The Laboratorium (3d ser.)

Mission Statement

2026-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

I’ve changed my mission statement. The old one read:

I study how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power. I try to help lawyers and technologists understand each other. My research interests include content moderation, digital copyright, generative AI, digital property, and other topics in computer and Internet law.

The new one reads:

I try to bring technical, legal, and conceptual clarity to the foundations of information and Internet law. I want to help lawyers and technologists understand each other. My research areas include generative AI, content moderation, platform regulation, online copyright, and digital property.

My old statement focused on the policy consequences of legal rules; my new one focuses on the legal rules themselves. To be clear, this is a change in emphasis. I’ve always cared about both policy and law and I expect that I always will. Nor is this a sudden shift in what I’m doing. Instead, I’ve updated the description to catch up with a gradual evolution in how I understand my scholarly contributions.

Still, the difference is real. I care most about getting the analytical parts of technology law right, I enjoy working on it, and I’m good (enough) at it. Anything I might write about technology policy, many other people can do better—but my ideas about technology law itself are weird enough that they simply will not get written unless I do it myself.

To give more of a sense of what my new statement means, let me unpack the invidual phrases, in a kind of Reporter’s Note:

The critical word is “clarity.” I used to want to be smart. Now I want to be clear. I strive hard for clarity in my work. I try to pare down my models to the provably minimal number of moving parts, to organize my arguments with step-by-step logical rigor, and to describe my ideas in “full, clear, concise, and exact terms.”
This clarity (hopefully) comes in three forms, of which the first and foremost is “doctrinal” clarity. I’m a “Professor of Law,” and to me what makes law distinctive as a discipline is its comprehensive engagement with doctrine: what is the law on a specific issue? I take doctrine seriously but not literally; I prefer to look past unimportant linguistic variations to the actual rules that the legal system is attempting to establish and apply.
Second, there is “technical” clarity. Another way of describing my research is that I study issues where “the legal treatment of software depends on the technical details of how that software works.” With a few exceptions, I don’t do novel computer-science scholarship. Instead, I explain the relevant technical ideas for non-technical audiences, as accurately and clearly as I can.
And third, there is “conceptual” clarity. I read a lot of analytic philosophy, and I try to bring out the underlying conceptual architecture that caselaw is groping towards. I’ve read too much legal realism and history of science to think that concepts alone should determine doctrine. Instead, I think that good concepts are useful; they work because they encapsulate widely shared beliefs about legal rules in a way that can be consistently applied.
My field of study—“information and Internet law”—may sound broad, but my job title is literally to work on “digital and information law.” Larry Lessig famously argued that Internet law was worth studying because it could “illuminate the entire law.” Today, as computer technologies and the information that passes through them extend ever further into personal, social, and civic life, these fields increasingly are the entire law. The distinction is meaningful, too, because I work extensively on information law (e.g., IP and speech), on Internet law (e.g., platforms like search engines and social media), and on their intersection (e.g., AI and digital property).
To ground that broad summary, my list of research areas—“generative AI, content moderation, platform regulation, online copyright, and digital property”—identifies the major topics that I write on. The list doesn’t include my one-offs, on topics like class actions or research ethics. Instead, it lists the topics on which I have a sustained body of work that I expect to keep working on.
I work on “foundations” more than on applications. I would rather clean up the threshold issues that every case on an issue raises than analyze a single lawsuit in comprehensive detail. Often, this means nailing down the conceptual question that numerous doctrines are asking, or being precise about how classes of computer systems do or don’t match common legal descriptions of them.
I say that I “try” to bring clarity because I know that I may not succeed. This is an aspirational statement for myself, not a guarantee of future results.
Finally, “I want to help lawyers and technologists understand each other.” I was trained in both fields, and my origin story involved realizing that despite some mutual suspicion, they have a great deal in common. I want to bridge the gap between them because I think that it will be helpful to both communities. Ultimately, I’m committed to conceptual clarity and to foundations rather than applications because I think it’s the most useful way I can address real-world problems: by giving lawyers and technologists the mutual understanding they need to face their shared challenges.

One reason that I revised my statement is that I realized people were picking up on the wrong words in it. They’d ask me to write or speak about big, sweeping policy issues when there are other scholars who would be better fits. Freedom, wealth, and power matter enormously and are all important to my work, but I’m not an expert on any of them as such, and I’m afraid the old statement gave the misleading impression that I am. I hope the new version gives a better sense of what it is I do, and why.

