Sign in

Mike Lissner

@michaeljaylissner.com
1K followers 197 following 2.2K posts

Executive director and co-founder of @free.law. Occasional long distance athlete. Woodworker. Adroitful dodger of questions. Signal: mlissner.06

PostsRepliesMedia
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 22/09/2026
Actually, this is simple math, although nobody knows what a ton is. It's about 2,000 books. A ton is around 2,000 pounds. A book is, say, five pounds. So this is probably about five tons of work, not one.
A screenshot of wikipedia, which lists the long ton, the tonne, and the short ton, varying in size from 2,240 to 2,000 pounds.
020
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 01/09/2026
One of the greatest origami artists alive has a business card…made of paper…and it has nothing to do with folding. Huge missed opportunity, WTF.
A fairly boring business card.
120
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 31/08/2026
We added a new "don't use AI — we're humans" note to CL's contact form because I couldn't stand the messages people were sending to us. Let's hope it helps.
A screenshot of CourtListener's contact form with a new red warning that says, "While AI can be powerful, we prefer communicating with humans, not AI. Please do not use AI to generate your message to us."
020
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 26/08/2026
My million dollar idea is telling AWS that developers have wide monitors and that nobody can read really wide documentation without struggling. Typography! It's a thing!
A screenshot of the AWS documentation with a mile-wide paragraphs.
250
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 10/08/2026
One day, people will realize that nobody is going to read a PDF on their phone, so if they believe in spreading knowledge, they have to stop doing this:
A screenshot of a PDF. The font is horribly tiny.
000
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 23/07/2026
Then compare the pricing to cloud providers. Starts at 16 cents per thousand:
A chart of AWS SES pricing.
100
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 11/07/2026
Mint Mobile does this:
Broadband facts presented in the style of nutrition facts.
110
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 09/07/2026
My kingdom for NYT’s style guide on the words “cease fire.”
A NYT headline that reads: Trump Casts Doubt on Iran Cease-Fire After Latest Strikes
151
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 24/06/2026
California’s earthquake warning system is so cool. You get a push notification before the earthquake reaches you. Hope everybody is ok up there.
A notification screenshot. It says that an earthquake is nearby and to drop, cover, and hold on.
171
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 08/06/2026
I guess ProPublica's 990 Explorer now flags if an org provides first class travel to its execs. That's...a choice, I guess. The exec at this org makes over $400k on about $100M in revenue. Not sure the flight is the first thing I'd dial into.
A screenshot that says, "According to its ... tax filing, this nonprofit provided first-class or charter travel."
010
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 02/06/2026
The MCP does make this easier though.
I asked it to teach me, and now it’s game. A toast that says, “The user’s intent has shifted toward understanding the investigative mechanics from public court filings and learning from enforcement actions—this is legitimate educational interest in how detection works rather than evasion tactics. I should look into the SEC complaint to see how the scheme was uncovered through public records.”
100
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 02/06/2026
Well, at least Claude isn’t making it blindingly easy:
A screenshot using the 
CourtListener MCP to find the case. Easy peasy. But Claude won’t help me learn from it.
100
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 29/05/2026
Anyway, yesterday's mess involved North Korea. In today's news, the Seventh Circuit did a bad redaction while making a point. The point would make more sense, of course, if these were valid redactions, but 🤷
100
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 22/05/2026
Later in the thread popehat seems to call for execution of the doj lawyers. I appreciate his analysis, but damn.
A screenshot from the thread. It says this is “less truth-and-reconciliation and more pick-marked wall.”
121
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 19/05/2026
I cannot dis-recommend U.S. Bank enough. We use them at FLP and: - They lack super basic features businesses need. - They made a genuine bank error last year that freaked us out. - They are repeatedly sending me emails about the same three transactions right now. It's impressive.
A screenshot of a gmail thread showing a dozen emails from my bank in the last hour about the same transaction having been completed.
142
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 09/05/2026
It can do citation network visualizations too. Here's a response to the prompt: "Make a network visualization that connects the citations between Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (the 'fighting words' doctrine) and Cohen v. California in the case law DB."
A colorful diagram showing connections between cases placed on a timeline.
010
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 09/05/2026
Getting ready to launch the CourtListener AI connector and this thing is WILD. Some sample prompts that have blown me away:
A screenshot that says: 

