Things to Read This Week (5/5)
Historical oddities and historical revelations, LLMs, and the freedom of the press
A Vow of Silence: Vice-Presidential Inaugural Addresses, by Gerard Magliocca, who has a real knack for topics. “This is the first (and probably the last) article on the (largely) abandoned tradition of vice-presidential inaugural speeches.”
The Press Clause: Important, Remembered, and Equally Shared, by Eugene Volokh — a response to this 100-page report from the Abrams Institute.
Large Language Models Are Unreliable Judges, by Jonathan Choi. Contains a very illuminating discussion of prompt phrasing and reliability that made me reevaluate some of the recent LLM judging literature.
Some Traditional Questions about History and Tradition, by Jonathan Green. (“If the Constitution’s legal content resides in the original meaning of its terms, how might a tradition of political practice that arose long after a constitutional provision’s adoption be legally relevant? Eighteenth-century English jurists had an answer to that question. . . . . The codification of an unwritten right in written law did not alter its status as a customary right, whose limits were set by a tradition that preceded and succeeded the text’s enactment.”) A good addition to the “general law” revival . . .
Reconstructing Section 1983, by Tyler Lindley. Something of a sequel to his Anachronistic Readings of Section 1983. I commented on this paper at a lunch talk in February, and my biggest questions were about Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 2, an issue discussed at pp. 26-29 of the paper.
