Welcome to Test Case

Welcome to "Test Case," my occasional blog.

The popularity of blogs has ebbed and flowed over the years, but I have always felt like they occupy a useful niche. There are a lot of conversations worth having in formats that are longer than a tweet but shorter or less formal than more traditional kinds of publication. And that’s what I’ll be aiming to do here.

About me: I'm a law professor, and my current research focuses are in artificial intelligence, consumer protection, and civil procedure. My writing here will likely focus mostly on those areas, and especially on topics that involve two or more of them (for instance, civil litigation about AI). In legal academia, the standard form for academic work and discussion is the law review article. But law review articles are *long*—like, 25,000 words long—and can take a long time to publish (often more than a year). Not every idea needs that many words to be expressed. And not every idea is clearly good enough that it's worth investing that amount of time and effort in. So that's where a blog comes in: a place for shorter ideas and more tentative ideas than the ones that make it into my more formal writing.

The name of the blog—Test Case—is a reference to ideas in two worlds. In the world of software development, test cases are a way of testing out new code, like a new product or new feature—you run some test cases to see how things work and find potential flaws or unexpected results. In the world of law, a test case is a case brought deliberately to try and make a new, useful precedent—to challenge a law and get it struck down, or to establish a new legal principle or overturn an old one. For the blog, the name reflects that the writing will touch on topics in law and technology; and the connotations of novel issues and "testing things out" are ones that feel particularly appropriate for the blogging medium.

I hope you enjoy reading it. My plan is for posts to be only occasional, rather than regularly scheduled. If you think you might like to read what I write here in the future, please consider signing up for the email list. I would also welcome any thoughts or reactions—so feel free and encouraged to leave a comment or send me an email about anything here.

(Image Credit: DALL•E)