Gettier Non-Problems

2026-01-31T00:00:00-05:00

What is knowledge? To know something is to correctly understand the world, so knowledge must involve the coming together of truth and belief.

Unfortunately, a definition of knowledge as “true belief” doesn’t work, because truth and belief can coincide by coincidence. For example, suppose that I have a high fever and hallucinate that my sister is in front of me talking to me, but in reality she is sitting quietly in a chair behind. I believe that she’s in the room with me, and it’s true that she’s in the room with me, but I don’t know that she’s in the room with me, because my belief that she’s in the room is based on bad reasons, reasons that are completely disconnected from the fact that she actually is in the room.

Thus, in epistemology, the traditional definition of knowledge was as “justified true belief.” The point of adding justification is to deal with cases in which I believe something for bad reasons but it coincidentally happen to be true.

Unfortunately, philosophers have recognized that this definition fails, by giving examples in which justification doesn’t do the work it’s supposed to. These examples are most often called “Gettier cases” or “Gettier problems,” after Edmund Gettier, who wrote a famously concise and highly influential article on the issue in 1963. Consider the following scenario (my paraphrase of an example posed by Roderick Chisholm):

I am standing in a field and I believe there is a sheep in the field with me because I can see what looks like a sheep. It turns out, however, (a) that I am looking at a dog disguised as a sheep, and (b) there is a real sheep behind the hill in the middle of the field. Thus:

I belive that there is a sheep in the field. (I really do believe it.)

My belief is justified. (Seeing what looks like a sheep is a good reason to believe that it is one.)

My belief is true. (There is a sheep in the field, behind the hill.)

The problem here is that once again, my belief is true for the wrong reasons. Seeing what looks like a sheep is sufficient to justify my belief, but not sufficient to actually make it true. This failure, however, is perfectly offset by the coincidence that there is a sheep behind the hill. What makes the belief true is not the same as what justifies it.

The range of scholarly responses to Gettier cases is immense. Some philosophers use them to argue that the problem goes away on a fallibilist theory of knowledge, one on which one’s knowledge is always subject to refutation or revision. These approaches attack the truth element of knowledge, because they are open to the possibility that one can “know” false things. Other philosophers have tried to formulate a more rigorous justification element, one that rules out Gettier-style coincidences. (These efforts often seem to run afoul of Gödelian incompleteness; any definition of justification provides a roadmap for evading it.)

But the present author is by no means a philosopher, and it seems to me that that there is a much simpler response. If knowledge hinges on the nexus between what is actually true in the world and what justification we have for our beliefs, and the two can coincide or come apart by happenstance, then perhaps knowledge is not a philosophically important concept. Truth matters, and we can reason about what is actually true in the world. Belief matters, and we can assign moral weight to what a person does and doesn’t believe. Justification matters, and we can debate what evidence is sufficient to justify a belief. But knowledge, by itself, is too contingent to matter.

To me, then, the real lesson of Gettier cases is that the entire attempt to define knowledge in terms of true belief is a dead end. Introducing justification was important not because it patched up the definition—or could be made to patch it up with suitable revisions—but because it introduced the thing we actually ought to care about when we ask what people know. What are we justified in believing? is a great question, and one that is far more useful to ask than What do we know?

Northwestern and Cornell

2026-01-14T00:00:00-05:00

Here in higher education, the capitulations will continue until morale improves. After Columbia’s shameful deal with the Trump administration last summer, I pledged not to donate to the university or to perform any service for it unless and until it repents and atones. Since then, several other universities have followed suit. I want to focus on two—Northwestern and Cornell—that raise similar enough issues to require a response on my part.

Start with Northwestern. Although its agreement includes a disclaimer that it does not give the “United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, University hiring, admission decisions, Northwestern’s curriculum, or the content of academic speech and research,” several provisions do in fact trade away core university principles of institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and openness to all. Among other things, the agreement requires Northwestern to disband one committee (§ 10) and create another (§ 15), prohibit nondisruptive acts of protest (§ 13), change its admissions (§ 21) and hiring (§ 25) in ways that make it harder to prevent invidious discrimination, prohibit diversity statements in hiring (§ 26), exclude trans women from female-designated athletic facilities (§ 28), and cease providing gender-affirming care to minors (§ 29). The university is also paying $75 million in what can only be described as protection money. I regret to say that Northwestern has compromised its fundamental values in the name of expedience, just as Columbia did.

