¶ The Laboratorium (3d ser.)

Twenty years ago, Edith Wainwright watched her lover Jack hang for a murder he didn’t commit. Even though three eyewitnesses claimed they saw someone who looked like Jack at the scene, Edith knew he was innocent: the two of them were together the night of the murder. But Jack refused to testify in his defense, and made Edith swear never to tell another soul where he had been. He was willing to die, he said, to protect her.

Since then, Edith has done her best to move on and build a life with her husband Charles—Jack’s best friend and the man she was cheating on that fateful night. But decades of guilt and lies have taken their toll, and Edith has started to wonder about the real reasons behind her long silence. When she hears rumors of a mysterious figure visiting Jack’s grave and walking the hills in a long black veil, she knows that her ghosts are returning.

Now, Edith must confront her past and uncover a town’s long-hidden secrets. As the only person who knows that the real killer is still on the loose, she must find the answers to all the questions she has been afraid to ask. What else was buried with Jack’s bones? What doesn’t she know about Charles, Jack, and their history together before she met them? And most of all, what really happened twenty years ago under the town hall light?

There are four principles you can live your life by:

• Truth is the pursuit of the scholar, the scientist, and the cynic: accurate, complete, and unsparing knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in.
• Utility is the goal of the economist, the engineer, and the politician: to make the world better by making the most of what it makes available to us.
• Justice is the project of the judge, the ethicist, and the activist: doing right by all by giving each what they deserve and have been denied.
• Beauty is the mission of the artist, the adventurer, and the epicure: it comprises the ineffable, the sublime, the fleeting, passion, peace, joy, transcendence, and infinitely more.

All of them are good, and all of them are important, but they are entirely incomparable. None of them can be found within the rest, and in their purest forms they utterly deny each others’ claims. To pursue one is always in part to turn from the others.

Every life has something of all four in them, but I have found that everyone steers by one in particular. It sparks their imagination and guides their actions. When they are in doubt, they look to it and find renewed purpose. When they are lost, they trust in it to light the way.

Which one is yours?

I regret to inform you that there is even more to the story of how Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff backed his car into a student. I also regret to inform you that Cornell’s Board of Trustees has made things worse.

For ease of reading, I’ve put a timeline at the end of this post with all of the primary documents: videos, statements, op-eds, etc. The first section is background; feel free to skip it if you’re familiar with the story and my own op-ed about the incident.

1. Background

On April 30, a group of people followed President Kotlikoff after an on-campus event, repeatedly asking him questions about Cornell’s speech and discipline policies. He eventually declined to engage further, walked to his car, turned it on, and then backed it into a student. The next day (May 1), Kotlikoff issued a statement describing the incident, the key paragraph of which was demonstrably false:

They continued to follow me to my car and then surrounded the car, banging on the windows, blocking the car, and shouting. I waited until I saw space behind the car and then, using my car’s rear pedestrian alert and automatic braking system, was able to slowly maneuver my car from the parking space and exit the parking lot.

We know it is false becase one member of the group took a video of the collision, which the Cornell Daily Sun published that same day. The video unambiguously shows Kotlikoff’s car making contact with the student, who backs away as the car continues to reverse into him. The university then released security-camera footage of the interaction in the parking lot, which also showed the contact. The university’s statement, attributed to Vice President for University Relations Kyle Kimball, said, “This is complete footage of the parking lot interactions, instead of clips to support a narrative” (confirming that Cornell considers what the video authentic and authoritative).

Over the next week, several organizations—including Cornell’s AAUP chapter and the Sun editorial board—criticized Kotlikoff’s actions and his statement. The Sun’s editorial described the statement, accurately and presciently, as as emblematic of “an administration that protects itself, not its students.”

