LawMeme is running a wonderful continuing feature, written by James Grimmelmann, to teach non-lawyers, and especially techies, how to read a legal brief:

Future lawyers spend three years in law school learning how to read and write legalese, but what serious geek has that kind of time to spare? This series will cover the basics of Legal; by the end of it, you should be ready to pick up a legal brief and know what’s going on and how to find out more.

To keep things close to reality, we’ll use as a case study a particularly important piece of recent legal writing: the good guys’ brief in Eldred v. Ashcroft. We’ll walk through the brief, seeing how the conventions of legal writing interact with the arguments Lessig and company are making.

If you’re at all interested in the topic, it’s well worth reading. (Part I; Part II; and more to come)

Simson Garfinkel has an interesting short article in Technology Review about wireless tags. He advocates a sort of consumers’ bill of rights, that would protect people against being observed or tracked against their will.

Wireless tags are an important and potentially scary technology. As I’ve written before, I think we need more discussion of their implications.

Today I submitted written testimony that will be included in the record of last week’s House hearings on the Berman-Coble bill.