Prior to going to urgent care on Sunday, my main medical complaints, besides leg pain, were fatigue, headache and nausea. The main side effects of the antibiotics I’m taking are…fatigue, headache and nausea. And people wonder why I hate going to the doctor.

It’s Not About You

I know a lot of you reading this are lawyers and therefore haven’t taken a STEM class since high school chemistry, so let me break it down for you…even if you aren’t personally killed by COVID-19, you can carry the disease and transfer it to someone who may otherwise not have caught it and they may be killed and/or transfer it to someone who may be killed. You’re going to have to experience some inconvenience so that people don’t die.

I am unpersuaded by the arguments comparing it to the flu. (1) It looks like it may be far more fatal percentage wise than the annual flu. If it spreads to flu numbers, we could be looking at catastrophic numbers of deaths. (2) There are some post-mortem studies showing that COVID-19 causes lung tissue damage which may have repercussions post-recovery that we don’t fully understand. And (3) - and this is a real galaxy brain take, I admit - but why are we “accepting” of a 80k US and 500k annual world wide influenza death rate. Less than 3,000 people died in each Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and we entered global conflict over it. Why are our public health emergencies not given the same reaction?

(I know why - it’s because “doing science” isn’t as much fun as being an armchair general sending poor people off to die in war and then reaping the reward of your military industrial complex stocks go up.)

Anyway, I do not have high hopes for the next few days/weeks/months because people are honestly way too selfish. Family members of a COVID-19 positive person broke quarantine to get their nails done and to go to a dance. And of course there will be people who can’t isolate because we have no safety net. So many fissures in society are about to crack wide open.

Cool Stuff from Free Law Project

Maybe this is just a common law jurisdiction law librarian thing, but one of the things that sort of freaks me out about our system of law is that so much depends on precedent and being able to find and cite an appropriate case and until really relatively recently, that wasn’t easy or guaranteed. <puts flashlight under chin> Imagine if Mr Shepard misfiled a case in the 1920s and the perfect case for your issue is out there but you will never find it because of Mr Shepard’s mistake!

One thing I didn’t fully appreciate until talking to the people at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab during their scanning project and the folks at the Free Law Project is that we don’t know A LOT about the corpus of law that in theory makes up the backbone of our society. Like, little things, like how many cases have been decided. Or how many courts have issued law.

The Free Law Project just released a database of court names. What a great public service. One of the benefits of free and open law is that if you give people access to the data, they will do things that may surprise you for reasons beyond profit margins. Could WEXIS have done this database years ago? Maybe. Did they? Nope.

Work Work Work Work

According to Facebook memories, I returned from my Panama Canal cruise a year ago and posted a bunch of pictures. One of the neatest things we saw was a group of leaf cutter ants on a chocolate plantation in Costa Rica. For years, my mom’s Christmas gift to my dad was “adopting” the Cincinnati Zoo leaf cutter ants for him. They were his favorite thing to see - I mean, my dad is so stereotypically German that his dreams are mostly about working on the farm so it’s no surprise that his favorite animal at the zoo are these little industrious sons of guns.

Anyway, here’s some wild leaf cutter ants.