After months of planning, the Law & Technology Symposium by the Connecticut Bar Foundation is finally here. Registration begins at 7:45 a.m. and the program will begin promptly at 8:30 a.m.  It’s at the UConn Law School. 

If you’re out of state (or even if you’re in-state) and can’t attend in person, the Connecticut Law Tribune and Brandon Smith Reporting have teamed up to provide a free live broadcast of the event.   To view the event, simply go to www.lawtrib.com/techsym and you’ll be able to sign up there. 

My sincere thanks to both the Trib and Brandon for their generous sponsorship of this. 

As part of the run-up to the event, we ran a contest on Twitter to have people "tweet" their favorite U.S. Supreme Court case in 140 characters or less.  We had only two big rules: 1) That they use the hashtag #cbftech, so we could publicize the event; and, 2) That they be creative or witty with their tweets. 

When I first thought of this, we just wanted to spread the word about the program.   I expected to get maybe a few dozen responses at best.  By my count, we had well over 200 tweets about the program. I stopped counting. Crazy.

Nevertheless, we have gone through them all and picked our top ten. We will announce our grand-prize three winners from this list at tomorrow’s event.  The other seven receive an honorable mention and our sincere thanks. (Hey, it’s a non-profit educational foundation, no iPad to hand out here.)

We’ve got a good cross-sampling of the different types of approaches people took. Some were serious, some were humorous, some were absurd, and some were, frankly, educational. 

In no particular order, the top ten tweets (after the jump) are:

  • @brucecarton Bush v. Gore: "Blah, blah, blah..have we written enough yet? Yes? OK, great–Bush wins." #cbftech
  • @malson4 Carolene Products – Justice Stone: "Fine, fine, I will put it in a footnote. No one ever reads those things anyways." #cbftech
  • @jkbeitz Miller v. CA: pornography? Protected by the 1st Amendment. Obscenity? Not so much. Here’s a test to help you tell the difference. #cbftech
  • @conlawgeek "Dude, but I have a valid prescription for . . . uh . . . medical . . . uh . . . what were we talking about?’ Gonzales v. Raich #cbftech
  • @GoldnI Brown v. Board of Education–"Hey Eisenhower, just kidding about the conservative thing. Love, Earl Warren." #cbftech
  • @gideonstrumpet Gideon v. Wainwright: helping poor people get convicted WITH the assistance of counsel since 1963. #cbftech
  • @ThirdTierAmie Buck v. Bell: You’re dumb, your mama’s dumb, even your mama’s mama is dumb! Three generations of imbeciles are enough! #cbftech
  • @coolasmcqueen U.S. v. Nixon: We have the privilege of informing you that you ARE a crook #cbftech
  • @elizabeth627 Griswold v. CT: Damages are in order when a vacation is ruined by the state’s shuttering of Wallyworld for safety violations. #cbftech
  • @JenLaviano Fav SCOTUS dissent: Blackmun’s "Poor Joshua" in DeShaney v Winnebego Cty #cbftech; made me cry when I read it in law school; still does

My sincere thanks to all that participated in the contest and spreading word about this great program. 

See you tomorrow.