I am familiar with legal Eagle, and I generally like him, though this underlines that these are entertainment videos and not law review submissions. By the same progression, law review articles, even those about legal history, generally aren’t sophisticated academic history papers. Same goes for those that touch on other field’s nexuses with the legal system. Lawyers are arrogant and get outside their lane regularly, and law professors are arroganter. :-)

I reckon either Devin or whoever else wrote the script was going off memory, and it all got conflated. It’s a miss, to be sure, but if I were inclined to cut him some slack, the CTEA was basically an amendment to the Copyright Act of 1976, and the whole Sonny Bono thing is more of an aside in the much longer video. Frankly, calling it Bono’s major policy accomplishment is a bit off in general, as Bono was just a co-sponsor on a similar bill, probably because the the entertainment industry backed his campaigns, and he had passed away by the time final version of the CTEA further extended 1976’s similar extension.

I would say just be careful with Legal Eagle, and view it as informational but not unimpeachable. In the videos I’ve watched, I haven’t seen anything that makes me think he’s communicating in bad faith or regularly being sloppy in how he analyzes issues. He of course has an agenda to serve his audience and to get content out in between whatever real legal work and firm management he does. I do feel pretty smug that I was complaining about law school not putting things into historical context, and here we see that’s exactly where our friendly neighborhood popularizer drops the ball.

Seriously, there is virtually no discussion of how language changes over the decades, how events of the day influence legislators and judges, and how all of that impacts future interpretation. The rise of “originalism” and “textualism” is specifically because law students are taught that they’re equipped to understand 250 year old texts just as well as the original drafters, and that the drafters were invariably operating with what we would consider acceptable morality. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that pretending to do so gives you the necessary cover to interpret the thing in exactly as retrograde a way as you need to satisfy conservative elites.

There is not nearly enough history of law in (US) law school, and absolutely zero required classes placing law and legal language in their proper historical and linguistic context. You read and discuss a few foundational cases at the beginning of each first-year course, and then the power of the pure legal mind, unmoored from idle distractions like “history” or “science”, is all the reasoning one needs.

Doesn’t want the brave public servants of his majesty’s constabulary to contract her communicable conjunctivitis. Very thoughtful, really.

Damn straight! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this page of text, it keeps going till it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone’s day, somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not “eyeball it!” This is a paragraph of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip!