The Cases That Don’t Exist

How GenAI is not yet ready for law

In 2023, a New York lawyer named Steven Schwartz filed a brief in a routine personal-injury case against an airline. The brief cited a half-dozen helpful precedents. The precedents did not exist. Schwartz had asked ChatGPT to find supporting cases, and ChatGPT — being a machine that produces plausible language rather than true statements — invented them, names and citations and quotations and all, then cheerfully assured him they were real when he asked. The legal world treated Mata v. Avianca as a freak show: a cautionary tale about one careless lawyer. An embarrassing one-off.

It was not a one-off. It was the first crack in a dam.

By the end of 2025, a researcher in Paris named Damien […]

By |June 12th, 2026|2026, 2Brains, Artificial Intelligence, law, Uncategorized|4 Comments
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When is a no-fly zone not a no-fly zone? When it’s an airlift.

This was the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49. Post-war Germany was partitioned into sectors administered separately by the major Allied powers. The city of Berlin, buried deep in the Soviet sector of Germany, was similarly partitioned. So there were American- and British- and French-administered parts of Berlin. Access from the rest of Europe was by road, rail, or air with trains and trucks passing through a Soviet-ruled countryside. That was until the Russians decided to shut down those roads and railways in 1948, keeping Berlin from receiving both fuel and food.

The only remaining access to Berlin was by air and so the United States Air Force and the Royal Air Force flew everything into […]

By |March 7th, 2022|2022, Breaking News, Government, history, law, military, Politics, Privacy and Security, strategy, transportation|295 Comments
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Bob’s 9/11 post from 20 years ago — To a Man With a Hammer

Some things are worth reading again. For the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, here — unedited — is my column originally published September 13, 2001.

My smarter and handsomer brother was in Northern New Jersey on Tuesday looking across the water at what was for just a moment longer the single remaining tower of the World Trade Center. A cold front had passed through the night before, leaving the day startlingly clear. The carnage was easy to see even from a distance. Only the rising cloud of smoke and ash marred the sky. And then that tower, too, was gone. The magnitude of this disaster and its sister at the Pentagon in Washington is […]

By |September 10th, 2021|2021, Government, history, law, Privacy and Security, terrorism|643 Comments
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COVID-19 Lessons from Three Mile Island #2 — the NRC

My last column was about crisis management lessons I learned back in 1979 while investigating the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island (TMI). Let’s just say that FEMA wasn’t ready for a nuclear meltdown. Today we turn to the other federal agency I investigated at that same time — the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). While FEMA was simply unprepared and incompetent, the NRC was unprepared and lied about it.

Like FEMA, the NRC had recently undergone a rebranding from its previous identity as the Atomic Energy Commission — a schizoid agency that had been charged […]

By |April 17th, 2020|2020, COVID-19, history, law, nuclear safety, Politics|193 Comments
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News we aren’t supposed to know

notacrookI’m writing this post on Wednesday evening here in California. Normally I wouldn’t point that out but in this case I want to put a kind of timestamp on my writing because at this moment we’re at the end of the second day of a concerted attack by the UAE Electronic Army on various DNS providers in North America. If you follow this stuff and bother to check, say, Google News right now for “UAE Electronic Army,” your search will probably generate some Facebook entries but no news at all because — two days into it — this attack has gone unnoticed by the world at large. My last column was about fake news. This […]

By |December 15th, 2016|2016, Government, law, Media, Politics, Predictions, Privacy and Security|121 Comments
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