Announcing Techdirt’s March Madness: Get Your Bracket For The Most Misunderstood Legal Concept
from the tournament-time dept
The games have begun! Vote here!
It’s that time of year — March Madness — when tons of people have filled out brackets and are watching college basketball. Way back in 2020 I had jokingly suggested on Twitter that we should set up a bracket for the most frequently misunderstood legal concepts, and people seemed to really like the idea. Of course, then I got busy and did nothing with it… until now. Introducing the inaugural Techdirt March Madness to determine what is the most misunderstood legal concept.
If you want to fill out your own bracket, you can get the spreadsheet here — you just need to make a copy and save it your own Google drive, and then fill out your bracket, take a screenshot and share it on Twitter (and tag @techdirt).
Each day that this is running, we’ll be posting Twitter polls of the competing legal concepts to see which one is more misunderstood. The winner will advance to the next round, eventually crowning the most misunderstood legal concept for 2022.
A few notes on how this initial bracket came together. Back in 2020 when I suggested this idea (jokingly, I swear), people sent in lots and lots of suggestions. Initially it was just supposed to be misunderstood laws, but that was too limiting to get to a 64-entry bracket (or at least an interesting one), so I expanded it to legal concepts. That does mean that there are some overlapping concepts (e.g. “free speech” and “1st Amendment”), but I don’t much care. We’ll see how it goes.
As for the seeding, I loaded all these concepts into an AI system to see what it said and then ranked them accordingly… or, actually, I just kind of made up the seeding with a few obvious ones closer to the top and then a lot of just randomly throwing together ones in the middle. You can disagree with the seeding, and we’ll see how the eventual voting turns out.
That’s basically it. Fill out your brackets and tweet them at us in the next day or so, because we’ll start running the Twitter polls tomorrow morning…
Filed Under: legal concepts, march madness, misunderstood legal concepts
Comments on “Announcing Techdirt’s March Madness: Get Your Bracket For The Most Misunderstood Legal Concept”
Section 230 is gonna take home the gold. Silver goes to the DMCA.
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I dunno, I think the First Amendment has the best chance of going all the way.
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yeah, this is somewhat my thoughts as well. People are petty and greedy, so willful misunderstanding of free speech/first amendment is what I expect at the top.
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Section 230 is not misconstrued. Those that are against 230 know exactly what it is supposed to do but constantly misrepresent section.
If anything, I would say Free Speech/censorship should win.
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Hey everyone! Good news! Elite politicians who know better know they are lying, so we can just assume all the rubes do as well, rather than guess most of them have been lied to on all sides and they don’t actually even know what section 230 is or does.
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Hey everyone! Good news! Elite politicians who know better know they are lying, so we can just assume all the rubes do as well, rather than guess most of them have been lied to on all sides and they don’t actually even know what section 230 is or does.
Seems like a bad take IMO.
Ah! I favor “Actual Malice”, though I’m hoping to see Section 230 face “Fire in a theater” in the third round.
room to improve
Folks… it’s 2022. Tournaments these days involve play-in games. You have sadly overlooked the importance of having
eminent domain,
adverse possession,
best evidence, and
civil forfeiture
compete for the final spots in the field.
I didn’t even list quasi in rem jurisdiction – they were on the bubble but ultimately they’re going to the Law NIT.
I’m going to go for Fair Use actually. Sure, idiots on twitter have dumb legal takes all the time, but there are entire communities that rely on nobody calling them on the fact that Fair Use is actually a lot narrower than they think.
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Good idea. Also, a lot of people don’t get that fair use only applies as a defense against infringement of copyrighted works. That is, if a work is in the public domain, you wouldn’t need a fair use defense because the work isn’t covered by ©, so there’s nothing to infringe!
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“Merger” came up a lot in the Oracle vs Copyright threads on Ars Technica. One IP maximalist troll (though I repeat myself) and his two sockpuppets insisted merger was an affirmative defense.
My question is why is “free speech” AND “1st Amendment” on there?
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The First Amendment is a specific law; “free speech” is a concept that transcends the First Amendment.
Re: 1st Amendment
The 1st also includes the Establishment Clause, providing freedom of and freedom from religion established by the state.
And the right to assemble/protest.
And the freedom of the press (arguably tied directly to free speech).
And the right to petition the state for a redress of grievances, which I’m not entirely sure of the application of myself.
Good chance…
RICO has a good chance. I’d call it a dark horse, but considering it gives Ken “Popehat” White an aneurysm whenever it is used wrongly, I’d say it’ll go far.
This puts a smile on my face.
“take a screenshot and share it on Twitter (and tag @techdirt).”
Well now I just feel even MORE left out.
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Hopefully there will be updates on the site for those of us who don’t tweet.
Moderate this. tableflipemoji
Rule Against Perpetuities, anyone?
I don’t see any mention of the concept that the system of paying Federal taxes is “voluntary” which people interpret as “optional”.
Regardless of the minutia, they’re all winners
Corporate Personhood is super underseeded here. It’s going to get crushed by the first amendment juggernaut in the second round but could have been a 2 seed.
Misunderstood by whoever votes on it on twitter.