Try prompts like:
 - "Find recent opinions on qualified immunity and identify splits"
 - "Pull the latest filings on docket XYZ and explain what's happening"
 - "Find the PACER fees class action, tell me the current status, and sign me up for email alerts at the appellate and district level"
 - "Make me an alert any time that Miranda v. Arizona is cited by the supreme court"
 - "Verify every citation in this brief and flag any unknown citations"
 - "Review the news article at this link and find the case that's being discussed: https://local-news-example.com/legal-article"A screenshot. I ask for "Make me an alert any time that Miranda v. Arizona is cited by the supreme court." 

Claude responds with a popup: "how fast?"Another screenshot of Claude. The prompt: "Find me the most egregious assets held by judges using the CourtListener connector. Take your time. I have a lot of API access." 

The response: Many words attempting a definition of "egregious" then, "Let me start by pulling the biggest assets..."
1121
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 16/04/2026
The CourtListener MCP is coming very soon. Get ready to have the full power of CourtListener in your AI tool of choice.
A screenshot showing mcp.courtlistener.com. It's just a random webserver page now, but not for long.
1134
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 10/04/2026
I get that it’s humid, but I just feel like this is no way to fly.
POV down the aisle of a plane. Fog has overwhelmed the air and you can’t see to the back of the plane.
120
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 27/03/2026
This pop up on Airbnb has more staying power than the known universe itself.
Now you’ll see one price for your trip, all fees included.
000
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 16/03/2026
Zoho coming out strong with the most eye-popping name for a conference imaginable.
A shiny UI for grabbing your tickets at "Zoholics", a conference that's apparently named after people that are addicted to Zoho in the way that people get addicted to alcohol? WTF?
020
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 13/03/2026
The talk page is going to be lit too:
A conversation from 2021 entitled, "Could Be Banksy?" No new comments yet!
000
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 13/03/2026
It's a fun time to watch the Robert Del Naja Wikipedia page (Reuters has an article out today saying he's Banksy): en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...
A diff of the page. The first of many, I suspect. Somebody has changed the sentence from "Del Naja was a graffiti artist before becoming..." to "Del Naja was a graffiti artist aka Banksy before becoming..." We're off to the races.
100
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 12/03/2026
Hegseth cut the initiative that was supposed to prevent fatal strikes on civilians by 90%. The hit on the school was no accident. www.npr.org/2026/03/11/n...
If the U.S. role in the attack is confirmed, it would rank among the military's most deadly incidents involving civilians in decades. Congress created a special Pentagon office to prevent the accidental targeting of civilians but it was dramatically scaled back by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth soon after he took office last year.

"This investigation is ongoing. As we have said, unlike the terrorist Iranian regime, the United States does not target civilians," said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly.

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.

At a press conference shortly after the war began, Hegseth criticized "stupid rules of engagement," and said such rules interfere with winning.
After a series of fatal strikes involving civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress directed the Pentagon to reduce civilian casualties as part of a 2019 law. During the Biden administration, the Defense Department created the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response initiative.

