Avalanche pressures Shah reform agenda in Nepal

Mount Kailash, 2016
Jean-Marie Hullot via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0

The devastating avalanche in Nepal is pushing the country's infrastructure to the limit and confronting the reform administration of Balen Shah with an overwhelming challenge.

I was in Nepal for the national election in March that catapulted rapper-politician Shah to the prime minister's office. Last week, an avalanche of ice, rock, and water tore through the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river systems, pouring out of the Lhende River in Tibet and sweeping away downstream Nepali villages. The death toll is expected to top 1,000 easily and soon, as hundreds missing are likely buried beneath mud and debris.

(Two CCTV captures from the China-side border crossing at Gyirong Port have been widely shared and are public domain. They're disturbing, so I'm placing them at the bottom of this post and not higher up, for any reader who wants to view them. They do demonstrate the shocking speed and power of the avalanche. The videos are available from Wikimedia Commons (1, 2).) 

Pilgrims circumnavigating Mount Kailash, 2016
Jean-Marie Hullot via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0

Pilgrims, including tourists, visiting Mount Kailash are among the missing. Mount Kailash is believed to be the home of Lord Shiva and his wife Parvati. The mountain is a holy site in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Bon, an indigenous Tibetan spiritual tradition.

As I've watched the coverage, I'm reminded that infrastructure was a key issue in the March election. Nepal has asked for foreign aid with rescue and recovery, including genetic testing to identify victims, and resources for reconstruction. Reuters reported the need is on the scale of billions of dollars.

And time is of the essence. Nepali rescuers now are drilling through the baking, hardening surface of the mudflows to try to reach survivors who might be trapped underneath. The rapid advance of ice and earth likely left pockets of air in what used to be vehicles, buildings, and tunnels.

Getting to the northern border region of Nepal is no small feat. Flights to Kathmandu are limited in the best of times. In March, I took one of few large carrier approaches, Cathay Pacific via Hong Kong; Middle East connections were closed because of the U.S.-Iran War. Most flights into Kathmandu are regional connections. Closer Tibetan airports pose prohibitive barriers with prerequisite visas, travel permits, and border crossings.

The Nepali side of the border area is another six to eight hours' drive from Kathmandu. And that doesn't take account of conditions on two-lane roads amid the crisis, nor time to acclimate to altitude. Arriving at Kathmandu already puts one at about 4,400 feet (1,300 meters). The border town of Rasuwagadhi is at 6,000 feet (1,830 meters).

Hiking near Nagarkot, east of Kathmandu, 2026
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In the election in March, Shah supporters worried whether they could marshal the youth vote precisely because of limited transportation infrastructure. Nepali law required that votes be cast in a person's home district. But more than a million Nepali people, especially young voters, left their home villages to seek employment in Kathmandu.

I wrote in March about a medical student I met in Kathmandu on election day who, representatively, was not voting, because he could afford neither the time nor expense to reach his home village, 16 hours away by bus. Anger over undeveloped infrastructure in Nepal is thus tied closely to the familiar economic issues of jobs and educational opportunity.

Shortly before the election, in February, Shah's party had released a 100-point "manifesto" (Nepali language) outlining the policy changes a Shah administration would implement. Anti-corruption measures in the judiciary, for example, were to include meritocratic appointments, live broadcast of court proceedings, and statutory enhancement of judicial independence. The manifesto promised to get monied influences out of politics and to beef up the economy through apolitical partnerships with China and India. (Nepal News.)

Home construction near Nagarkot, 2026
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

A bold economic development agenda included measures such as rapid growth of capacity in electricity generation, airports, and rail networks. Some of this work was under way; hydropower operators and construction workers at existing and new facilities are a significant number of the hundreds now missing.

Painfully apropos of the present circumstances, the manifesto called for "major reforms in mountain tourism safety and management," according to Nepal News, including "modern technologies such as drones and digital monitoring systems ... to strengthen safety, search, and rescue operations," especially in the Himalayan region on the Nepal-China border, and "hill stations in mountainous areas located within 1.5 hours of the India-Nepal border."

It's early to be Monday-morning quarterbacking what went wrong in the instant disaster—besides that climate change generally is melting glaciers and destabilizing permafrost at high altitudes. We know that affected Nepali villages received no early warning of the avalanche. Commenters have said that existing early warning systems are sparse, too widely dispersed, and depend on primitive and inadequate measurements, such as water levels. Moreover, sensitive technologies with communication capacity and weather resilience are difficult to install at high altitudes, and national borders complicate installation and communication.

