

Tomorrow is the first day of summer, and it is the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. I'll be carrying on a retrospective. My usual "50 years ago" blog posts are "50 years ago today" and hit the precise date. I'll try to do that once summer comes, that is, tomorrow. Over the weekend, I had posts for each of the 3 days of the Monterey Pop Festival, but today I'm reaching back to May 14th. Why? Because I was researching the NYT archive for the emergence of the word "hippie" (or "hippy" as Thompson has it). This isn't the oldest thing I found, but it's the first one I really wanted to share.

What I like about it is its resonance today: Left-wing activists intent on roping young people into their agenda of "change" and "progress."* Young people skeptical of being put to use and dreaming of happiness. A profusion of drugs offering to take the world in a love embrace.
_______________

* Thompson put those words in quotes, and it still seems like the right thing to do, doesn't it?

"Ann Coulter said Wednesday that she was forced to cancel her speaking event Thursday at the University of California, Berkeley amid concerns of violence..."

"... calling it 'a dark day for free speech in America.'"

"I have my flights, so I thought I might stroll around the graveyard of the First Amendment," Coulter said in an emailed message when asked if she was still coming to Berkeley.

"I intend to return Berkeley to its rightful place as the home of free speech — whether university administrators and violent far-left antifa thugs like it or not."

"I will bring activists, writers, artists, politicians, YouTubers, veterans and drag queens from across the ideological spectrum to lecture, march and party."

Says Milo Yiannopoulos (and he won't say who's inviting him or backing him).

"Ann Coulter rejected an offer to speak at the University of California at Berkeley on a new date..."

"... after the university canceled her event because of safety concerns, then quickly reversed itself, saying it would reschedule her speech," WaPo reports.

In a series of tweets Thursday night, Coulter criticized the university, saying Berkeley officials were adding “burdensome” conditions to her speech. She said she had already spent money to hold the event on April 27 and was not available to appear May 2. She also pointed out that the later date would coincide with a reading period before final exams, when there are no classes on campus and fewer students are around. Instead, she vowed to speak in Berkeley on April 27 whether the university approves or not.

Berkeley is making a fool of itself. I laughed out loud when I heard the spokesperson on TV:

University spokesman Dan Mogulof responded to the lawsuit threat, saying, “We are confident that we are on very solid legal grounds.... We are concerned about her disregard for the assessment and recommendations of law enforcement professionals whose primary focus is the safety and well-being of our students and other members of our campus community"... 

Pathetic. At best, "confident that we are on very solid legal grounds" is a bald-faced lie.

"Would you like symbolic arrests?"/"If so, where and when?"

Questions from the Berkeley Police Department.

"I was there for part of last night, and I know what I saw and those people were not Berkeley students. Those people were outside agitators. I have never seen them before."

Said UC Berkeley professor and former Democratic Secretary of Labor Robert Reich — about the rioters who succeeded in shutting down a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos.

"There’s rumors that they actually were right-wingers. They were a part of a kind of group that was organized and ready to create the kind of tumult and danger you saw that forced the police to cancel the event. So Donald Trump, when he says Berkeley doesn’t respect free speech rights, that’s a complete distortion of the truth.”

“You think it’s a strategy by [Milo Yiannopoulos] or right-wingers?” asked host Don Lemon.

“I wouldn’t bet against it,” Reich said. “I saw these people. They all looked very– almost paramilitary. They were not from the campus. I don’t want to say factually, but I’ve heard there was some relationship here between these people and the right-wing movement that is affiliated with Breitbart News.”

Yes, they did look "almost paramilitary." Here's a description:

Black-clad protesters wearing masks threw commercial-grade fireworks and rocks at police. Some even hurled Molotov cocktails that ignited fires. They also smashed windows of the student union center on the Berkeley campus where the Yiannopoulos event was to be held.

They wore masks. It's ludicrous to say "I have never seen them before" when you are talking about people who hid their faces with masks.

How can you say they were from the "outside" and "not from the campus" when you can't see who they are? Even if you could see the faces, how could you know if you were looking at students? Reich may be a Berkeley professor, but there are over 38,000 students at Berkeley. He can't recognize them all.

Is he relying on some sort of stereotype of what Berkeley students look like?



That's a microaggression against students who don't look like the stereotype.

Although Reich went to Yale Law School — he's currently a professor not of law but public policy — he does not use weaseling language to say something without saying anything. That makes it easier to cry "fake news" on him as he wafts his theory.

But that doesn't mean his theory is wrong. It might be true. It's interesting to hear a person of the left say "outside agitators."

"Outside agitators" was a classic phrase used against civil rights workers. Here it is in a classic context from 1963:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely."...

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against "outsiders coming in."...

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here....

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

The last time I looked Berkeley was inside the United States.

"The hard left, which has become so utterly anthetical to free speech in the last few years, has taken a turn post-Trump's election..."

"... where they simply will not allow any speaker on campus — even somebody as silly and harmless and gay as me — to have their voice heard. They're absolutely petrified by alternative visions of how the world ought to look."

Says Milo Yiannopoulos, in this NYT video, which also shows the violent protests that got Berkeley to shut down his speech.



I transcribed the quote, because it does not appear in the accompanying article, "Berkeley Cancels Milo Yiannopoulos Speech, and Donald Trump Tweets Outrage."

(The previous post has more detail about the Berkeley incident. I'm only putting up this second post because of the video and the interesting quote from Yiannopoulos.) 

Berkeley shuts down Milo Yiannopoulos — "Amid violence, destruction of property and out of concern for public safety..."

WaPo reports in an article headlined "Trump lashes back at Berkeley after protests block speech by Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos":

Security officials said that about 150 “masked agitators” joined the demonstration, setting fires, throwing Molotov cocktails and rocks and attacking some members of the crowd. Officers from the city of Oakland and Alameda County arrived at 7:45 p.m. to help the university and Berkeley city police. There were no immediate reports of arrests or serious injuries. The “shelter in place” order was lifted about 10 p.m., although campus police warned that protests were still going on in the surrounding community and advised people to avoid neighboring streets....

The demonstrators included “Black bloc” protesters, who wear masks and black clothing to present a unified front as they disrupt events, making it difficult for police to recognize individuals in the group. They are often seen at protests organized by groups such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, destroying property and setting fires. They torched a limousine in Washington last month on the day of Trump’s inauguration, and a group spray-painted buildings and smashed electrical boxes during a demonstration in Portland, Ore., earlier in January. When a group of them arrived at Berkeley, it swiftly changed the tenor of the peaceful demonstration....

Lots more at the link, with plenty of photographs.

More than 100 faculty members signed two letters to Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks. One said: “Although we object strenuously to Yiannopoulos’s views — he advocates white supremacy, transphobia and misogyny — it is rather his harmful conduct to which we call attention in asking for the cancellation of this event.”

His harmful conduct?? According to the professors:

"Yiannopoulos’s views pass from protected free speech to incitement, harassment and defamation once they publicly target individuals in his audience or on campus, creating conditions for concrete harm and actually harming students through defamatory and harassing actions. Such actions are protected neither by free speech nor by academic freedom."

What a shameful and embarrassing interpretation of free speech at the university whose name once meant FREE SPEECH!