Free Republic

It's Walters v. OpenAI L.L.C., No. 23-A-04860-2, filed in Gwinnett Co. (GA) yesterday. An excerpt from the Complaint (please note both that the Complaint is just an allegation,that the statements quoted in it about Walters are allegedly entirely made up, not by some human accuser but by a hallucinating AI program): 8. Fred Riehl is a third party who works for a media outlet [Ammoland.com] as a journalist and who is a subscriber of ChatGPT. 9. On May 4, 2023, Riehl interacted with ChatGPT about a lawsuit (the "Lawsuit") that Riehl was reporting on. 10. The Lawsuit is in federal...

As I noted Wednesday, some people are arguing that Donald Trump Jr. committed a crime by expressing willingness to accept unspecified information that came from the Russian government and that was offered as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” (The incident happened before the hack of the Democratic National Committee was revealed, so there’s no indication that Trump Jr. thought that the offered information had been obtained illegally.) The theory is this: 1. A federal statute makes it a crime for “a foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make … a contribution or donation of money...

Does an American citizen have a Constitutional right to own a gun? Here's what the Second Amendment says: "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Now, it once seemed to me like that language only protected state militias and not individuals. Indeed, this is the view held by the four dissenting Supreme Court justices in the 2008 case of District of Columbia versus Heller, a landmark case dealing with gun ownership. But the more research I did, the more I came...

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is considering whether wearing clothing in the workplace with the Gadsden flag printed on it constitutes legally actionable racial harassment. According to Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor who runs the “Volokh Conspiracy” blog at The Washington Post, the EEOC ruled two months ago that it will need to collect more evidence in a case filed in Jan. 2014 by an African American federal employee who complained about his coworker wearing a hat with the Gadsden flag printed on it. The complainant said that the Gadsden flag, which was designed during the Revolutionary War in...

The well known and brilliant law professor, Eugene Volokh has partnered with the Washington Post to place the Volokh Conspiracy, a well argued and written blog that I have often cited, under the Washington Post website. Professor Volokh lists his reasons as one would expect: And there’s a wide middle zone of people, on this subject and on others, who are open to hearing arguments — and facts — and who might be swayed by them. (I was one myself, before I started researching gun issues seriously in the mid-1990s.) But to reach those people, you have to be in...

Backers of laws that let pretty much all law-abiding carry concealed guns in public places often argue that these laws will sometimes enable people to stop mass shootings. Opponents occasionally ask: If that’s so, what examples can one give of civilians armed with guns stopping such shootings? Sometimes, I hear people asking if even one such example can be found, or saying that they haven’t heard even one such example. Naturally, such examples will be rare, partly because mass shootings are rare, partly because many mass shootings happen in supposedly “gun-free” zones (such as schools, universities, or private property posted...

I was just on a HuffPost Live panel with, among others, Elie Mystal (Above The Law), and he suggested — as a gun control proposal — that guns should be regulated like cars. This prompts me to repost an item I posted several years ago: Cars are basically regulated as follows (I rely below on California law, but to my knowledge the rules are similar throughout the country): (1) No federal licensing or registration of car owners. (2) Any person may use a car on his own private property without any license or registration. See, e.g., California Vehicle Code §§...

As part of Guns.com continued effort to bring you the most fascinating and informative gun-related content on the Internet, I decided to reach out to Professor Eugene Volokh, the Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. Prof. Volokh specializes in free speech law, criminal law, tort law, religious freedom law, and church-state relations law – but he also knows more about the 2nd Amendment and firearms regulation policy than almost anyone you can think of. Plus, he is a genius. Not in a figurative sense of the term, but literally. At age 12 he worked...

Article VII, §8 of the Wisconsin Constitution requires a three-fifths quorum only for statutes that are fiscal, that is, statutes that actually appropriate money, impose taxes, create a debt, or release a claim owed to the state. Even then, these categories have consistently been interpreted in the most limited form conceivable. The Wisconsin attorney general in 1971 gave a formal opinion to the legislature that a bill that changed collective bargaining rights substantially was not fiscal in nature and was not subject to the three-fifths super quorum provision. Because collective bargaining rights and that very statutory chapter (ch. 111) are...

Few scholars have led a life as varied as Eugene Volokh’s. Born in the Soviet Union in 1968, Volokh immigrated with his family to the United States at age 7. A prodigy, he entered the University of California at Los Angeles at 12 and graduated at 15 with a degree in math and computer science. At the same time he contributed to the family software business, which became very successful thanks in large part to Eugene’s programming skills. In his 20s, interested in new challenges, Volokh went to law school, starting on a path that would eventually lead to clerkships...

Did anyone watch the Abrams Report at 5:00 EST on MSNBC?????? I was flipping channels and heard him say to a guest "sorry I did not leave you much time but I spent more time on the 2nd amendment which I am passionate about" I figure he was either discussing the Wal-mart suit or the DOJ document recognizing the 2nd amendment as an individual right put out this past week. I believe he is a big anti so I'm curious what he said and who was on.. Does The Abrams Report repeat later tonight. I checked the web page but...

GUEST OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Los Angeles Say that an I.R.S. agent leaks a politician's income tax return to a newspaper reporter, an act that is a federal felony. The newspaper may have a First Amendment right to publish the information, especially since it bears on a matter of public interest. The government, meanwhile, is entitled to punish the agent, to protect citizens' privacy and ensure a fair and efficient tax system. To punish the agent, prosecutors may need to get the leaker's name from the reporter; but if the reporter refuses to testify because of a "journalist's privilege" to protect confidential...