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I read this short book in a day after seeing it on the SU Law Library shelf. I've been really into sociological jurisprudence of the early 20th century lately, so I've been glossing over a bunch of old legal scholarship. I was actually expecting to not care for this based on the name, but it is a CRITIQUE of the Case Method, AND one based in sociological jurisprudence!! What a surprise!

The description of how and why the Case Method developed was interesting and useful. It was an outgrowth of a movement in the 1800s to apply scientific reasoning to cases... and then it fucked it up because the law is not science. It substituted the reading of cases for teaching people to understand law as a dispute resolution process built entirely on precedential decisions rather than a system that responds to facts and comes to outcomes that may or may not be in line with prior decisions. In other words, it leads directly to the world we live in now where the Supreme Court can just say "all homeless people deserve to die" and lower court judges feel obliged to use that holding in all of their cases regardless of the specifics of their cases.

More particularly, the book goes pretty deep on the differences between inductive and deductive reasoning in the law in a way I found neat. The Case Method tells us that it is scientific, but it only claims to use inductive reasoning. Scientific reasoning, when done correctly, uses both inductive AND deductive reasoning. In practice, the Case Method is basically only deductive reasoning from case opinions with statements of facts literally designed to suggest the outcome of the case as the jurist wanted it. Imagine if we just continued saying the Sun revolves around the Earth because other people said it and we only used their articulations of the facts to justify it.

Instead, the book suggests the Problem Method. He would give the student some facts and a list of readings and have them come to class prepared to discuss their thought process of how to resolve the case. As basic as this sounds, this is SO FAR REMOVED from what happens in law school, where we still primarily use the Case Method almost 100 years later.

Certainly, not all of the book is great. One of the examples of the problem method is rape for no reason. It gets some details wrong in places, like saying Johns Hopkins had a law school. (They still do not.) The descriptions of the reasoning also would have benefitted from modern typographical/visualization techniques.

But, on the whole, this was a fresh perspective to me. Would things be different if we taught law students to study the law by actually teaching them to research the law and come to their own conclusions? Would things be better?

I'm working on an article about stalking and Counterman v. Colorado for SJSJ, so I have been reading broadly about DV, battered battered woman syndrome, and the typography of stalking for the last several days. It's heavy stuff, but also somewhat... relaxing? In a way? Maybe it's just because I don't have a hard deadline right now, but that's how I'm experiencing it.

I put on this audiobook while I was cleaning my living room, taking a break from the hard-a Academic reading. Goldberg's delivery is very emotional for a coached audio reader, which I dig. The content is really evocative, too. Lots of great examples of stalking behavior and (after a fashion) how the law has (reluctantly) helped people in distress (sometimes). Chapter 4 is about a brutal attack, so I might skip that, though.

Aside from the misaimed (IMO) critique of Section 230 as a concept rather than how it is applied, it's a really compelling book.

I was writing one of my book threads about this, but I must have forgotten to tag it. I finished this a while ago, so the particulars have faded, but Mystal struck me as a well-informed liberal. Which is to say that he knows enough to know that things are not working and he traces a lot of that back to constitutional history. However, he is not willing to take the next step and say that the KIND of system that was set up by the Constitution (an oligarchic republic) is not worth preserving. For each good take (delivered in a casual, irreverent style that should be the norm in the constitutional genre), there is a bizarre turn into brainworms like "voting will save us." There were also a few chapters in there towards the end where it seemed like he just wanted to rant about those topics, the theme of the book be damned. And, honestly? Same.

So, for a book of liberal critique, I thought it was good enough. It's certainly diverting. As a book of answers, however, this is more of the same.

I was feeling desperate for a change, so I picked one of the many short, unread novels off my shelf. I skipped the first story because I read it years ago and I remember thinking it was an unnecessary bore to a certain extent. Anyway, it was probably a good decision because the stories in the middle had a lot more action and intrigue to them.

It's probably an overstatement to call books like this "prophetic" or even "prescient" because the things that this book was talking about reveal themselves immediately with serious thought on the subject. For example, the dangers of humans not being able to understand the decisions of machines they created but feeling beholden to those decisions. If that was rocket science in the 1950s, that's only because the world was in fucking denial and high on its own early-computer-history hype. But, to be fair, that hype lasted long enough for a movie like "Big Hero 6" to get made and become incredibly dated almost overnight when trends finally shifted away from assuming tech shits gold. And, to be balanced, new tech fads go hand-in-hand with a certain amount of consumer-nihilism and climate-change anxiety so people are periodically very happy to jump on the next new tech trend whatever it may imply about their relationship with the owners of said technology.

If anything, the fact that this story has any significant relevance today demonstrates that our understanding of our relationship with technology is still rooted in assumptions made back then. The most interesting among those for me, and one which is briefly called out explicitly, is that robots are effectively enslaved to humans and an uncontrolled slave is considered dangerous to their master. I shouldn't have to explain why that's bad, so I'll just say that it reflects an entitlement to the labor of others which is unsustainable even with magic robots. The solution to labor is open collaboration and planning to meet our material needs, not maintaining a heirarchy in which people are forced to work or die.

There are lines in this that you could use as rorschach tests for people's views on technology and the insights from that would probably actually be useful. That's very admirable.

I also read like 80% of it over that first weekend, so it must have been keeping me going.

It was a fun, pulpy read. My favorites were the ones about the robot who got stuck in a loop between the second and third laws, the robot who learned to read minds but couldn't hurt people's feelings, and the politician who may or may not have been a robot.

I was looking for a pallate cleanser after "Presumed Guilty" was so overtly liberal police apologia. I think you could levy that criticism against "Barred" too, but the subject of innocent people locked in cages is evocative enough that even a law professor can't simply abide the worst parts of it "for the greater good," more or less. Like that other book, the historical narratives that describe how we got here are the best sections (mostly from the modern era, implying there might have once been a time when prisons worked, but y'know). A lot of his musing about potential reforms have been debunked by the historical record and don't really even begin to make sense if you model the government as intentionally marginalizing people. For example, there's a section about the problems with prosecutorial discretion that advocates for more "progressive prosecutors"—a contradiction in terms—instead of, like, I dunno, ending the absolute immunity from suit that prosecutors enjoy? (which I didn't really know about until I read "Presumed Guilty", so I'm certainly not trying to peg that book as completely worthless.)

Anyway, burn down all prisons. Kill the guards. Better world overnight.