Author: Errica Jensen

Standing in front of a room full of Tuscaloosa law students and acknowledging, in essence, that the Court she sits on might not be doing enough creative thinking is almost refreshingly honest. That was the implication of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s remarks on April 9 at the University of Alabama School of Law, where she talked about an AI system that a colleague had told her about. The system was intended to forecast the Supreme Court’s decision-making process, and it had a remarkably high success rate. Her response was straightforward. She described it as “a very bad thing.” It demonstrated, in…

The depth of the libraries, the publications piled on faculty office shelves, and the graduate students from thirty different countries bent over work that frequently actually advances human knowledge are all immediately noticeable when you stroll through the hallways of nearly any major European research university. The European University Association has noted that, taken as a whole, European universities are possibly the best in the world. Excellent research is produced on the continent. Serious scientists are trained there. According to numerous international rankings, its higher education systems are on par with those of the US and Asia. However, something continues…

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals received the brief formatted, numbered, and citing authority just like any other filing, and it took the judges who were reviewing it an unsettlingly short time to realize there was a problem. Not a single thing is incorrect. It wasn’t a thoughtless mistake or an incorrect page number. In a brief that Texas lawyer Heather Hersh had submitted in a Fair Credit Reporting Act appeal, there were twenty-one instances of made-up quotes or grave legal and factual misrepresentations. A show-cause order was issued by the court. Hersh answered. The three-judge panel, presided over…

There is a version of this story that remains in the corners of the internet where it originated. It is a long-standing conspiracy theory that has been circulated through fringe forums and anonymous accounts, asserting that France’s first lady was born a man. No Delaware courtroom ever sees that version. Like most such theories, that version fades without any repercussions. However, in early 2024, Candace Owens made the decision that the theory was worth risking her career for. She spent the better part of a year promoting it to a nearly seven million-person audience on X, releasing a multi-part video…

Imagine a warm July afternoon in 2019 at a Trader Joe’s in Palm Beach, Florida. After using his Visa debit card to complete a transaction and receiving his receipt, a customer named Brian Keim notices something strange. The first six and last four digits of his card number—ten of the sixteen digits—are printed in black ink on standard thermal paper, making them visible to any store employee who handed it over as well as anybody else who happened to look at it. Businesses are only allowed to print a customer’s last five card numbers under federal law. Something that wasn’t…

A tiny circular gadget with a glowing screen and flawless internal hardware is mounted on a wall somewhere in an Illinois home. The room temperature can still be read by it. The heat can still be turned on. However, the features that made it worth $250—the smartphone app, the Wi-Fi connection, and the flexibility to adjust it from a car, a couch, or an airport gate—are no longer there. It was taken by Google. Google’s authority to do so is currently being questioned in a federal class action lawsuit. Alphabet Inc. and Google LLC are being sued in the U.S.…

The Renaissance Hotel, located on 17th Street in Fort Lauderdale, is the type of establishment that frequently accommodates airline crews on layovers. It is a refined Marriott-brand hotel just a short distance from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and has the kind of quiet hallways and well-lit lobbies that pilots and flight attendants pass through dozens of times a year without any problems. A year after something went wrong in one of those hallways on February 1, 2025, Southwest Airlines was named in a $215,576 federal lawsuit alleging that a flight attendant had “negligently interfered” with a fire sprinkler system, according…

In Pendleton, Indiana, a school board meeting that attracts hundreds of community members is genuinely uncommon, graduation programs consistently feature the same names, and everyone knows which teachers have been at the high school for decades. A legal dispute over school transparency, religious freedom, and what a public employee is allowed to say on her own time took place in a familiar and locally rooted setting. That disagreement was formally resolved this week with a $195,000 settlement. It’s another matter entirely whether it ended well. Kathy McCord worked in Indiana schools for 37 years, the final 25 of those years…

After leaving Barstow, head east on Interstate 40, past the solar farms, outlet stores, and long, flat nothing, and eventually the terrain begins to rise. The Clark Mountains, dark volcanic ridgelines that are abrupt and steep and contain pockets of moisture that support plant life found almost nowhere else in California, rise out of the Mojave floor like something that wasn’t supposed to be there. Early in the morning, bighorn sheep travel through those canyons. Botanical surveys show that the rare plant density in those mountains is second only to one other range in the entire state. It is an…

A 60-page lawsuit has been sitting quietly since April somewhere in Bengaluru, inside the kind of district court building where ceiling fans turn slowly and files pile up in yellowing bundles on wooden benches. One of the most reputable names in mobile technology is the company that filed it. Reddit threads, X accounts, Instagram creators, and YouTubers are the targets. And the content in question includes everything from videos purportedly showing phones catching fire to negative product reviews that, depending on who you ask, are either dangerous false information or precisely the kind of frank criticism that Indian consumers on…