As a result, I’m adding Northwestern to my pledge. I will not speak at conferences held at or organized by Northwestern. I will not publish with Northwestern publications or provide peer reviews for them. I will not provide outside tenure evaluations for Northwestern departments. I will not contribute in any way to the institution until everyone who is responsible for its shameful decision has resigned, retired, or been fired, and until Northwestern repudiates their catastrophic choice. If any other universities strike similarly repugnant deals, I will add them as well.

Now for Cornell. Things here are different in two ways. First, while its agreement is not good, it is nowhere near as bad as Columbia’s or Northwestern’s. Unlike their deals, there are no terms in Cornell’s that significantly compromise the academic freedom of the university’s affiliates or the university’s own institutional autonomy. My colleague Nate Foster and our local AAUP chapter have published thoughtful critiques of the Cornell agreement. I agree with their criticisms of the provisions on admissions data, campus climate surveys, and providing tendentious training materials to faculty and staff. But I think that while these terms are harmful and ill-advised, none of them cut to the heart of what it means to be a university.

The worst terms in the Cornell agreement are the financial ones. Cornell will pay $30 million to the federal government over three years. This is straight-up protection money, and paying it is shameful. Cornell has also pledged to spend $30 million on programs that combine agriculture with AI and robotics. Although the money will be spent on potentially worthwhile research, this particular cause is serving as such an obvious fig leaf that in a way it is even more embarassing. This said, I have seen universities lose far larger sums in even more pathetic ways. I don’t feel that mishandling money like this requires me or others to avoid performing academic service for Cornell. (Donors, however, might rightly question whether they should be supporting a university that squanders its money on bribes to a bullying government.)

The other relevant difference for Cornell is that I work here. My labor is not a gift that I gave freely and can freely suspend. I negotiated the terms under which I provide my labor to the university. Among those terms is that they pay me. The roof over my head and the food on my table are not trifles. For my part, I’ve promised to teach my courses, advise my students, perform my research, serve on commitees, and do the million other things that make up the job of a professor.

There’s something else to this, too. I’m a member of a community here, one with tighter bonds and greater commitments than the general worldwide community of scholars. I have obligations. My students are counting on me. My advisees are counting on me. My colleagues are counting on me. I know the names of the people who’ll be left in the lurch if I don’t show up to class. They signed up to take my course, with me. My first responsibility is to them, because, again, this is what it means to work at a university.

This is not to say that I feel obliged to support Cornell no matter what. There is no institution in the world that you should support no matter what. Rather, as I said last time, universities exist to promote the discovery, preservation, and transmission of knowledge, and upholding that value means different things depending on one’s relationship to the university in question. I can certainly imagine that Cornell could do things so repugnant that I would feel obliged to resign—but the bar is much higher when it comes to one’s own university.

Origin Story

2026-01-12T00:00:00-05:00

This is the story that I tell when people ask me how I got into Internet law. Like all of its kind, it’s a polished and refracted version of what actually happened. Still, for all the misremembered details and conscious omissions, it bears a resemblance to the truth.

Late in the summer of 1999, armed with a bachelors degree in computer science, a working knowledge of some programming languages, and an exceptional degree of self-confidence, I set out to conquer the world. I took a job as a software engineer at Microsoft Research in Seattle for a compiler-tools group I had interned for during college. My plan was to work there for a few years, identify some problems I wanted to solve, and then either stay in the software industry or go back to get a PhD in computer science.

To quote Colson Whitehead:

I could do it. It was going to be a great year. I was sure of it. Isn’t it funny? The way the mind works?

The group I joined was reorganized out of existence that fall; my new manager was a literal and metaphorical pointy-haired boss. I spent the winter discovering what being miserable at work felt like, and I spent the spring fighting corporate bureaucracy to be allowed to transfer. I had to go up three levels and tell the vice president of Microsoft Research that I’d quit if they tried to make me stay in a group I hadn’t signed up for.

I wound up moving in mid-2000 to a product group, doing XML internals for a new web-based office suite called NetDocs. The working conditions were much better: I had an exemplary manager and some wonderful colleagues. But again, entropy won. In late spring of 2001, NetDocs became the most expensive cancelled project in Microsoft history. (If you know much about the history of the web stack, you’ll understand why it was an idea fatally ahead of its time.)

At any other time in the last few decades, I might have stayed in the tech industry. But this was the low following the dot-com crash, and things seemed equally bleak everywhere else. It wasn’t just that there weren’t many jobs; it was that no one seemed to be doing anything interesting, anything worthwhile. (If you know some Internet history, you’ll understand how hilariously wrong I was.)