An informative assessment of the early warning angle was posted Saturday by "The Honest Broker," political scientist and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Roger A. Pielke Jr. He quoted a regional news source explaining that existing sensors, such as they were, ordinarily reporting every ten minutes, were simply swept away and silenced by the flash flood.

At 0.9 kmh, the record 200 million liters of water (52.8 billion U.S. gallons, filling 80,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools) reportedly traveled at twice the speed of past floods.

Residential woodpile, Nagarkot, 2026
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Before the avalanche, when the Shah administration marked 100 days in office, on July 4, there was ample optimism and satisfaction in Nepal; Shah supporters generally were pleased. The party claimed meaningful progress on 70 to 90 manifesto points, according to various reports. A Kathmandu Post analysis pegged achievement at more like 38. But really, that's not bad for a start.

A range of initiatives already are transforming healthcare. Digital tools have been deployed to facilitate access to hospitals, an air ambulance system has extended its capacity to remote locales, and burn units and pharmacy services are expanding.

The administration reimbursed small-account holders who lost money in a public savings corruption scandal and compensated families of persons killed in the Gen Z protests (more on the protests in my earlier posts). Government offices have been streamlined, reducing backlogs and wait times on services such as passports, driver licenses, and business licenses. Legislative groundwork has been laid for constitutional and economic reforms.

There has been pushback and controversy. The administration has implemented a range of anti-corruption initiatives, including investigation and arrest of the prior prime minister. I'm not a fan of criminalizing politics, but in this case, the move is not unwarranted.

Nevertheless, and perhaps predictably, legislators are fretting over Shah's imperiousness. And outcry is coming not only from opposition parties, as Shah upends the status quo. Though I figure that's to be expected when a serious reformer takes on corruption. Imagine if Bernie Sanders had won the U.S. election in 2020. Opponents in his own party fretted that he would get nothing done with a recalcitrant Congress, but I thirsted for the effort and the naming of names it would entail.

The Shah administration also has drawn displeasure by seizing land, even if the takings are legitimate. Some seizures represent claw-backs of public lands that were sold off or given away as a function of government corruption (Yosemite, anyone?). Some seizures are lawful takings for infrastructure development. The problem arises in that with a downtrodden working class, much land is occupied by squatters, and the government has not always been gentle with their removal. Human rights advocates have criticized the Shah administration for forgetting the people whilst helping The People.

Notwithstanding political discontent, reasoned criticism, and media impatience, to my mind, Shah has been on a tear. Now the disaster poses a test. 

Of course, no one will blame Shah for the avalanche, nor for melting glaciers. Rather, if he plays his cards right, he can blame the West for global warming, China for lack of early warning, and his predecessors for the weak infrastructure that is aggravating rescue and will dog recovery. 

Rather, his problem is a plain old economic one. Collecting billions in foreign aid will be a chore in the present batten-down-the-hatches transnational zeitgeist. And focusing efforts on the relatively small and remote northern border region where the disaster occurred will mean a major drain on national resources, diverting focus and finance from the prime minister's agenda. 

Natural disasters have undone chief executives before. Ready or not, Nepal is going to find out whether Balen Shah has the right stuff to overcome.

CCTV Capture 1 at Gyirong Port

CCTV Capture 2 at Gyirong Port

Belgian scholar publishes magisterial deep dive into comparative data privacy law across Atlantic

Dr. Sylvia Lissens has published her remarkable dissertation in comparative law as a book, Personal Data Protection in the United States and the European Union (Larcier-Intersentia 2026).

Here is the publisher's description:

In today’s digitized world, personal data is being requested and collected everywhere. With the emergence of the internet and devices that are connected to the internet, such as smartphones, smartwatches or even smart fridges, the collection of personal data has expanded to an unprecedented scale. Personal data flows between the European Union and the United States are occurring on a daily basis, since most U.S. big tech companies sell their devices and offer their services in the EU. Successive deals were made in order to protect citizens’ personal data, but most of them did not survive scrutiny by the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Upon closer inspection, the underlying problem appears to be the different qualifications and frameworks used for personal data (protection) in the EU and the U.S., defining it respectively as a fundamental (human) right and a trade asset. This book addresses the question of what the core differences between the U.S. and EU legal approaches towards personal data (protection) are, where they come from, and whether there are signs of convergence. Functional comparative law research is conducted on three levels to reflect the perspectives of the three main stakeholders: the private sector, civil society and the public sector, focusing on intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

