Agreed.
Also didn’t realize how long Nesson has been at it. I mean I knew he was old, but damn.
My understanding is that it used to be very common, and is still common in some countries today.
My resume says “single - ready to mingle” on it.
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Despite the attention spurred by the Hatch investigation, some foundations seem to have continued undeterred. Consider the Lijin Gouhua Foundation. Collecting Chinese paintings and sharing them with the public was the stated mission of the organization, which was launched by Bay Area venture capitalists J. Sanford “Sandy” Miller and his then-wife, Vinie Zhang Miller, in 2006. Since then, the couple generated $5.6 million worth of income tax write-offs largely from donating shares of tech companies like Twitter and Snapchat to their private foundation.
When the couple cashed in the foundation’s stock to buy a potential museum space for the art in 2017, they opted against a high-traffic location where lots of people could easily access it. Instead, they chose the $3.1 million house adjacent to their own estate in Woodside, an exclusive enclave outside of San Francisco.
“A private museum is usually by appointment only,” Vinie Miller said when asked about the out-of-the-way location. “We wouldn’t hold long showing hours. It’s usually people we have a relationship with.” She said that the main way for the public to access the collection was through loans of artwork the foundation has made to universities, other museums and galleries.
Cool my pool is a private museum that’s only available for private events, mostly for people I know. Where’s my tax break?
Lol Amy Barrett
Ultimately, Justice Barrett and other proponents of the linguistic MQD make just such empirical claims about how ordinary readers approach language. These claims are almost entirely untested. In Biden v. Nebraska , Justice Barrett offered assertions about the ordinary reader’s “common sense” about general delegations. Barrett’s primary example is the babysitter hypothetical:
Consider a parent who hires a babysitter to watch her young children over the weekend. As she walks out the door, the parent hands the babysitter her credit card and says: “Make sure the kids have fun.” Emboldened, the babysitter takes the kids on a road trip to an amusement park, where they spend two days on rollercoasters and one night in a hotel. Was the babysitter’s trip consistent with the parent’s instruction? Maybe in a literal sense, because the instruction was open-ended. But was the trip consistent with a reasonable understanding of the parent’s instruction? Highly doubtful. In the normal course, permission to spend money on fun authorizes a babysitter to take children to the local ice cream parlor or movie theater, not on a multiday excursion to an out-of-town amusement park. If a parent were willing to greenlight a trip that big, we would expect much more clarity than a general instruction to “make sure the kids have fun.”
To be sure, this recognition that context can influence interpretation is a constructive and welcome statement, especially coming from a textualist Justice. However, it is critical to distinguish between this more general claim (context can matter) and the more specific and tendentious claim that ordinary linguistic practice includes a contextual restriction of delegations as strong as the MQD. On one reading of the babysitter argument, it is simply a “motte” and “bailey” fallacy, conflating one proposition that is easy to defend (the motte) with one much harder to defend (the bailey). The bailey here is much stronger than some generalization about the importance of context; it is something like: “Ordinary people understand general delegations to X to be limited to only the most reasonable ways to X , absent further contextual support for X .” But do they?
In our article, we conduct two original survey experiments that fill the empirical gaps left by Barrett’s and Wurman’s linguistic defenses of the MQD. The results are bad news if you are a believer in the linguistic MQD. Consistent with some prior experimental philosophy literature, we find a small stakes effect on ordinary knowledge claims. But such a small effect is hard to interpret in favor of the MQD. In the “low stakes” bank case, 95% of people attributed knowledge, while in the “high stakes” case 86 % did. So does stakes impact knowledge for the “ordinary reader”? Not for the vast majority of ordinary participants. It would be more accurate to say that the vast majority of ordinary participants did not factor high stakes into their assessment of what was known.
More importantly, we find that the second claim about clarity judgments and interpretive stakes finds no support in ordinary readers. Higher-stakes don’t make rules less clear. A central premise of the “high stakes” MQD defense thus reflects an un ordinary epistemology
Turning to Barrett’s argument, we gave survey respondents the babysitter hypothetical with five experimental treatments designed to assess whether ordinary readers implicitly limit a general delegation of authority to the babysitter to “use this credit card to make sure the kids have fun” to only the limited set of the most reasonable possible forms of fun. Ordinary people did not share Barrett’s “common sense” about the trip to the amusement park (only 8% of percent of respondents believed that the babysitter broke the rule by taking the kids to an amusement park). And even more extreme actions, such as bringing an animal entertainer and live alligator into the house for a showing, were also overwhelmingly judged to be within the rule. Moreover, ordinary readers made these judgments about the text of the delegation despite believing that both of these actions were not as reasonable as other actions, such as renting a movie for the kids—so, in ordinary understanding the authorization of delegations is not limited to the most reasonable actions. Importantly, it was not as if ordinary readers did not see anything as inconsistent with the rule. They judged that the babysitter was not authorized to simply rent a movie for himself
These results undermine the empirical claims at the heart of the linguistic MQD. To be sure, it might be possible to articulate different versions of the linguistic defense. It might also be possible to build a case for a linguistic canon that is informed by generalizations about legislative intent in delegating authority to agencies (indeed, Wurman offers this as an alternative, and Barrett nods to it), although that tact would presumably not appeal much to the textualists who have generally rejected evidence of legislative intent that is not objectified in some way in the text itself. But, as it is, the linguistic defenses on the table appear indefensible in light of ordinary people’s actual “common sense”
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Can we LOL LAW other countries? Here’s Singapore’s submission:
I typically don’t have sympathy if the law says and everybody knows don’t f’ing do this or we kill you but man that’s bullshit. I know it’s not great when you have gray areas out of rigid rules but that certainly warranted it.
Well don’t help transfer any damn thing at all for your “friends” in singapore.
Texas wants Planned Parenthood to give back millions of dollars in Medicaid reimbursements — and pay far more in fines on top of that — in a lawsuit that appears to be the first of its kind brought by a state against the largest abortion provider in the U.S.
That sucks. Let’s see who’s the judge
A hearing was set for Tuesday in front of U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk,
Oh
Could go in a few threads. Lindell unhinged at his depositions and just going off on the attorneys calling them traitors and criminals. Also rips on the judge a few times for not dismissing the lawsuit. Probably headed towards a default judgment.
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https://twitter.com/thereceipts33/status/1700221304786342107?t=vTQxb1fEFvS34SdzcbZf1Q&s=19
Unfortunately, I don’t know how to embed a video. I literally could not stop laughing!
Lumpy pillows 
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Man this shit is just transparent. Like don’t give a fuck about appearing like they’re doing anything but the GOP interest
https://x.com/mjs_DC/status/1707462884521816264?s=20
https://x.com/mjs_DC/status/1707463304262643764?s=20
Going to guess the Supreme Court is going to do a shoulder shrug and be like “what you can do you?” and we’re going to have Alabama have broken the law for 2 straight elections.
As a judge, it’s probably never a good idea to have real time text exchanges with your bailiff during a trial… it’s DEFINITELY not a good idea when the courtroom cameras can see your phone.
Khristian Martzall was convicted of second-degree manslaughter in the 2018 death of Braxton Danker, his girlfriend’s son, and sentenced to four years with credit for time served. He served no additional jail time, according to the petition.
Martzall’s girlfriend pleaded guilty to enabling child abuse and was sentenced to 25 years.
sure you murdered the kid but damn that woman for dating him
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Suspended with pay.
Voting Rights Act gutted (even more)
https://twitter.com/RedistrictNet/status/1726635943921336656?t=HeSlMZZ4tozIfl9LGe-22w&s=19
Who are they billing for this and how many billable hours are there in all the work on both sides?
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Dream client