Rep. Darrell Issa is getting grief for some clumsy remarks he made at the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund hearing (1:42:00 or so in the video), and issued a clarifying statement.

My latest Liability Outlook examines the problems of retroactive lawmaking and litigation, especially reviver statutes, and even Obama fans will find something to like:

The controversy over whether and how to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations at the Democratic National Convention shows the danger of changing rules midstream and upsetting settled expectations. Reviver statutes not only obviate statutes of limitations, which are a critical aid to justice, by "reviving" claims that have expired or never existed, but they can also pose the danger of undoing the benefits of future prospective legislation. In evaluating laws, the issue is not merely one of retroactivity, but of the importance of promoting legal certainty. For example, the FISA Amendments Act, S. 2248, while ostensibly acting retroactively to grant immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration's antiterror surveillance program, works to protect settled expectations.

I'm not one to tattoo slogans on my forehead, but if I were, I'd assuredly get it centered.

The hearing is now on-line. I'm at the 55:18 mark; Maxine Waters is at the 2:10:20 mark. John Conyers is somewhere in between.

Things I should've said: that a dictator did a good job in the past hardly means that a dictatorship is a good idea. But one can be dumbfounded by the stupidity of some questions.

The House Judiciary Committee hasn't posted my testimony yet, so I've put it on SSRN.

We're watching the beginning of Double Indemnity.

Slim: Is he shot?
Me: What? In the shoulder? He's holding his arm funny. Maybe. It's not colorized, so I can't tell.
Slim: There isn't a lot of blood.
Me: It was 1944. Less blood then. There was wartime rationing.

Slim: Readin' my blog?
Slim (singing off-key): Readin' my blog... way to say you love me, reading my blog.
Me: You're weirder than a Truck-O-Saurus. A defective Truck-O-Saurus. With 85,000 documents from In re Truck-O-Saurus Product Liability Litigation.

Via Overlawyered, the Times reports about an anti-supercollider lawsuit worried that it will generate particles that will destroy the world:

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

Left out: Arkani-Hamed was talking about a possibility so small that the experiment could be run a million times a second between now and a billion years from now, and the odds are astronomical that it would not generate "dragons that might eat us up". Unfortunately, the English language word "minuscule" doesn't quite capture that quantum mathematical concept that anything could happen, and minds not trained in physics aren't quite able to grok the idea of the impossible being actually tremendously improbable. In quantum theory, all the atoms in your body might suddenly jump simultaneously six feet to the right. They almost certainly won't. It would be better if scientists discussing absurd possibilities used actually absurd (and equally unlikely) possibilities like "the CERN supercollider might generate a Welsh-speaking replica of Frank Sinatra in a blue tuxedo." Even Richard Posner gets it wrong in his book on catastrophes, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he was writing in the law-professorish sense of creating an interesting hypothetical.