The U.S. and the EU seem to understand and qualify personal data differently in words and deeds, but upon closer inspection they have more in common than may seem at first sight. The findings in this book confirm that it is possible to develop a roadmap for the U.S. and EU legal approaches towards data privacy to coexist, and that convergences can be found at the level of the private sector, civil society, and the public sector intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Data privacy principles developed in different parts of the world and by several organizations share many elements in common. It is time for actors and regions to decide to cooperate and engage in mutual understanding, as the internet does not know any borders in a globalized world.

Dr. Sylvia Lissens is a legal scholar specializing in data protection, international data exchange, and the intersection of technology, security and fundamental rights. Holding master’s degrees in Law and Criminological Sciences, she conducted doctoral research on EU–U.S. data protection and international cooperation at KU Leuven. Through collaborations with the University of Helsinki, Venice International University, Duke University, and the Jagiellonian University of Cracow, she developed expertise in cybersecurity, policing, counterterrorism, and the legal implications of emerging technologies.

The work is magisterial: an astonishingly comprehensive and insightful survey of the history and cultural context of data privacy on the two sides of the Atlantic, unlike any resource before it. I was immensely privileged to learn from Lissens as an adviser from the U.S. side in her work, and as a member of the committee for her defense at KU Leuven in Belgium in 2025. A hat tip to the indispensable support for Dr. Lissens of her significant other, the multi-talented Giovanni C., and to my friend, colleague, and fellow adviser, Professor Przemysław Pałka, Jagiellonian University.

As gratifying a culmination of achievement as this book is, I am even more thrilled to report that Lissens soon will start work as a lawyer and data privacy officer for the Belgian federal police agency. Watch this space for great things to come.

Like first-gen students it's all about, Raposa book breaks new ground in law school academic support

My long-ago law student in Torts, and later colleague in teaching, Brittany L. Raposa (LinkedIn) this year published, as editor and contributor, Fostering First Gen Success and Inclusion: A Guide for Law Schools (Carolina Academic Press 2026). 

"First gen" refers to law students whose parents did not pursue post-secondary education. Here is the publisher's description:

Fostering First Gen Success and Inclusion: A Guide for Law Schools provides law schools with practical and substantive tools to support first-generation law students.... This book illustrates the challenges and characteristics of all first-generation law students by looking at a diverse range of first-generation law student populations. It is designed to assist law schools with creating an inclusive environment for first-generation law students and to foster success in all aspects of their law school journey, from admission to post graduation.

More than 45 contributors (including many former first gen students themselves) offer their experiences and their insights as to how first gen students can be supported and can flourish. Whether it be for situations such as orientation programming, academic success help, doctrinal or legal writing classrooms, experiential education, or career development and bar exam support, this book offers guidance and support. And of course, the voices of next gen students themselves resonate throughout.

Raposa is a Massachusetts attorney at Raposa Law, practicing family and estate law. She came to law school years ago with two bachelors in English literature, writing, and rhetoric, graduated at the top of her law class, and then earned an LL.M. in health law and policy at Northeastern. For about six years, she served on the faculty at Roger Williams Law, specializing in bar support.

My stellar colleague Professor Amy Vaughn-Thomas, who just joined the faculty at University of Detroit Mercy Law and whom already I sorely miss, contributed the first chapter to the Raposa volume, "Speaking from Experience: Profiling the First Gen Perspective to Foster Inclusion in Legal Education." My gifted colleague Professor Rebecca Flanagan contributed chapter 10, "Why Do Law Schools Need to Understand the Special Needs of First Gen Pre-Law Students?"

Raposa herself contributed three chapters, besides a compelling introduction: chapter 20, "Don’t Stop After 1L Year: Incorporating Skills Teaching in Upper-Level Doctrinal Courses"; chapter 24, "The Silencing Power of Expectation: The Need for Law Schools to Amplify Diverse Voices in Legal Scholarship"; and chapter 29, "Bar Talk: Learning from First-Generation Bar Takers to Create Bar Support Programming."

Conservancy loss illustrates ongoing impotence of environmental protection right in state constitution

Franklin Park postcard, c. 1930-1945
Boston Public Library, public domain

In the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Wednesday, environmentalists lost their bid to block renovation of a stadium in a Boston park.

