What Earth Will Look Like 100 Million Years from Now
Posted: 30 Sep 2011 05:01 AM PDT
This is what you’d call efficient. In two minutes, we watch our planet take form. 600 million years of geological history whizzes by in a snap. Then we see what the next 100 million years may have in store for us. If you don’t have the patience to watch 700 million years unfold in 180 seconds (seriously?), then we’ll give you this spoiler: Coastal real estate is not a long-term buy…

Find this video added to our collection of Great Science Videos.

What Earth Will Look Like 100 Million Years from Now is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at openculture.com, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Colbert on Prosecution Without Representation

Douglas Colbert (University of Maryland School of Law) has posted Prosecution Without Representation (Buffalo Law Review Vol. 59, p. 333, April 2011) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Nearly 50 years after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright established indigent defendants’ constitutional right to counsel, poor people throughout the country still remain without a lawyer when first appearing before a judicial officer who determines pretrial liberty or bail. Absent counsel, low-income defendants unable to afford bail remain in jail for periods ranging from 3-70 days until assigned counsel appears in-court. Examining Walter Rothgery’s wrongful prosecution, the article includes a national survey that informs readers about the limited right to counsel at the initial appearance and the extent of delay in each of the 50 states. The article also analyzes the Justices’ response to the wrongfully accused and unrepresented Walter Rothgery, and provides insight into how the Court will likely decide the constitutional claim to counsel when it next faces the issue. It suggests that the amicus community’s participation will likely assume an important role in the Supreme Court’s ultimate ruling.

to me
FORT WORTH, Texas – When you’re trying to decide the guilt or innocence of someone on trial, it’s probably not a good idea to ‘friend’ that person on Facebook.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports 22-year-old Jonathan Hudson was removed from a jury last month after trying to add the defendant as a Facebook friend.
The civil trial was over a 2008 car wreck and proceeded with 11 jurors.
Hudson had received jury instructions specifically forbidding jurors from discussing the case on social networks. He pleaded guilty last week to four counts of contempt and will serve two days of community service.
(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Court Rules That Police Cannot Use Warrants to Obtain Cell Phone Location of Person Who is Subject of Arrest Warrant”

Orin Kerr discusses the opinion at The Volokh Conspiracy. In part:
My own view is that Judge Gauvey is pretty clearly wrong. Most fundamentally, I don’t think location information of phones is protected by the Fourth Amendment under Smith v. Maryland, for all the reasons I have explained at length. Part of the problem is that the Fourth Amendment does not deal in abstractions, with categories such as the right to privacy in “location” or right to privacy in “movement.” The Fourth Amendment is much more granular: The relevant question is whether the particular data stored in a particular place on a particular server is protected by the Fourth Amendment, and if so, who is it who has those rights and under what circumstances can that particular information be accessed and disclosed. Given that, Judge Gauvey’s abstract categories produce more heat than light. It doesn’t help that Judge Gauvey relies significantly on the “mosaic theory” opinion that the Supreme Court recently agreed to review.
August 9, 2011 | Permalink

Michael L. Perlin (New York Law School) has posted Tangled Up in Law: The Jurisprudence of Bob Dylan on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

A a careful examination of Bob Dylan’s lyrics reveals a writer – a scholar – with a well-developed jurisprudence, ranging over a broad array of topics that relate to civil and criminal law, public and private law. His lyrics reflect the work of a thinker who takes “the law” seriously in multiple iterations – the role of lawyers, the role of judges, the disparities between the ways the law treats the rich and the poor, the inequality of the criminal and civil justice systems, the corruption of government, the police, and the judiciary, and more. In this paper, I seek to create a topography of Dylan-as-jurisprudential scholar, and will seek to do this by looking at selected Dylan songs in these discrete areas of law (and law-and-society):
• Civil rights
• Inequality of the criminal justice system
• Institutions
• Governmental/judicial corruption
• Equality and emancipation (political and economic)
• Poverty, the environment, and Inequality of the civil justice system, and
• The role of lawyers and the legal process.