Legal Commentary

Lost Cause Dept.

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

A noble effort by Paul Ohm at Freedom to Tinker, Being Acquitted Versus Being Searched (YANAL):

With this post, I’m launching a new, (very) occasional series I’m calling YANAL, for “You Are Not A Lawyer.” In this series, I will try to disabuse computer scientists and other technically minded people of some commonly held misconceptions about the law (and the legal system).

Funnily enough, that’s how I got my start as an Internet lawyer. Back in the early ’90s there were a lot of software engineers writing a great deal of nonsense about the US Constitution on USENET. When they used these mistaken priors to (mis)explain the law relating to the Clipper Chip, I decided to write a short 10-12 page article on the regulation of cryptography, just to set the record straight.

One hundred and sixty pages (and one case of carpal tunnel) later, I had an article.

Good luck, Paul, you’ll need it!

Full post as published by Discourse.net on February 09, 2009 (boomark / email).