Trump, Fetuses, Animals, Sentient Chatbots, and More Trump: My Week
Regular readers of this blog might be wondering: Hey, this is supposed to be Dorf on Law. Where's Dorf this week? Wonder no more. I've been blessed to have a surfeit of content from my co-bloggers this week, with more still to come very soon. But if you're wondering what I've been up to this week, here's an extremely brief recap:
Trump: My latest Verdict column takes as its starting point a NY Times article describing the results of a survey of legal scholars about the worst excesses of the Trump administration thus far. I was one of the 35 respondents to the survey and am briefly quoted in the article. After a few preliminary observations, the heart of my column consists of my detailed answers to the questions posed by the Times.
Fetuses/Animals: I am the guest on the podcast The Vegan Report by Rayane Laddi for a long-ish interview that focuses primarily on the argument Sherry Colb and I laid out in our 2016 book, Beating Hearts: Abortion and Animal Rights. You can listen at the link above or via your favorite platform.
Animals/Sentient Chatbots: I am one of two guests on this week's episode of the podcast Our Henhouse. I joined co-hosts Mariann Sullivan and Jasmin Singer to discuss a(nother) recent NY Times article, this one about how Anthropic is now concerned about "AI welfare." We explore how discussions of the possibility of AI sentience inadvertently show recognition of what grounds rights for nonhuman animals but also frequently take for granted the permissibility of the unjust ways in which humans treat such animals. I addressed some of the same issues in this 2015 Verdict column.
More Trump: I was part of a panel discussion with Yale Law Professor Cristina Rodriguez and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Ilya Shapiro on Harvard's lawsuit over the Trump administration's funding cutoff and related matters. The Chronicle of Higher Education published the transcript of our discussion.
More soon from my co-bloggers and me.
--Michael C. Dorf