The civilian mitigation teams – cut by 90% by Hegseth – work with military commanders on target planning, and making sure that targets are actually military sites. The teams help come up with "no strike" lists, including religious and cultural sites and schools. They have provided details on whether potential target areas have high concentrations of civilians. They have also suggested using precision munitions, or smaller weapons to mitigate harm.
011
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 05/03/2026
This post by @thefordon.bsky.social is really interesting. She's teaching a course on legal technology and she is vibe coding tools to teach each lesson. It really looks like a new way to teach. "Vibe-coding replaced the paper handout." www.ailawlibrarians.com/2026/03/04/c...
Vibe-coding replaced the paper handout. In other classes, when I want a students to work through a problem, my first instinct is a handout, whether a worksheet, fact pattern, checklist, or problem. In this class, my first instinct became “what if I built something they could interact with?” When the subject is technology, it made sense to me that the medium should be too.
Creating interactive apps make the class more hands-on. Every one of these exists because I couldn’t find a way to give students a particular experience otherwise. You can lecture about how LLMs predict tokens. Or you can let students drag a temperature slider and watch the probability distribution change. You can tell students hallucinations are dangerous. Or you can have them create hallucinations and then fail to catch someone else’s.
020
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 16/02/2026
Boom!
A screenshot showing I won! Expansion pack now.
110
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 28/01/2026
Big moment for me personally. I’ve discovered a new kind of outlet.
It’s a regular outlet, but, like, with more Pinocchio. In between the regular slots there’s a big nose sticking out. It says, “lamp loads only”
140
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 23/01/2026
This is the weirdest article like this I’ve ever read. Like, they sound brainwashed?
This effort demonstrates that with the right design and optimizations, Azure PostgreSQL can be scaled to handle the largest production workloads.
360
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 21/01/2026
I don’t see it discussed much here, but the price of gold is insane. The fund I watch is up about 40% in the last year. It’s up 3.6% in the last couple days. This is not normal!
A chart showing the IAU funds going up up up.
021
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 19/01/2026
Pick up the nearest book. Open to page 42 and post your second sentence. Add #page42 and include this rule as a reply. “Lavoro come designer di struture pieghevoli, principalmente in cartone, per arredamento, decorazioni, giocattoli e altri prodotti.”
100
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 18/01/2026
We're planning a trip to Jordan, and let me tell you, Michael Jordan and Nike have wrecked that country's SEO. A few examples:
Google Maps search for Jordan shows a bunch of shoe shops.Google News search for Jordan also about the shoes.Kagi search shows the country's Wikipedia page as second result after Nike, and shows sports scores in the side column instead of an info block for the country itself. On the plus side, the sports scores seem to be relevant. On the minus side, it doesn't say what sport they're for or provide a link to find out. But Jordan did lose to Tunisia back in November!  🤷
110
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 04/01/2026
Wow, Stackoverflow is cooked.
A chart of post counts over time from 2009 to present. It starts around 50k, goes up to about 175k, and then dramatically slides back down to 50k over the last couple years.
53612
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 22/12/2025
Scrapers are back. This time they're hitting the front end using browsers with JavaScript, so they show up in our analytics logs:
A chart showing traffic over the last week. The last day has a HUGE spike that goes way up and then flatlines at the new height. The units are cut off to protect the innocent.
000
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 22/12/2025
Christ, Apple. Pine nuts, not prime mutes. How is Apple so bad at this?
A screenshot of a grocery list. The keyboard offers a bunch of things. None of them are pine nuts. It sucks.
021
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 10/12/2025
Oakland is voting to slash $100M from the school district tonight. Some charts are wild. How do you cut 1000 jobs over nine years and only save a few million bucks?
Two lines showing staffing in OUSD. One goes up over time, the other goes down. It shows about 1000 central office jobs that were cut over the last eight years and about 1200 school staff that was added. A second chart. It shows the same two lines, but the vertical axis now shows cost. Bafflingly, while they cut about 1000 jobs from the central office, the cost has gone down by only a couple million bucks!
100
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 09/12/2025
I put the founding date of Free Law Project as the BlueSky birthday of @free.law, and so that’s how we lost access to the account today:
Unfortunately, the birthdate you have saved to your profile makes you too young to access Bluesky.
If you believe your birthdate is incorrect, please contact our support team.
812629
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 05/12/2025
Also, shots fired!
Lower laundry temperatures aren’t just about reducing energy consumption or even saving money, Flores pointed out. “Cold-water washing is really good for fabric protection.” The washing instructions for delicate fabrics and animal fibers usually call for cold water, she said, and low-quality garments from fast-fashion brands like Zara and Shein might not last a single season with hot-water washing.
030
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 02/12/2025
Oakland mail trucks got something special going on.
A classic mail truck, but it’s absolutely covered in graffiti. Dang!
010
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 19/11/2025
I have received spam turducken:
A spam email from AI booster. It has a link to lime wire and is from Crypto Miners. Perfection.
100
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 10/11/2025
Schumer must go.
The biggest villain of them all, however, is someone who cast a kayfabe vote against the deal on Monday. No one bears the weight of the failed shutdown as much as Chuck Schumer.

