... paradoxically, harder to correct or overturn than regular binding precedent and strips it of the rule of law, legitimacy, notice, and reliance values standardly invoked to support precedent's use.
Drawing an example from the Second Circuit's largely unpublished case law on the meaning of “social visibility” in asylum law — the subject of a deepening circuit split and a recent en banc hearing in the Ninth Circuit — this essay shows that copy-paste precedent can prove even more influential than a circuit's precedential statements on the same subject. This essay calls attention to a set of decisions in which the law that gets copied and pasted is substantively mistaken. Its broader goal, however, is to show why copy-paste precedent is itself a mistaken way for courts to make law. Legal Theory Blog: Soucek on Copy-Paste Precedent
9 years
...ever, to the process by which unpublished opinions are prepared — or to ways in which this process allows some unpublished opinions to become de facto precedent.
This essay identifies one such way. “Copy-paste precedent” arises when the text of an unpublished opinion gets repeatedly copied and pasted by staff attorneys drafting subsequent opinions on the same topic. Whereas ordinary precedent is meant to be reasoned and published, then cited and quoted, “copy-paste precedent” gets followed without being either cited or explicitly quoted, thereby gaining the influence of precedent without real precedent’s authority — or scrutiny. The obscurity of copy-paste precedent makes it, paradoxically, harder to correct or overturn than regular binding precedent and strips it of the rule of law, legitimacy, notice, and reliance values s...
Legal Theory Blog: Soucek on Copy-Paste Precedent
This essay identifies one such way. “Copy-paste precedent” arises when the text of an unpublished opinion gets repeatedly copied and pasted by staff attorneys drafting subsequent opinions on the same topic. Whereas ordinary precedent is meant to be reasoned and published, then cited and quoted, “copy-paste precedent” gets followed without being either cited or explicitly quoted, thereby gaining the influence of precedent without real precedent’s authority — or scrutiny. The obscurity of copy-paste precedent makes it, paradoxically, harder to correct or overturn than regular binding precedent and strips it of the rule of law, legitimacy, notice, and reliance values s...
Legal Theory Blog: Soucek on Copy-Paste Precedent
9 years
One cell. One division. Half a gig of data. Now figure that millions of bacteria could fit on the head of a pin and that many of them are an order of magnitude more complex than M. genitalium. Or ponder the idea that the human body is made up of 10 trillion (big, complex) human cells, plus about 90 or 100 trillion bacterial cells. That's about 100,000,000,000,000 cells in total. That'd take a lot of computers to model, eh? If it were possible, that is.
To Model the Simplest Microbe in the World, You Need 128 Computers — The Atlantic
To Model the Simplest Microbe in the World, You Need 128 Computers — The Atlantic
9 years
"Right now, running a simulation for a single cell to divide only one time takes around 10 hours and generates half a gigabyte of data," lead scientist Covert told the New York Times. "I find this fact completely fascinating, because I don't know that anyone has ever asked how much data a living thing truly holds."
To Model the Simplest Microbe in the World, You Need 128 Computers — The Atlantic
9 years
From this epoch the lover no longer jests — no longer sees any thing even of the fantastic in the Raven’s demeanor. He speaks of him as a “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore,” and feels the “fiery eyes” burning into his “bosom’s core.” This revolution of thought, or fancy, on the lover’s part, is intended to induce a similar one on the part of t...
Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - The Philosophy of Composition [Text-02]
9 years
And here I may as well say a few words of the versification. My first object (as usual) was originality. The extent to which this has been neglected, in versification, is one of the most unaccountable things in the world. Admitting that there is little [page 166:] possibility of variety in mere rhythm, it is still clear that the possible varieties of metre and stanza are absolutely infinite — and yet, for centuries, no man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed to think of doing, an original thing. The fact is, originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sough...
Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - The Philosophy of Composition [Text-02]
9 years
...ries of the lover. And here it was that I saw at once the opportunity afforded for the effect on which I had been depending — that is to say, the effect of the variation of application. I saw that I could make the first query propounded by the lover — the first query to which the Raven should reply “Nevermore” — that I could make this first query a commonplace one — the second less so — the third still less, and so on — until at length the lover, startled from his original nonchalance by the melancholy character of the word itself — by its frequent repetition — and by a consideration of the ominous reputation of the fowl that uttered it — is at length excited to superstition, and wildly propounds queries of a far different character — queries whose solution he has passionately at heart — propounds them half in superstition and half in that species of despair which delights in self-torture — propounds them not altogether because he believes in the prophetic or demoniac character of the bird (which, reason assures him, is merely repeating a lesson learned by rote) but because he experiences a phrenzied pleasure in so modeling his questions as to receive from the expected “Nevermore” the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow. Perceiving the opportunity thus afforded me — or, more strictly, thus forced upon me in the progress of the construction — I first established in mind the climax, or concluding ...
Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - The Philosophy of Composition [Text-02]
9 years
...ositions; and, since the interest of an analysis, or reconstruction, such as I have considered a desideratum, is quite independent of any real or fancied interest in the thing analyzed, it will not be regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the modus operandi by which some one of my own works was put together. I select “The Raven,” as most generally known. It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition — that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with ...
Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - The Philosophy of Composition [Text-02]
9 years
9 years
...such [column 2:] a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a loss to say — but, perhaps, the autorial vanity has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause. Most writers — poets in especial — prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy — an ecstatic intuition — and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought — at the true purposes seized only at the last moment — at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view — at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable — at the cautious selections and rejections — at the painful erasures and interpolations — in a word, at the wheels and pinions — the tackle for scene-shifting — the step-ladders and demon-traps — the cock’s feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.
Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - The Philosophy of Composition [Text-02]
9 years
I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would — that is to say, who could — detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why such [column 2:] a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a loss to say — but, perhaps, the autorial vanity has had more to do with the omission than an...
Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Tales - The Philosophy of Composition [Text-02]
9 years
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