I wrote about the case in the lower court at some length in 2024. The Emerald Necklace Conservancy and local residents wanted to stop the road construction and structural overhaul to bring White Stadium in Boston's Franklin Park into service as stadium host of Boston Legacy, a football club in the U.S. National Women's Soccer League. The "Emerald Necklace" is an urban greenway that landscape architect Franklin Law Olmsted planned to encircle Boston and was widely disrupted in the city's 20th century growth.

The court affirmed on various grounds, and two are of interest to me relative to environmental litigation. First, the court held that The Emerald Necklace Conservancy lacked standing to challenge the project as a violation of terms of the trust that supports the existing stadium and park.

This result is not unusual; environmentalist standing has been a challenging plaintiff problem since I studied environmental law decades ago. (Hat tip to Profs. James Boyle & Jonathan Weiner.) But the outcome shows that that's still so. The doctrine of locus standi in the European Union and elsewhere looks like standing in U.S. constitutional law, but is not as prohibitive, and in many jurisdictions—such as Malawi, where I traveled this summer—legislators have enacted workarounds to allow conservation organizations to respond to industry abuses that endanger human welfare.

Second, the court held that the Massachusetts legislature removed the stadium property from park status no later than 1950, thus depriving the plaintiffs of a claim to which they might otherwise be entitled under Amendments Article 97 (Article XCVII) of the Massachusetts Constitution, a conservation measure that voters approved overwhelmingly in 1972.

Article 97 interests me because of its potential breadth. Its first paragraph articulates a powerful affirmative right: "The people shall have the right to clean air and water, freedom from excessive and unnecessary noise, and the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic qualities of their environment; and the protection of the people in their right to the conservation, development and utilization of the agricultural, mineral, forest, water, air and other natural resources is hereby declared to be a public purpose."

This language dates to the same year, 1972, as the Clean Water Act in federal law, and the likes of article IX of the Montana Constitution, which sustained the youth climate claim in Held v. Montana in 2024. The language weirdly resonates with later constitutional expressions of environmental rights elsewhere in the world, such as South Africa's (article 24). 

Thus far, however, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has interpreted Article 97 narrowly, only in connection with designated park land and only as implemented by the legislature—so hardly a constitutional right at all.

The case is Emerald Necklace Conservancy, Inc. v. City of Boston (Mass. Aug. 19, 2026). Justice Gabrielle R. Wolohojian wrote the unanimous opinion of the court.

Oliver team uses state FOIA in Flock camera probe

Flock camera
Bruxton via Wikimedia Commons CC0 1.0

HBO's Last Week Tonight aired a story on August 2 on police surveillance technologies, and it featured the fruits of state freedom-of-information-act (FOIA) requests.

Comedian John Oliver subjected police surveillance technology to his usual gratifying, if NSFW, raking over the coals, surveying the likes and inadequacies of ShotSpotter (purported audio detection of gunshots), Stingray (interception of cell communication), Fusus (live feed-map interfacing), and Flock cameras (tracking by car license plate; recently at Vox). Even for those of us who've worried about these technologies for some years, the show is, as always, worth the watch.

(Vox and The Washington Post published this week on Flock cameras, in paywalled stories. See also NPR coverage of Flock camera vandalism.)

I write about the Last Week coverage here for a collateral point, which is to highlight the use of state FOIA. Abuse of surveillance systems has been revealed in many an investigation by requests for public records, namely, surveillance access logs. 

The Oliver segment related, for example, reports of a suspiciously high incidence of tech and law enforcement personnel viewing surveillance feeds from places such as gyms without any apparent legitimate purpose, not to mention extended surveillance of persons not yet suspected of any specific wrongdoing, with problematic implications in racial profiling.

To investigate for themselves, Oliver's team used the California Public Records Act over the course of three years to interrogate the police department in Rialto, California, over its use of Fusus. Rialto was noteworthy, because the city required new businesses, as a licensing condition, to connect live-feed cameras to the police Fusus network.

In response to a request for police emails mentioning Fusus, the city first said it had none, Oliver reported—

which seemed implausible. So, we filed a much broader request and over the next two years, they sent us 28 pages, which still didn't seem like all the material they probably had. So, last February, we said, f— it, send us an export of your whole log database for Fusus, showing us every time your officers peaked at a privately owned camera. We asked for it as a searchable digital file as the law requires. But instead, what they did was send us a 30,413 page PDF.