With no obvious lifeboat to jump ship for, I was thrown back on myself, and I came to realize that software development wasn’t for me. Programming had been a stimulating part-time vocation in college, but it was a tedious slog as a full-time job. I liked everyone on my team, but I hated working as part of one. One of my good friends has described her ideal job as sitting in a room by herself, being passed puzzles through a slot in the door, solving them, and passing them back out through the slot. I had thought that was what programming was—and for me, it wasn’t.

I resigned in the summer of 2001. I wasn’t pushed; I jumped. I knew that I could stay employed as long as I wanted to. I could write code that worked well enough, get good-enough performance reviews, and feel happy enough about coming in to work. The problem was that I could see how my motivation was already draining away. I didn’t hate my job now, but I knew that I’d hate it in ten years, and it was better to get out now rather than wait.

Now we need to rewind a few years, because even as my career as a technologist was undergoing an uncontrolled descent, something else was rising to take its place. My grandmother died in December of 1999, and thus, very close to the darkest day of the year, I took a red-eye to be home for the funeral. If it was not quite the lowest point of my life, it was a local minimum. But when we hit our lowest point, we are open to the greatest change.

On the flight home, I read Lawrence Lessig’s Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace. It was, and remains, the most revelatory book I have ever read, and my entire academic career consists of a series of footnotes to Lessig. But even putting aside how it changed my life by teaching me about Internet policy, it changed my life by showing me that a law professor understood computers better than anyone I knew did. Even from his outsider’s perspective, Lessig cut to the heart of how the Internet worked, and how it could change under legal pressure. Lawyers had access to an entirely different source of knowledge about the technologies I’d devoted myself to studying.

In fact, I soon discovered, the lawyerly way of seeing the world was congenial to the way my brain worked. I had thought that law and legalese were brain-numbingly boring, equal parts superficial rhetoric and bad theatrics. But every time I read an actual legal text (and there were plenty in those heady days of U.S. v. Microsoft, Napster, and DeCSS), I found it logical and persuasive. There was something surprisingly familiar to me about how judges approached a problem. As I read more, I started to wonder whether “law professor” was shorthand for a job where you got paid to write about interesting things.

I also did my due diligence about the road to get there. I asked my friends in law school about the experience, and I snuck peeks at their books when they weren’t looking. Then I found a cheap copy of the Dukeminier property casebook at a used bookstore, and I was hooked: here was an intricate and sometimes elegant system of rules that structured the entire world around me. (It stuck: Property is my core first-year subject, and I’ve written extensively in the field.) By the time I took the LSAT and applied to law school, I had a pretty good sense of what to expect.

I also started blogging in May 2000, and I found that writing for the blog—even just for the small group of friends and random Internet acquaintances who read it—filled a part of me I hadn’t realized was hollow. On evenings and weekends, and even some days in hours stolen at work, I wrote and wrote and wrote. Publishing a post gave me a sense of satisfaction that checking in code notably didn’t. My early law blogging was terrible (I keep those posts online out of honesty, not out of pride), but it felt meaningful.

I didn’t go immediately to law school after quitting Microsoft. I spent a year back in Boston, working part-time at Harvard (I wrote reports on why study abroad was broken and why moving the sciences to Allston would be a logistical disaster) and trying my hand at being a freelance writer (I failed miserably). But even if I was supposedly keeping my options open, I had a strong sense that law was where I was meant to be. When I was accepted to Yale—infamous for training future law professors—it was an easy decision to enroll.

When I arrived in law school, I told myself that if I didn’t become a legal academic, I’d go back to programming rather than practice law. Fortunately, that was a choice I didn’t have to make. This is my nineteenth year as a law professor studying and teaching Internet law. My job as a Cornell Law School faculty member working at Cornell Tech is exactly halfway in between technology and law. It’s a kind of position that didn’t exist when I started teaching law, and it feels as though it was created specifically for me. I cannot imagine anything better.

I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate in my career. But it started with a terrible mistake. I’m able to do what I do today only because I was able to accept that I wasn’t who I thought I was twenty-five years ago.

Do Not Confuse

2025-12-13T00:00:00-05:00

I was a few years ago old when I learned that these were all distinct:

Mala Htun, 1969–2025

2025-11-09T00:00:00-05:00

I learned today that Mala Htun, professor of political science at the University of New Mexico, died in January, after living with cancer for several years. She was the TA for my college course in the political economy of economic development. I could not now name most of my TAs, but a few of them stood out, as though everything about them was drawn with a surer hand and brighter colors. Mala Htun—I find myself wanting to call her “Dr. Htun,” although she wasn’t then, not yet—was one of them. She shone with a light of inner purpose, intellectual and moral, and was one of the sharpest people I have ever met. Whenever someone started to ask a question in the discussion section, she could see around multiple corners to know where they were going with it.