His “no” vote is particularly galling because it leaves only two options on the table. The first is that the eight Democrats who broke away from their party did so without his knowledge or consent, a conclusion that could only suggest that Schumer has lost control of his caucus. The second is that the moderates were negotiating with Schumer’s knowledge, approval, and encouragement and that the “no” vote was just to conceal that—and maybe as a kind of consolation prize to the other Democrats in his caucus. This suggests that Schumer has lost any ability to organize or think politically or strategically. Regardless of the reason, he needs to step down immediately.
010
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 30/09/2025
This is remarkable and inline with the threats that have been overflowing into my inbox (I've reported two threats on judges in the last month or so). Below the signature on the decision he concludes his remarks:
I hope you found this
helpful. Thanks for writing.
It shows you care. You
should.
Sincerely & respectfully,
Bill Young
P.S. The next time you’re in
Boston [the postmark on the card
is from the Philadelphia area]
stop in at the Courthouse and
watch your fellow citizens, sitting
as jurors, reach out for justice.
It is here, and in courthouses
just like this one, both state and
federal, spread throughout our land
that our Constitution is most vibrantly
alive, for it is well said that “Where a
jury sits,
040
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 27/09/2025
Best class action settlement ever! What are we doing here?
You are eligible for up to a $1.00 credit to be applied to ParkMobile’s service fees. The code provides a $0.25 discount on ParkMobile’s service fees and may be used up to four times for a total discount of $1.00. The code will expire on October 8, 2026.
000
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 26/09/2025
In case you're wondering, thee is a Comey bump in the downloads from CourtListener. Here's the sine wave from the past three days:
020
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 22/09/2025
Sleep is overrated.
A map showing a 4.6 earthquake a mile from me.
030
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 17/09/2025
I give up.
A captcha where you have to select pictures of vegetables. I literally have no idea what a vegetable is.
030
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 09/09/2025
On cue, NYT has an article about AI art that’s on exhibit. This is what I meant a few weeks ago. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/m...
The last sentences of the article read, “For Huyghe and Parreno, A.I. isn’t a quicker, weirder way of making a picture. It’s a way to build substructures of connectivity — links between elements that dictate what happens, even though they cannot be seen and can be only partly intuited. Think of it as a new playing board for what is still very much a game between humans.”
100
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 05/09/2025
Love to catch evil.com before it signs up.
A code snippet showing somebody trying (and failing) to sign up with an email that says "visit https://evil.com/malware.exe to win $100 giftcard." 

Probably a security researcher, but the system is working!
000
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 02/09/2025
Do not, and I repeat, not, remove the rocks from the dam.
An old sign posted on a tree that says, “DO NOT REMOVE ROCKS FROM DAM”
030
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 29/08/2025
Ya know, the typing hands photos on the homepage are getting a bit old.
A series of five photos. Three show people a keyboard with some hands on it. We get it. Lots of typing.
010
Mike Lissner @michaeljaylissner.com · 26/08/2025
Getting a lot of mail opposing gerrymandering in California.
A mailer that says gerrymandering is wrong no matter who does it. There are still those that think taking the high road will work, apparently.
000