Your Morning Sift

Good morning.

Wakey, wakey, readers. Let's get this week started with your morning Sift.

A- We'll start out this Monday morning with an in-depth discussion by Southern District of Florida Blog of Miami attorney Roy Black's recent blog post detailing how he would improve a UM Law School education.

The real challenge seems to me to be eliminating the dichotomy between “practical” and “doctrinal” training and seamlessly teaching both simultaneously. That’s the Holy Grail of legal education. It is not enough to have students learn by emulating good examples. Schools need to foster in students real insight into why everything—whether it be the rule against perpetuities or the foundation for introducing a business record—is the way it is. That enables them to do things not just as well as but better than the people who taught them.

B- Miami Beach 411 takes a ride through Lion Country Safari in a Truly Nolen mouse limo. I wanna see Beached Miami beat that!

So there we were, a group of South Florida social media whores, sitting in the back of the Truly Nolen Mouse Limo, about to wind our way through Lion Country Safari in Palm Beach County.

The limo is like one of those yellow Truly Nolen VW Bugs disguised as mice we’ve been seeing for decades, only a limo. A yellow limo with a black tail and ears.

C- Justice Building Blog notes that court reporters are going the way of 8-track tapes.

So get used to electronic transcription. And in 50 or 60 years we will be replacing Judges with robots who, having instantaneous access to 500 years of recorded legal history will be making split second decisions that will do away with the need for appellate courts. All in the name of technology saving money.

No more court reporters in court: a bad thing.
No more judges in court: not a bad thing.

D- Mike LaMonica wonders whether this will be another Black Monday.

There have have actually been three Black Mondays in the stock market, but here’s the good news: they all occurred in October and none of them came announced. Well, it’s not October and the recent events couldn’t be more “announced.” Black strikes when least expected.

E- The Reid Report notes how the extreme right marches in lockstep to a concerted message that is primarily fueled and molded by Fox News and talk radio

.There is an entire segment of the population whose entire understanding of history and economics boils down to a set of probably Frank Luntz focus-grouped, multi-platform media-repeated slogans. They think the slogans are real. They think the papered-over quickie-history and moralistic tropes ingrained in them are real (i.e., the founders intended the country to be ruled by Christian dogma… the civil war wasn’t about slavery… Americans were better off before the New Deal… unions are destructive and workers only appear to want collective bargaining because they’re being coerced by “thugs”… corporations and the rich are morally superior — they are the “productive class” and the “job creators” — and thus should not be taxed and need no regulation… in fact, the very ideas of taxation, regulation and collective bargaining are “communism” … government itself is bad — even evil, etc.) And they want to govern the country based on those tropes.

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