FSU College of Law Research Center Blog

Lawyer of the Year

The National Law Journal (subscription required) has selected Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry as its Lawyer of the Year. The article appears in the December 12th issue and is titled "Inspiration in a Troubled Land"  Here's an excerpt:

Chaudhry, the chief justice of Pakistan who was dismissed from office by President Pervez Musharraf after the imposition of emergency rule, has been a strong voice for the preservation of the rule of law in Pakistan — one of the United States' key allies in the war on terror.

Though currently held under house arrest, Chaudhry has spoken out against emergency rule and has inspired thousands of his lawyer-brethren to protest in the streets in their traditional black suits and ties. He has become an international symbol of an independent judiciary and of resistance to the excesses of military rule. Hundreds of attorneys have also turned out to protest on his behalf in cities across the country.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Evaluation and Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards and Testing

The EVEREST: Evaluation and Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards and Testing:  Final Report has been released.  This is an Ohio study released by the Ohio Secretary of State and prepared by teams from Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pennsylvania and WebWise Security.  Excerpt of conclusions:

• Insufficient Security - The systems uniformly failed to adequately address important threats against election data and processes. Central among these is a failure to adequately defend an election from insiders, to prevent virally infected software from compromising entire precincts and counties, and to ensure cast votes are appropriately protected and accurately counted.
• Improper Use or Implementation of Security Technology - A root cause of the failures present in the studied systems is the pervasive mis-application of security technology. Failure to follow standard and well-known practices for the use of cryptography, key and password management, and security hardware seriously undermine the protections provided. In several important cases, the misapplication of commonly accepted principles renders the security technology of no use whatsoever.
• Auditing - All of the systems exhibited a visible lack of trustworthy auditing capability. In all systems, the logs of election practices were commonly forgeable or erasable by the principals who they were intended to be monitoring. The impact of the lack of secure auditing is that it is difficult to know when an attack occurs, or to know how to isolate or recover from it when it is detected.
• Software Maintenance - The software maintenance practices of the studied systems are deeply flawed. This has led to fragile software in which exploitable crashes, lockups, and failures are common in normal use. Such software instability is likely to increase over time, and may lead to highly insecure and unreliable elections.

Read the Report here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

International Conference on the Future of Legal Education

From February 20-23 at Georgia State University College of Law.   For its point of departure the Conference with examine the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Educating Lawyers report.  See this post for more information on this report.

Click here for more Conference information.

Posted by Jon Lutz

The University of Google

Joe Hodnicki had an interesting post on Law School Innovation on the book The University of Google: Education in the (Post) Information Age.  Here's an excerpt:

Angry, humorous and practical in equal measure, The University of Google is based on real teaching experience and on years of engaged and sometimes exasperated reflection on it. It is far from a luddite critique of the information age. Tara Brabazon celebrates the possibilities of digital platforms in education, but deplores the consequences of placing funding on technology and not teachers. In doing so, she opens a new debate on how to make our educational system both productive and provocative in the (post-) information age.

Read the whole post here.

Posted by Jon Lutz