Fortunately, HBO, per Last Week, had the resources to convert the PDF to a searchable, digital file. Among the findings, police "access[ed] cameras at the Rialto Days Inn for hundreds of hours, including the one facing the pool."

I've been working in freedom of information law, especially access law, for more than 30 years, and it's lamentable that the FOIA compliance playbook, especially at the municipal level, hasn't changed. The go-to tools to obstruct access continue to be: 

• simply and outrightly deny that responsive records exist; 
• deter the requester with an outrageous fee demand (if not here); 
• delay, often by under-producing or redacting, to cost the requester time and resources to follow up; and, 
• if ultimately compelled to produce, render records useless through tactics such as over-production and medium or format regression.

Having just concluded a term on the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Advisory Committee, working closely with FOIA officers, I want to be quick to acknowledge that there are countless dedicated public servants working hard to serve requesters honestly and fairly, often at the hazard of facing off with their own supervisors. The same is true at the state and local level, and I don't want to generalize unfairly to denigrate the work and sacrifices of so many. The situation is surely a case of the bad apples that spoil the bushel.

Kudos to HBO and Last Week for their tenacity in shining light on a spoiled bushel.

High court sticks with conventional duty doctrine in relieving contractor of responsibility for roofer's fall

Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort
Jason Morrison via Flickr (edited) CC BY-NC 2.0

A general contractor without boots on the job site owes no duty of care to a subcontractor's employee on site, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) held Monday.

The plaintiff was a roofing worker on the job at Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in Hancock, Massachusetts. He sustained serious injuries falling from a roof when between safety-harness clips. 

Worker compensation law precluded the plaintiff from suing his own employer, a subcontractor. But as often happens in such cases, to supplement insufficient compensation from the worker compensation system, the plaintiff looks around for third parties who also might bear responsibility. Here, the plaintiff sued the general contractor for negligence and negligent hiring—or, more precisely, negligent contracting.

The litigation pattern is similar to a case I teach (Lulu, SSRN), first developed for 1L torts by the late Prof. Marshall S. Shapo, to introduce students to litigation patterns more complex than a simple one plaintiff versus one defendant, as well as the collateral implications of legislative policy, such as worker compensation. Like here, in Wrobel v Trapani (Ill. App. Ct. 1970), the plaintiff was a subcontractor employee who sued the general contractor in negligence. Sometimes I fret over the age of some of the cases I rely on to teach 1Ls, but, I suppose, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Though a range of amici lined up on both sides, including the Suffolk Law Supreme Court Clinic for the plaintiff and the American Tort Reform Association for the defense, the instant case was straightforward, and the court's decision a workmanlike affirmance. 

Though the contract between general and sub had broad language about maintaining a safe site, all of the how-to was why the general hired the sub, thus within the sub's almost exclusive purview, the court reasoned. The general contractor had little more authority than to say stop or proceed with the work overall. The sub, and not the general, was involved at the detail level of how long and how many safety lines to have, the sort of stuff that would matter in the plaintiff's suit. So the plaintiff's legal maneuver was an ill-fated effort to subvert the exclusivity of worker comp. 

What's interesting about the case pedagogically is how the SJC framed its decision in terms of duty. The most ethereal of the fundamental elements of tort, duty is where the ghost in the machine gets its say, that is, that judges are permitted to put a thumb in the scale in favor of public policy. And the SJC did. 

"Whether a duty exists is a question of law informed by foreseeability, the relationship of the parties, existing social values, and public policy," the court wrote. Well said; hey, did the court crib my final exam answer key? Because that's an easy six points for the student who remembers.

Applying that standard, beyond the analysis of the facts, the court observed that the legislature frowns on third-party suits that might unfairly undermine worker comp as exclusive remedy. For uncertainty around liability could in turn put a damper on general contracting. The approach is classic economic-conservative, no doubt to the dismay of labor-friendly amici who supported the plaintiff, though not entirely unfairly, if one is suspicious of judicial policymaking.

All the same, the court's reliance on duty is curious in two respects. First, Wrobel v. Trapani was not decided on the basis of duty, rather on the common law doctrine of active-passive indemnity. In Wrobel, the court reached a different conclusion on potential liability in part, but that was because the general contractor in that case did have personnel on site, and the plaintiff alleged directly implicated negligence by one of the general's workers.

