Note: These are my personal thoughts and do not in anyway represent the opinions of my employer, the Minnesota State, Hennepin County, and Ramsey County Bar Associations. *** May 1, 2025 was National Law Day of Action. Events to mark the day were held throughout the nation, with 1,500-2,000 attending in New York City. Organizers encouraged attorneys to retake their oath as part of the planned events in order to reaffirm their commitment to the…
Note: A couple of the links in this post are appearing as though words are crossed out. Go ahead and click on them to get to the link. Not sure why this is happening and apologize for this hopefully short-lived wonkiness. —– About a month ago, OpenAI released a new model of generative AI, GPT-4o, with ‘o’ standing for ‘omni,’ meaning the AI could work in a multi-modal way. That may sound like a bunch…
I have been heavy of heart and mind this week with the mass shooting at the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, which followed a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, which followed a mass shooting at a church in Laguna Woods, California, which followed a mass shooting …, which followed a mass shooting …, which followed a mass shooting …. There have been so damn many mass shootings in this country that one…
I am irritated. I read a story on NPR News about a Pennsylvania guy who stole artifacts, mostly firearms, from about a dozen museums in the 1960s and ’70s. He got caught in 2018 after trying to sell one of the guns. His sentence? One day. One. Day. I am irritated because this sentence shows how unseriously the courts, and by extension, society in general, take thefts from museums. Oh, well, it’s just an artifact,…
Last Monday, I visited my county law library. It’s a fairly small room in the courthouse, with lots of tall shelves for books filled with higher court decisions and laws. The earliest books seem to be these Minnesota Reports that contain cases decided in the Supreme Court of Minnesota. The publishing date of Volume I is 1877, but it contains cases between 1851 and 1858, when Minnesota was still a territory. (Minnesota became a state…