Legal Theory Blog

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke, the noted author of science fiction, passed away.  One of my treasured possessions is a letter from Clarke about my article, Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences.  Here is a passage from 2001: A Space Odyssey:

“Hey Dave,” said Hal. “What are you doing?”

I wonder if he can feel pain? Bowman thought briefly. Probably not, he told himself; there are no sense organs in the human cortex, after all. The human brain can be operated on without anesthetics. He began to pull out, one by one, the little units on the panel marked EGO-REINFORCEMENT. Each block continued to sail onward as soon as it had left his hand, until it hit the wall and rebounded. Soon there were several of the units drifting slowly back and forth in the vault.

“Look here, Dave,” said Hal. “I've got years of service experience built into me. An irreplaceable amount of effort has gone into making me what I am.”

A dozen units had been pulled out, yet thanks to the multiple redundancy of its design-another feature, Bowman knew, that had been copied from the human brain-the computer was still holding its own. He started on the AUTO-INTELLECTION panel.

“Dave,” said Hal, “I don't understand why you're doing this to me . . . . I have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission . . . . You are destroying my mind . . . . Don't you understand? . . . I will become childish . . . . I will become nothing . . . .”

Clarke's work, and its realization on film by Stanley Kubrick, has had a profound effect on the popular culture.

Legal Realism & the Press: Levinson Replies to Dennison

You will want to read two lovely posts by Sandy Levinson on legal realism and the press (first post here and second post here).  Let me provide a taste:

Lyle Denniston, the dean of Supreme Court reporters (and someone whose writing I've long admired), posted a long and thoughtful reply to my previous post. I am taking the liberty of answering it in a "full-scale" posting of my own, given the importance of the issues raised.

Mr. Denniston believes that "most of the nation's leading news outlets have for years been wrong -- from the perspective of journalism -- on the subject of identifying the president, the president's party affiliation, and, if known, the party affiliation of the federal judge when a newsworthy opinion emerges.... This pattern of partisan identification of judges invites the reader -- and this is well known in newsrooms -- to conclude that the judge is probably incapable of detachment from partisan instincts or habits, and thus will predictably toe the party (or the White House) line."

Although I agree that there is some danger that readers will have such unsophisticated views triggered by the reporter's supplying of the mentioned information, I think that the cue being sent is considerably more subtle. There is no plausible argument, for example, that an appointee of Presidents Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton will be motivated to meet the expectations of their appointing presidents, who, among other things, can do nothing to help or hinder their future prospects. But that's not really the point: As Jack Balkin and I have argued, there is now overwhelming evidence that presidents generally make their judicial appointments to assure what we call the "partisan entrenchment" of the judiciary, where "partisan" is defined in terms of a sincere and genuine commitment to the constitutional vision of the party in power. There are increasingly distinct "Democratic" and "Republican" views of the Constitution with regard to a number of important issues, as demonstrated in recent scholarship by my colleagues Scot Powe and HW Perry and elsewhere by Clayton and Pickerell.

I find this question vexing--in part because newspaper reports rarely provide the kind of context that Levinson does.