Two memories of her stand out for me. The first is of a time that a conversation spilled over after class. We walked across campus, still talking, and into a coffee shop as she got the caffeine to power her through the rest of the day. I regret that I can remember nothing about what we were discussing; it could have been import-substitution industrialization, or the greater influence of urban constituencies on developing governments, or one of a dozen other topics. But I had a sudden realization that here was someone with her own life (afterwards, she left to go grocery shopping) who took the subject, and my questions, seriously enough not to wave me off, as she absolutely could have.

The second is from years later, after Nienke Grossman and other brave women accused government professor Jorge Dominguez of sexual harassment across many years. Now-Professor Htun reached out to me to compare notes, to understand what we each had seen, or should have seen at the time. Again, it made a big impression on me; here was someone with all the markers of status and success that would have let her ignore something at that point two decades old, but who took seriously her responsibility to others traveling a harder road. From everything I understand about her career and her mentorship at UNM, it was completely in character.

I am both glad and sorrowful to say that she appears to have lived a life of personal and professional meaning. She published three books (on women and the state in Latin America), and after eleven years at the New School, she moved to UNM in her home town of Albuquerque. She was a special advisor to the dean on recruiting and retaining women and others from underrepresented backgrounds. She married in 2006 (in nearby Santa Fe) and is survived by her husband, her parents, a son, and two daughters. My heart goes out to them.

UNM is fundraising for a memorial academic fund to endow a chair in Professor Htun’s honor. It’s a completely inadequate tribute to the loss we all have suffered with her passing, but it’s also completely fitting.

Complicity is Not Contagion

2025-10-29T00:00:00-04:00

Jason Koebler, ICE Is Using a University Building as a Deportation Office and the University Says It Can’t Do Anything About It, 404 Media (Oct. 28, 2025):

A university in Milwaukee is stuck with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as its tenant after the agency refused to leave a building the university intended to renovate into an architectural and civil engineering classroom building. Instead, the building is being used as an office for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the main part of ICE performing Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. …

In 2023, an alum of the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) sold a building at 310 E. Knapp St. to the school for a massive discount, with the intention of the building being renovated and turned into an academic facility. At the time, ICE was a tenant of the building but was in the process of building a new office elsewhere in Milwaukee. Its lease was set to expire in April, but ICE, through the General Services Administration (GSA) which handles real estate for the federal government, unilaterally extended the lease through April of next year and has the option to remain in the building through 2028, the university says. The university says there is nothing it can legally do to evict ICE.

This is bad. It is bad because so much of what ICE is doing is cruel and immoral, and its continued occupation of the space enables it to do more cruel and immoral things. It is also bad for MSOE, which can’t renovate the building into classroom sapce as it wanted to.

I don’t think it’s the case, however, that it is bad because it makes the university complicit in ICE’s cruelty:

Concerned students say the situation is untenable and immoral—the university is now collecting rent directly from the government, and ICE is processing undocumented immigrants from the office.

“Can you see how it might look like MSOE is helping facilitate their mass deportation effort?” a student asked university administrators at a meeting about the building last week, according to audio obtained by 404 Media. “It feels like the federal government’s goals and objectives of mass deportation right now outweigh the academic use of that building for MSOE,” another said.

Moral complicity is usually described in terms of the actions you take, or sometimes fail to take, that contribute to another’s wrongdoing. If the university voluntarily agreed to lease the space to ICE today, that might make it complicit in ICE’s kidnappings and deportations. But buying the building was not complicity, because ICE had a lease to stay through April, and it could stay there regardless of who owned it. Buying the building or not buying it made no difference to any of ICE’s activities. The same goes for the lease extension. This is something forced on MSOE, not something the university chose to do.

Instead, I think the first student is articulating something closer to a theory of complicity as contagion. On this view, ICE is an evil presence that pollutes everything it touches. If you fail to remove the pollution, you also become unclean, and capable of polluting others. ICE’s presence in a university-owned building, and payment of rent to the university, makes MSOE unclean, so that students also have to be concerned about their potential pollution from being enrolled there.