On May 7, I joined them with an op-ed in the Sun. I argued that his statement was false or misleading in three ways that were disproven by the video evidence. I wrote:

1. The videos do not show anyone “banging on the windows” and the audio does not contain the sounds of banging or “shouting.” The car was not “surrounded” until after he began driving. Taking the University at its word that the security video is “complete footage of the parking lot interactions,” Kotlikoff’s claims are false.
2. The videos show that a person (identified by The Sun as a Cornell student) was stationary behind the car in its path of travel when Kotlikoff backed up, and that he backed the car up into them several times. His claim that “I waited until I saw space behind the car” is explicitly false.
3. His claim that “using my car’s rear pedestrian alert and automatic braking system, [I] was able to slowly maneuver my car from the parking space and exit the parking lot” is materially misleading. A reasonable reader of this passage would be under the false impression that Kotlikoff used his car’s safety features to avoid striking anyone.

I added that a student who engaged in similar conduct would be subject to disciplinary action, and that intentionally driving a car into someone and giving false statements about it could have serious legal consequences. I listed the tort of assault, the tort of battery, the crime of reckless endangerment, and the crime of making false statements in an investigation.

That same day, an Ad Hoc Special Committee of the Board of Trustees announced that it had been established “to oversee an investigation into the events of April 30, 2026, involving Cornell President Michael I. Kotlikoff and a group of individuals.” The committee consisted of the Board’s chair (Anne Meinig Smalling) and its three vice chairs (Howard L. Morgan, Beckie Robertson, and Stephen C. Robinson). The actual investigation was to be conducted by the Cornell University Police Department (CUPD), and Kotlikoff would be recused from any involvement in it.

A correction: I said on Bluesky that the Board’s announcement was “two hours later” than my post. That was wrong; in fact it was almost exactly two hours earlier. I did not see the announcement until after my op-ed was live, and I failed to notice that it had been sent out well before then.

2. Kotlikoff’s May 15 Statement

On May 15, the committee released another statement describing the results of the review, and later that day, Kotlikoff released his own statement looking back on the incident and review. I want to start with Kotlikoff’s statement, because he has substantially changed his story about what happened in the parking lot:

When I shared my experience with the community on May 1st, I did not believe, based on the information I had at the time, that my car had made any contact with anyone. Only when I saw the videos circulating later did I realize that a student had placed himself directly behind the car without my being aware of it as I backed up. Only the following afternoon did I understand that my experience would look very different in the selected video clips posted on social media and be framed in ways that I found genuinely shocking. In the moment, my goal was extricating myself from the situation safely without escalating it. In retrospect, I certainly should have remained in my car, locked it, and called the police. (emphasis added)

I find this explanation credible. It is consistent with what is visible in the videos, and it parsimoniously explains why his May 1 statement said what it did. Taking what he now says at face value, I belive that his May 1 statement was false but not intentionally so. In particular:

1. The “banging on the windows,” “shouting,” and “surround[ing]” the car take place after he backed into the student (and in substantial part because of it). These claims no longer read as excuses by someone who knows he drove his car into someone; they read as context provided by someone who didn’t think he had.
2. “I waited until I saw space behind the car” is a mistake of fact. There was not space, but he thought that there was.
3. The implied claim that he used his car’s safety features to avoid striking anyone is also a mistake of fact. He was under the same incorrect impression that a reader of this passage would take away from it.

You don’t need to agree with me. Indeed, part of the point of having a neutral and thorough adjudication process is so that a well-informed fact-finder can decide whether testimony is credible. All I am saying is that I personally believe Kotlikoff when he now says that he didn’t know at the time there was someone behind his car.

If all of this is correct, then many of the other legal consequences I discussed in my op-ed drop away. Battery and assault are intentional torts; without an intent to make contact or create a fear of contact, there is no wrongful act. Reckless endangerment requires recklessness—the “conscious[] disregard[] [of] a substantial and unjustifiable risk “ with a “gross deviation” from a reasonable person’s standard of care. At low speeds the belief that no one is in the car’s path of travel strikes me as a deviation but not necessarily a gross deviation from reasonably careful driving. And if one believes in the truth of what one is saying, there is no wilfully false statement.

On the other hand, this is hardly to say that Kotlikoff comes across well. The assault and endangerment sections of the Student Code of Conduct do not have comparable mental-state elements. A student who engaged in similar conduct and gave a similar statement would still be subject to Cornell discipline. A university president should know better, and should be held at least to the same standards as any other community member.

