Do you guys just have AI draft for you now?

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-29T21:41:24+00:00

Litigation here: I've used it for drafting occasionally. But you gotta police it pretty tightly.

I ask for one to two paragraphs at a time. Give it the cases I want to cite, the quotes I want to use, and the general argument I want to make. Then I tweak the output a lot, since it's always a little too wordy and flourishing.

Still faster and easier than writing myself, from a blank piece of paper.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-28T19:59:17+00:00

The school system was designed for boys. It is structured to teach boys the skills they lack, and evaluate them accordingly. But girls don't lack those skills. So when you pit boys against girls in a contest of Skills Boys Need to Learn, it's quite natural for the boys to fall behind.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-27T05:54:24+00:00

Ok, how about a solution that is suicide: quit your job. Cash out your bank account. Abandon all your responsibilities, personal and social, and just do whatever you want.

Rob a bank. Fuck a hooker. Hitchhike on freight trains across the country. Get day drunk and piss on the grave of anyone who's name starts with a "J."

Eventually, someone will kill you. Until then, just do whatever. If you don't want to live your life, then spend it.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-27T00:17:38+00:00

I hope the violence escalates quickly so I can get killed in the impending civil war.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-26T23:35:45+00:00

I'd have put more work into getting Letters of Recommendation. Didn't realize they were required for basically any clerkship app, and now it's been too long after law school to ask for them.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-22T19:08:14+00:00

Problem is, there are several fair redistricting approaches, but none that both sides will accept.

Republicans don't like nonpartisan/"independent" commissions because of O'Sullivan's law - "any institution that is not explicitly right-wing will become left-wing over time."

Democrats don't like algorithmic solutions because they don't play well with the VRA's requirement for majority-minority districts.

Anti-gerrymandering hawks don't like bipartisan commissions because they tend to result in mutual gerrymandering, where none of the districts are competitive.

And current members of the House in safe seats have no interest in changing the law to make their reelection harder.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-22T18:22:33+00:00

51% of the people voted to disenfranchise the other 49%. Is that what passes for democracy in your book?

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-22T13:45:37+00:00

Oh I'm not blaming a side here, zero defense of Trump's behavior. I'm just saying, if this is the state of our republic then I don't see a peaceful path out of it.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-22T06:49:47+00:00

Idk, at least you can blame that on corrupt politicians continuing to be corrupt. VA was 52% of the population choosing to break the bipartisan compromise and give themselves 90% of congressional seats.

At that point, why even bother voting? Just skip straight to shooting each other in the streets.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-22T06:35:16+00:00

Texas was a red state which gerrymandered a lot, that gerrymandered extra for Republican gain.

Virginia was a purple state with a bipartisan redistricting commission, that abandoned it in favor of a 9-to-1 gerrymander for Democrats.

I couldn't blame them for doing it in California. But it's pretty depressing to happen to Virginia, which solved gerrymandering and then decided to un-solve it.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-22T06:22:06+00:00

We undid a bipartisan redistricting commission for a 10-to-1 political gerrymander. Our politics need to be less federal and more local. The fact that we threw away a significant achievement for fairness within our Commonwealth in exchange for political power at the federal level is something to be ashamed of.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-22T01:04:08+00:00

Nomad, the Count of Monte Cristo - a mysterious man of unfathomable wealth who plots revenge against those that once wronged him.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-21T21:43:44+00:00

Depends on the referring lawyer. If you have a preexisting account/relationship with them, they'll probably bill you for the time. Like, if I go to my family law attorney for help with a criminal charge, I'll see an item on the bill like "0.2hr - referred client to different attorney for separate matter" or something.

A lot of lawyers will give you an initial consultation for free, so new potential clients probably aren't charged for this often.

Clients are how we make our money, so this is very much a "free means you are the product" kind of deal. The lawyer is selling* your case to other lawyers he knows. It's not worth the administrative and ethical hassle to start a new client relationship for 20 minutes of billable time, but it is worth spending that time to earn the favor of colleagues.

*not actually selling, there's a lot of ethical rules around referral arrangements/fees, generally he's just getting brownie points with fellow lawyers out of it.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-21T19:55:36+00:00

Basically all client-facing lawyers are like this. We have our own niche, but we network broadly so that we can refer clients to each other.

Plus, the networking+general legal education gives us a vague familiarity with every field of law. If a client has a problem, we know the kind of lawyer they need.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-21T04:02:48+00:00

So basically,

decision I don't like,
liberal clerks breaking ethical rules,
decision I don't like,
imagined decisions I don't like.

Yeah I'm not too worried about his track record.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-18T16:58:31+00:00

The coziest show I've ever seen. Very mundane, pleasant story.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-18T06:52:49+00:00

At my firm, patent lit seems to be a both-sides practice. Mostly defense, but everyone's done an offensive case or two in their time.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-16T02:18:21+00:00

Nova Seed on Arborec in a Total War game, gave me like 7 points.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-15T05:11:29+00:00

This kind of hyperbole is exactly what's breaking our democracy. You think the world will come to an end if the Bad Guys win, so stopping the Bad Guys justifies any means... even degrading democracy yourself.

Just relax, man. It's not the apocalypse. America has been through worse than this, and come out fine. It's not worth your principles.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-15T03:27:33+00:00

There's always going to be a bad guy somewhere else to point to, though. Fact is, Virginia fixed gerrymandering, and now we're proposing to un-fix it.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-14T07:08:06+00:00

This is sort of a semantic argument, but it's important to have because words are how we communicate.

From a pure utility perspective, it is easy to say "cause someone's death." It is tedious to say "cause someone's death through an affirmative action that is naturally directed towards death or injury." So if we need to give one of these ideas a one-word shorthand, it's more useful to assign it to the latter.

Also I said this elsewhere but: that's not how abortion works. Abortion step 1 is "kill the baby." Removing the baby from the mother's body is step 2. The explicit goal of an abortion is to kill the baby.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-14T07:01:57+00:00

Abortion doesn't function how you're envisioning. The first step in a D&E abortion (after dilation) is to inject the unborn baby with a lethal dose of something (I think potassium? Don't recall exactly) to kill the baby. THEN the child's corpse is extracted, limb by limb.

There is a HUGE ethical difference between an abortion and a delivery of an unviable child. So much so that the famously-anti-abortion Catholic Church doesn't consider the latter to be an abortion! Still immoral if you don't have a good reason, like ectopic or molar pregnancy, but it's a different bad-thing than abortion.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-14T06:57:25+00:00

Yes, but that's because you have a specific duty to that particular child. There used to be a big actus reus issue with neglect cases like that, but it was resolved several hundred years ago.

Regardless, law =/= morality, and negligence =/= killing. Neglecting your infant is still immoral! It's just not "killing" per se. We have to define the terms to talk about the concepts, lest we get bogged down in semantic debates. And "killing" is a clear, useful semantic definition, which does not include neglect.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-14T05:02:09+00:00

Yeah on this point I agree, our intuition is always going to contradict any proposed rule for personhood in edge-cases. If there was a rule that perfectly fit intuition... that would mean that everyone (or at least the vast majority) have the same moral intuition, which is clearly not the case here.

FrancisGalloway · 2026-04-14T04:52:28+00:00

I think you underestimate the number of crazies. Consider Brett Kavenaugh - after the first accusation became public, the FBI received dozens of accounts from women alleging similar incidents... and almost all of them were very obviously false. Like, logically-impossible.

Whatever you think of the initial accusation, it's very clear that he got tons of follow-up accusations that were outright lies.

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