To be clear, I think this view is wrong. But I also think it is highly prevalent today. You can see something like it in the radiating circles of attempted boycotts around Israel: the government, companies that do business there, companies that provide services to companies that do business there, institutions whose executives work for companies that provide services to companies that do business there, and so on. You can also see something similar in religious-exemption arguments: objectors frequently have to strain to explain why baking a cake is a matter of deep conscience, or why filing a form objecting to contraceptive coverage constitutes an endorsement of contraception. These examples, and many others, become much easier to understand if you think of the thing they object to as a polluting force, rather than a source of moral reasons for actions.

Disney Is Dead to Me

2025-09-20T00:00:00-04:00

We had a family discussion last night and decided to cancel our subscription to Disney+ and Hulu. It was an easy choice, because it was such a clear-cut case. Jimmy Kimmel’s supposedly awful comments were civil and mild; there is no plausible theory of the First Amendment on which they are not core protected speech. The governmental coercion was blatant and thuggish; Brendan Carr’s threats against ABC were themselves a First Amendment violation. And Disney’s capitulation was so staightforwardly cowardly and greedy that there is nothing much more to be said.

The people running America’s institutions, from Bob Iger and Brad Karp and Claire Shipman on down, act and talk like they don’t have a choice. The government has such power, and we have so much to lose, they say. If we fought, we might win a few rounds, but the revenge would be fearsome. Some of our customers, or clients, or donors agree with the demands, and who are we to tell them no? Thousands of people work here, and many more depend on us. And is the ask really so onerous? What’s one talk-show host compared to an $8 billion merger? Our hands were tied.

But they had a choice. They always had a choice. They had a choice, and they chose tyranny.

And we have a choice too. We always have a choice. We have a choice, and we chose to walk away from Disney.

Consent is Necessary to the Ritual

2025-09-11T00:00:00-04:00

For some reason, this passage reminded me of how Internet companies think about user consent:

“There are certain things black shamans can do—and certain things people trained by them can do. You’ve seen a sample already. There are worse things: transport into the false worlds, into the dream borders, binding forever in places which exist within the mind and have virtually no exits to the outside world. But to do any of these things, the shaman believes that his ritual demands consent. Listen to me, Marianne.”

“I’m listening. You said the ritual demands consent.”

“Remember it. The shamans believe the ritual is necessary to the effect, and they believe that consent is necessary to the ritual. The shaman says to his victim, ‘Will you have some tea?’ And the victim says, ‘Yes, thank you.’ That is consent. In my own library, your brother said to you, ‘Come, let me introduce you to …’ and you nodded yes. That was consent. So she then struck at you.”

“Did the people who went riding consent? If so, to what?”

“More likely, Madame went down to the stables before going to bed last night, taking a few lumps of sugar with her. ‘Here, old boy, have a lump of sugar,’ and the horse nods his head, taking the sugar. He has consented then, and they can use him. So also with dogs, with birds, with anything they can get to take food from their hands. The true victim was to be the horse, whatever horse you might be riding or anyone else might be riding. They are not over scrupulous.”

— Sheri S. Tepper, Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore

A Joke

2025-09-08T00:00:00-04:00

[Traditional, with adaptations.]

In a certain village there lived a rabbi, famed for the time he had spent studying Talmud. One day, two villagers came to see him about a dispute. The rabbi agreed to hear them out and decide the matter for them, and a small crowd gathered around.

Chaim went first. “Moshe’s chickens have been running into my yard,” he explained, describing how they were eating from his stores and harassing his children. “Moshe needs to build a fence to keep them in.”

The rabbi frowned sadly and spread his arms in empathy. “I’m afraid that you are wrong,” he began. For fifteen minutes he spoke, quoting Torah and Talmud, explaining why Moshe and his chickens had violated none of the Law. By the end of his learned explanation, the crowd was nodding and murmuring in agreement.

Now it was Moshe’s turn. “My chickens are well-behaved and I look after them carefully,” he said. It was rare that even one chicken got out, and it never went far. “I have done all I can. If Chaim is so concerned, well then he should build a fence to keep them out.”

Again the rabbi frowned, a wistful look on his face. “I’m afraid that you too are wrong,” he said. For another fifteen minutes he spoke, quoting Torah and Talmud, explaining why Moshe had failed in his obligations towards his wayward chickens. Once again, the crowd of villagers was nodding along with him—all except one.

“They can’t both be wrong!” Herschel shouted. “First you told us that Chaim was wrong, and then you told us that Moshe was wrong. Which is it? It has to be one or the other.”

The rabbi nodded sadly. “Alas, my son, I’m afraid that you are wrong as well.”