Even worse is that from at least May 1 onwards—when the Sun first published its story with the student video—Kotlikoff should have known beyond any doubt that he had driven into a student. He should have known beyond any doubt that his statement to the Cornell community was at best deeply misleading. It reflects a serious failure of judgment that he did not correct the record until May 15, a full two weeks later.

I respect that he refained from comment while the Special Committee’s review was pending (i.e. between May 7 and May 15), but that still leaves six days (i.e. from May 1 to May 7) during which he did nothing to set the record straight. Indeed, a vice president who reports directly to him put out a statement (on May 3) purporting to exonerate him but which actually did the opposite.

It is also striking that Kotlikoff’s May 15 statement does not contain any apologies. He does not express any contrition that he drove his car into a student. He does not express regret about misleading the Cornell community. I, for one, think that we are entitled to expect more from our leaders.

3. The Board’s May 15 Statement

Now for the Ad Hoc Special Committee. To summarize its findings:

1. CUPD conducted a professional investigation “without any bias or undue influence.”
2. Kotlikoff provided a sworn statement about the incident, but none of the other individuals present at the scene did so, despite repeated attempts by CUPD to contact them and collect statements.
3. The Tompkins County District Attorney determined that “no criminal charges were warranted against any individuals involved in this matter.”
4. The other individuals’ actions were “inconsistent with university policies governing expressive activity and our standards for respectful conduct, safety, and the prohibition of intimidation.”
5. “President Kotlikoff has declined to pursue a complaint against the students involved, which would have been required to initiate action under the university’s code of conduct. Appropriate action is being taken against the non-students involved.”
6. “President Kotlikoff has shown a steadfast commitment to Cornell’s values and principles, and we are confident he will continue to lead with integrity … .”

You will have noticed, I hope, what is missing from this list. The Special Committe’s statement doesn’t say anything about whether President Kotlikoff acted appropriately on April 30, when he drove his car into a student. It doesn’t say anything about his false statement of May 1, or about his failure to correct that statement once its falsity was apparent. It doesn’t say anything about whether CUPD’s investigation included Kotlikoff’s conduct on April 30, or whether the commitee itself considered his conduct. And when it discusses Kotlikoff’s behavior (as opposed to the other individuals’), it’s about his commitment to freedom of speech, not about driving his car into people.

This isn’t even a whitewash. It’s a brush-off. The reason that the Board of Trustees needed to get involved was that a university’s president cannot in good faith investigate himself. The entire point of appointing a special committee and walling Kotlikoff off from the CUPD investigation was to ensure that someone neutral and detatched, someone with only Cornell’s interests in mind, would take seriously the question of whether he violated Cornell’s standards of conduct and the trust that the university community has placed in him. Everything else is a sideshow.

Instead, the Special Committee seems to have believed that there were two reasons for their involvement: (1) to ensure that any disciplinary action taken against the other individuals would be untainted by Kotlikoff’s influence, and (2) to show that the Board still has confidence in his leadership. Neither of these reasons stands up to serious scrutiny. The issue of disciplinary action is moot, because Kotlikoff chose not to initiate a complaint. And the Board’s confidence is misconceived, because there is no legitimate basis for them to have that confidence unless they have actually seriously considered the reasons other people might question his fitness. If the committee did any of this work, they have not said so.

The Special Committee’s report did Kotlikoff and Cornell no favors. What he needed—what we needed—was a thoughtful discussion of his conduct on April 30 and May 1. The Trustees needed to ask whether it is a problem that the President did not check his rear-view mirrors properly, whether it is a problem that he did not stop after someone shouted that he’d run over their foot, whether it is a problem that he issued a statement without investigating facts within his ability to find out, and whether it is a problem that he failed to correct that statement promptly once he knew it was false. I am willing to accept answers to those questions that differ from my own. I am not willing to accept the implicit assertion that these aren’t even questions worth asking.

4. About the Other Individuals

There is a running theme in much of the commentary on this incident: to make it about the people who followed Kotlikoff to his car. That was the emphasis of his initial May 1 statement, and it is a major theme in his later May 15 statement and the Special Committee’s statement. Simiarly, in letters to the Sun, Paul Muller ‘91 criticized the students involved as “utterly, stupidly pretentious,” and more recently a group of over 500 community members expressed support for Kotlikoff, describing the individuals’ actions as “a breakdown of the rules that protect us all.”

