Derek Bambauer

@derektmuller Again: "the most valuable heuristic of movement in the USNWR law school rankings? It’s a symbol of law school management."

@derektmuller From Above the Law: abovethelaw.com/2026/04/end-of… "As for the biggest drop in this segment of the rankings, we’ve got Arizona (-11). Ooof."

"the most valuable heuristic of movement in the USNWR law school rankings? It’s a symbol of law school management. The rankings are simply something to be managed. If a school is managing the rankings well or poorly, one can observe and attempt to assess why" Quote @derektmuller

Except at the end of the day, someone marks a box - or pays a seat deposit. And the polls / rankings are excellent predictors of that outcome. Believe what you want. But jobs are on the line, and not just ours.

It's the single most important thing that applicants consider, including financial aid. It's fashionable to conclude that the rankings don't matter. In the same way that political candidates prefer to believe that polls don't matter.

f you're Kia, and your ranking from, say, Car and Driver, of your Telluride goes from "top of class" to mid-level, you would be deeply concerned. If not panicked. You would be right.

(UFLaw is moving on up, with record bar passage in 2025 and near-record job numbers.)

This is exactly right. One would think university presidents / provosts would use this as a metric for law school leadership. Most don't. In fact, there are very recent examples of law schools doubling down on leadership failure in this regard.

Being strapped into a rocket and then discovering the system runs on Microsoft is the stuff of nightmares

Hard to conceive of how anyone could have done a worse job as attorney general than Pam Bondi - but the great thing about the Trump administration is, we'll inevitably find out.

NASA pays $100M for Microsoft 365 licensing across the agency. They standardized every system on Microsoft. They put Microsoft Surfaces on the Orion spacecraft as the crew's personal computing devices. And the first technical crisis of humanity's return to the Moon was Reid Wiseman radioing Houston to say he has two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one works. Mission Control's response? "With your go, we can remote in and take a look." The same exact workflow your company's IT helpdesk uses when you submit a ticket on a Monday morning. Except the user is traveling at 4,275 mph, 30,000 miles from Earth, and the Wi-Fi situation is considerably worse. This spacecraft survived hydrogen leaks, helium leaks, a faulty heat shield, and a broken toilet. Outlook broke anyway. The toilet actually got fixed faster. The real story here is that Microsoft has achieved something no other software company in history can claim: a support ticket from lunar transit. Their enterprise sales team should frame this. "Battle-tested in space" is a positioning statement most B2B companies would mass murder for, and Microsoft accidentally earned it because Outlook crashes everywhere, including orbit. Outlook remains the only software in human history that performs identically whether you're in a cubicle in Redmond or aboard a spacecraft bound for the Moon. Universally, reliably broken. And we keep buying it anyway.

Amen. One of the best short pieces I've read in a while. News Web sites are atrocious and, honestly, they make me indifferent to the plight of journalism when they're so openly contemptuous of their customers. daringfireball.net/2026/03/your_f…

Great paper from my colleague @LawandWildlife at @UFLaw

I close with "Best regards." And I have gotten pushback on "Best." I don't know.

An associate signed an email to opposing counsel with "Warmly." I stared at the screen for a full minute trying to process the audacity. We are litigating a hostile takeover, not hosting a bed and breakfast. I called him into my office and asked him to define warmth in a corporate context. He mumbled something about professional courtesy. I told him courtesy is a sign of weakness and warmth implies a lack of billable friction. I made him recall every email he sent that week and resend them with "Regards." Just "Regards." Not even "Best." He spent three hours doing this instead of sleeping. Opposing counsel probably thought we were insane. But the junior learned that in this firm, the only acceptable temperature is absolute zero.

@hamandcheese You might be interested in this new paper on AI surveillance, authoritarianism, and law: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Could not feel more sad.

Feedback / comments / criticism very much welcomed.

The Article applies these lessons to two AI current controversies, over copyright and defamation, to clarify how these doctrines have previously dealt with hybrid information production and what is at stake normatively in these debates for AI governance.

New article forthcoming about AI regulation, in @WLU_LawReview. Core claim: governance of hybrid (human + AI) systems should situate AI in context, by technology & use, & draw lessons from history of human-computation co-production for more effective, less burdensome oversight.