The Laboratorium (3d ser.)

3d.laboratorium.net · American English

A blog by James Grimmelmann.

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Do Not Confuse
Sep 17, 2026 · original
Jacobean Jacobian Jacobin Jacobite
Nonfeasance, Misfeasance, and Malfeasance: Academic Freedom in a Nutshell
Aug 23, 2026 · original
Here’s a simple taxonomy for thinking about academic duties and freedoms. There are basically three kinds of reasons why a university could take disciplinary action against an academic: Nonfeasance : “You were hired to do X and you didn’t do it.” These are the easiest cases, because even when X is a specialized activity, evaluating whether someone did it at all is usually a bright-line rule that can be enforced by non-experts. You don’t need to be an expert in microbiology to see that a microbiologist hasn’t been publishing or showing up to class. Misfeasance : “You were hired to do X and you did it badly.” These are the hardest cases, because evaluating whether an academic did X badly requires the exercise of professional scholarly judgment. A key part of academic freedom and shared governance is that judgments of this sort need to be made by scholars with appropriate expertise in the f
Long Black Veil, Part 2
Aug 13, 2026 · original
Twenty years ago, Edith Wainwright watched her lover Jack hang for a murder he didn’t commit. Even though three eyewitnesses claimed they saw someone who looked like Jack at the scene, Edith knew he was innocent: the two of them were together the night of the murder. But Jack refused to testify in his defense, and made Edith swear never to tell another soul where he had been. He was willing to die, he said, to protect her. Since then, Edith has done her best to move on and build a life with her husband Charles—Jack’s best friend and the man she was cheating on that fateful night. But decades of guilt and lies have taken their toll, and Edith has started to wonder about the real reasons behind her long silence. When she hears rumors of a mysterious figure visiting Jack’s grave and walking the hills in a long black veil, she knows that her ghosts are returning. Now, Edith must confront her
Four Kinds of Purpose
Jul 6, 2026 · original
There are four principles you can live your life by: Truth is the pursuit of the scholar, the scientist, and the cynic: accurate, complete, and unsparing knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in. Utility is the goal of the economist, the engineer, and the politician: to make the world better by making the most of what it makes available to us. Justice is the project of the judge, the ethicist, and the activist: doing right by all by giving each what they deserve and have been denied. Beauty is the mission of the artist, the adventurer, and the epicure: it comprises the ineffable, the sublime, the fleeting, passion, peace, joy, transcendence, and infinitely more. All of them are good, and all of them are important, but they are entirely incomparable. None of them can be found within the rest, and in their purest forms they utterly deny each others’ claims. To pursue one is always i
How Not to Investigate a University President
May 22, 2026 · original
I regret to inform you that there is even more to the story of how Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff backed his car into a student. I also regret to inform you that Cornell’s Board of Trustees has made things worse. For ease of reading, I’ve put a timeline at the end of this post with all of the primary documents: videos, statements, op-eds, etc. The first section is background; feel free to skip it if you’re familiar with the story and my own op-ed about the incident. 1. Background On April 30, a group of people followed President Kotlikoff after an on-campus event, repeatedly asking him questions about Cornell’s speech and discipline policies. He eventually declined to engage further, walked to his car, turned it on, and then backed it into a student. The next day (May 1), Kotlikoff issued a statement describing the incident, the key paragraph of which was demonstrably false: They co
Mission Statement
Apr 1, 2026 · original
I’ve changed my mission statement . The old one read: I study how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power. I try to help lawyers and technologists understand each other. My research interests include content moderation, digital copyright, generative AI, digital property, and other topics in computer and Internet law. The new one reads: I try to bring technical, legal, and conceptual clarity to the foundations of information and Internet law. I want to help lawyers and technologists understand each other. My research areas include generative AI, content moderation, platform regulation, online copyright, and digital property. My old statement focused on the policy consequences of legal rules; my new one focuses on the legal rules themselves. To be clear, this is a change in emphasis. I’ve always cared about both policy and law and I expect that I always will. Nor is this
Gettier Non-Problems
Jan 31, 2026 · original
What is knowledge? To know something is to correctly understand the world, so knowledge must involve the coming together of truth and belief . Unfortunately, a definition of knowledge as “true belief” doesn’t work, because truth and belief can coincide by coincidence. For example, suppose that I have a high fever and hallucinate that my sister is in front of me talking to me, but in reality she is sitting quietly in a chair behind. I believe that she’s in the room with me, and it’s true that she’s in the room with me, but I don’t know that she’s in the room with me, because my belief that she’s in the room is based on bad reasons, reasons that are completely disconnected from the fact that she actually is in the room. Thus, in epistemology, the traditional definition of knowledge was as “ justified true belief.” The point of adding justification is to deal with cases in which I believe s
Northwestern and Cornell
Jan 14, 2026 · original
Here in higher education, the capitulations will continue until morale improves. After Columbia’s shameful deal with the Trump administration last summer, I pledged not to donate to the university or to perform any service for it unless and until it repents and atones. Since then, several other universities have followed suit. I want to focus on two—Northwestern and Cornell—that raise similar enough issues to require a response on my part. Start with Northwestern. Although its agreement includes a disclaimer that it does not give the “United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, University hiring, admission decisions, Northwestern’s curriculum, or the content of academic speech and research,” several provisions do in fact trade away core university principles of institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and openness to all. Among other things, the agreement requires Northwestern to
Origin Story
Jan 12, 2026 · original
This is the story that I tell when people ask me how I got into Internet law. Like all of its kind, it’s a polished and refracted version of what actually happened. Still, for all the misremembered details and conscious omissions, it bears a resemblance to the truth. Late in the summer of 1999, armed with a bachelors degree in computer science, a working knowledge of some programming languages, and an exceptional degree of self-confidence, I set out to conquer the world. I took a job as a software engineer at Microsoft Research in Seattle for a compiler-tools group I had interned for during college. My plan was to work there for a few years, identify some problems I wanted to solve, and then either stay in the software industry or go back to get a PhD in computer science. To quote Colson Whitehead : I could do it. It was going to be a great year. I was sure of it. Isn’t it funny? The way
Do Not Confuse
Dec 13, 2025 · original
I was a few years ago old when I learned that these were all distinct: catacomb catafalque catamite catamount cataphract catapult cataract

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