I want to be extremely clear about this. I take no position on their conduct. I have my own thoughts on the matter, and I intend to keep those thoughts to myself. For a detailed discussion of demonstrative protest and the relationship between speech and safety on Cornell campuses, I recommend the report of the Committee on Expressive Activity that I served on. Many other people have weighed in in on the individuals’ actions, and I have linked to their commentaries in the timeline below. I invite you to consider their views and make up your own mind about the appropriateness of disciplinary action, criminal charges, and persona non grata orders.

I say this because it’s dangerously easy to fall into the trap of thinking that exactly one side must be right. If the individuals were behaving threateningly, then Kotlikoff was justified in driving into them—or, if they were acting innocently, then what he did must be grievously wrong. But that’s not how it works. Both sides in a dispute can be behaving well (an impassioned but respectful conversation), or both sides can be behaving badly (a duel with pistols at twenty paces).

Whether these other people crossed a morally or legally significant line is mostly irrelevant to whether President Kotlikoff did. It matters only insofar as they did or did not put him in a state of reasonable fear or confusion that could justify or excuse his actions. By his own later admissions, I think it is fair to say that they did not.

Conclusion

I care about this case because I care deeply about the university that Michael Kotlikoff and the Board of Trustees lead. I care enough to want Cornell to do the right thing, both when other people are behaving well and when they aren’t.

I no longer have confidence in the Special Committee’s members, which means I no longer have confidence in the Chair and the three Vice-Chairs of Cornell’s Board of Trustees. They took on a discrete task of great importance to the university, but they utterly failed to understand the assignment. These are not people who have demonstrated the judgment we require from our leaders. The Board of Trustees should dismiss them and replace them with officers who can actually do their jobs.

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Timeline and Source Documents

May 1: Kotlikoff statement: “Harassment and intimidation incident at Day Hall”

May 1, 11:06 PM: Cornell Daily Sun article (including handheld video)

May 1: Kyle Kimball statement: “Video of harassment and intimidation incident at Day Hall” (including security-camera footage) (updated May 3 with “enhanced (zoomed-in and brightened) version”)

May 4: Students for a Democratic Cornell statement: “Statement to the Community Regarding Recent Events”

May 4: Persona non grata order issued to Milton Taam ‘73, per the May 15 Sun article “Alumnus Present at Kotlikoff Car Incident Issued Persona Non Grata, 3-Year Ban From Campus”

May 5, 1:14 PM: Paul Muller ‘91 letter: “Students, Get Over Yourselves”

May 5, 6:18 PM: Cornell Daily Sun editorial: “President Kotlikoff, It’s Time To Hit the Brakes”

May 6, 12:00 PM: Graduate student op-ed: “Kotlikoff Must Resign”

May 7, 5:00 PM: Cornell AAUP op-ed: “President Kotlikoff’s Actions Demand an Independent Investigation”

May 7, 5:28 PM, “Statement from Ad Hoc Special Committee of the Board of Trustees on Investigation”

May 7, 7:30 PM: James Grimmelmann op-ed: “Kotlikoff Makes the Rules; He Needs to Follow Them Too”

May 15, 10:03 AM: “Statement from Ad Hoc Special Committee of the Board of Trustees”

May 15, 3:40 PM: Kotlikoff statement: “Observations on April 30 incident”

May 18, 4:00 PM: Letter from 500 community members, “In Support of Peaceful Protest”

May 20, 12:00 PM: Paul Sawyer op-ed: “Kotlikoff’s Record on Dissent Raises Concerns About His Fitness to Lead Cornell”

May 20, 5:30 PM: Milton Taam op-ed: “Kotlikoff Weaponizes Dialogue”

May 20: “Inter-organization statement on April 30/May 1 incident””

May 21, 4:22 PM: Joseph Margulies ‘82 op-ed: “The Potemkin Process”

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.

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:

1. I belive that there is a sheep in the field. (I really do believe it.)
2. My belief is justified. (Seeing what looks like a sheep is a good reason to believe that it is one.)
3. 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?