mauv Profile picture
Oct 29, 2020 10 tweets 2 min read Read on X
When I started law school, I discovered law is bullshit. I was not prepared for this.
In other fields, truth is found by experimentation or by reasoning from first principles. In law, there is nothing to experiment on, and no real first principles to reason from.
Judges and scholars sometimes speak of "natural law" as a thing that exists outside and above the legal system. This is nonsense. "Natural law" is code for "I'm pulling this out of my ass, but I'm pretty sure if you looked within your own ass, you'd find something similar."
In law, the closest thing to a basic principle is that people must be persuaded that the acts of the state are just. Everything flows messily from this.

Per Harry Frankfurt, bullshit is that which is offered to persuade w/o regard for truth. Ergo, law is bullshit.
This was extremely disorienting.

I was a software engineer, so I was accustomed to thinking thoughts, writing code, and then running my code it to see if it works.

You don't really get to test legal arguments like that. The only test is whether they persuade other humans.
Moving to a new field so deeply rooted in persuasion has changed the way I think about knowledge.

I am more mindful of the vectors by which bias and opinion sneak into ostensibly-objective reasoning, and I'm more skeptical of subsequent conclusions.

I know less than I used to.
@Lithros wrote an extremely thoughtful response thread, so if this train of thought interests you, continue here:

@maybegray has a deep-dive thread on administrative law with a more optimistic framing.

actual legitimacy and apparent legitimacy as separate-but-related goals of the legal system:

this realization was my gateway to shitposting on twitter, b/c it's basically the same thing

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More from @ThatsMauvelous

Feb 17
apparently there isnt a cluster at 150 Image
Image
if elon is right about this im gonna be so mad

this absolutely cannot be real. the federal government cannot be this incompetent. there are not actual dollars being disbursed on the legal theory that 190-year-old people are alive

right?
a recent report from NYT implies that most of these old database entries are not associated with ongoing disbursements

h/t @LyingWrongAgain Image
Read 4 tweets
Jan 5
a brief commentary on this graph 🧵

in the original paper, this chart appears above the caption "household sharing unit". that's kinda important Image
household sharing means that the analysis takes into account all income of all members of the household.

and yep, when analyzing people who live with their parents, this pencils out exactly as stupidly as you'd expect. Image
Image
Read 13 tweets
Jan 2
Yesterday, I wrote a thread critical of Blake Lively.

I think Justin Baldoni's PR team used a bot network to boost me with over a thousand retweets, bringing millions of impressions.

I'm here to gossip with friends, not fix his reputation. So I'm mad about this. 🧵
Context:

Last week, I wrote a thread musing about Stephanie Jones' involvement in the Lively-Baldoni suit. It's not particularly favorable to either party, but it spills a lot of tea.

I'm proud of it. If you haven't read it, I bet you'll enjoy it. ⬇️

Yesterday, I wrote another thread unpacking some details from Baldoni's latest legal filing.

It's mediocre. Hopefully good enough to entertain my small circle of twitter friends, but certainly not good enough to go viral. ⬇️

Read 19 tweets
Jan 1
A New Year's Eve legal filing sheds new light on the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni situation.

It seems the @nytimes made a major error in their reporting. I'd like to know how it happened.

🧵
@nytimes The main character of today's story is not mentioned in Blake Lively's filings. The main character of today's story is a lowly emoji: the upside-down smiley face, icon of irony and sarcasm.

🙃
@nytimes The narrative meat of Blake Lively's lawsuit is laid out from start to finish in its twenty-five paragraph introduction, which includes twenty-one text messages.
Read 27 tweets
Dec 30, 2024
hunter is an excellent follow but imo barking up the wrong tree with griggs v duke power. quick thread
the argument goes like this:

iq is an important driver of job performance. griggs v. duke power prohibits employers from iq testing in the hiring process, so as a substitute means of filtering by iq, they demand education credentials (mostly university degrees).
the focus on degrees drives a lot of talent into needless years of institutional education when they could be producing & learning on the job instead.

it's a good story - but i have two problems with it:
Read 11 tweets
Dec 28, 2024
Blake Lively's sexual harassment and retaliation complaint against Justin Baldoni is very well-evidenced for a pre-discovery complaint.

She quotes many juicy and damning text messages among Baldoni's publicity team.

How did she get those texts? It's a good tale, I think. 🧵 Image
Image
For this story, our protagonist is not Blake Lively or Justin Baldoni. In fact, our protagonist is not even mentioned by name in Lively's legal filings. Our protagonist is a veteran publicist by the name of Stephanie Jones.
Stephanie Jones is the founder and CEO of Jonesworks, a celebrity PR firm. Over the years, Jonesworks' client list has included such high-profile figures such as Venus Williams, Jeff Bezos, and Tom Brady. And since 2017, Justin Baldoni. Image
Read 25 tweets

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