The heuristic of active-passive indemnity nevertheless works functionally the same as the court's duty analysis here: the general was not involved, so passive, and the sub was involved, so active, each relative to the alleged negligence. I urge my students to understand active-passive indemnity merely as the sort of hardening of common law logic that occurs through stare decisis when the same fact pattern, here a problem in duty, is presented over and over again in the courts.

Massachusetts does recognize active-passive indemnity, but it is disfavored relative to contractual terms. The instant case exhibits the same disfavor relative to the absence of contractual terms, which might otherwise have spelled out a more specific duty on the part of the general contractor.

Second, the court relies on the Second Restatement to bolster its duty analysis, apparently ignoring the SJC's adoption of the Third Restatement approach to duty, which I wrote about at length more than five years ago and won't unpack again here. Suffice to say the Third Restatement tries to purge policy from the common law duty analysis and might rather have decided the instant case on "scope of liability." That approach, in turn, might more closely reflect the operation of active-passive indemnity.

The dissenters in Doull v. Foster (Mass. 2021), two of five, warned that the Third Restatement approach tried to fix something that wasn't broken and so would not catch on. Their warning seems prescient, as the lower courts have been reluctant to modify their m.o. in duty and causation analysis, and even the SJC has seemed reluctant to double down on rocking the boat.

The instant case is Contento Suquilanda v. Skyway Roofing, Inc. (Mass. Aug. 17, 2026). Justice Serge Georges Jr. wrote the unanimous court opinion. A Suffolk Law alumnus, Justice Georges was sworn into the court in December 2020, so did not participate in the opinion in Doull v. Foster, issued in February 2021.

AI breathes life into Theodore Roosevelt at new Library

A Savory Tort Photo Essay

The new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opened on July 4, in Medora, North Dakota, and I visited last week.

(All photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

I'm a Theodore Roosevelt ("TR") fan, politically, socially, and otherwise, and this summer, I've immersed myself in a torrent of books and audiovisual media about the 26th President of the United States and his remarkable life. In the weeks to come, I plan to write more about TR, and North Dakota, with relevance to contemporary life, from U.S. party politics to foreign policy.

I pose with sculptor John Lopez's bronze TR (2017) at the Old Town Hall in Medora, North Dakota.

Meanwhile, I write to share, and to laud, the new TR Presidential Library (Library), especially the artificial intelligence (AI) experience. You might have seen the Library on TV already, as Lee Cowan produced a July package on the opening for CBS Sunday Morning.

The Library itself is a physical marvel. Designed by the global, Oslo-headquartered architectural firm Snøhetta, the earth-toned buildings are melded in sweeping curves into the breathtaking landscape of the North Dakota badlands.  

The Library blends into its landscape.

 

The landscape is part of the visitor experience both outside and inside the Library.

Visitors are encouraged to explore a perimeter boardwalk, where grasslands are being restored, post-construction, and the badlands buttes of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park stretch to the horizon. 

More than mere conveyance, the boardwalk around the Library is a work of exceptional craftsmanship.

Moreover, visitors can switchback their way to the top of the organic green roof of the Library itself.

Visitors summit the Library roof.

The exhibition space features a central hall with rows of displays that, through artifacts and text panels, tell the story of TR's life, from youth to higher education, to North Dakota ranching, New York politics, Washington, the Spanish-American War, the White House, Africa, and the Amazon.

The central hall exhibits are organized chronologically.

In the manner of a presidential library, the subject matter is treated with reverence, but not with total ignorance of controversy or the fallibility of the subject. For example, one display depicts TR's meeting and correspondence with Booker T. Washington, but notes that TR distanced himself from Washington publicly after the meeting went down poorly with Republicans.

Most displayed papers are replicas or on loan, as TR artifacts are collected already at other sites.
Artful exhibits convey authenticity nonetheless; replicas of papers and objects are well made.

On both sides of the hall, large, themed rooms beckon with elaborate sets re-creating periods of TR's life, such as a log cabin in the badlands, or the 1900 Republican convention in Philadelphia.

TR escaped to remote North Dakota amid the grief of losing his (first) wife and mother both on Valentine's Day, 1884.

The themed rooms feature further artifacts and information, as well as experiences for visitors, including the use of AI.

At an activity station, visitors can develop their own campaign posters in the style of the 19-aughts.

A visitor to the Library has the option of having a photograph taken at the Library entrance and carrying a bracelet with an RFID-enabled token to scan at various stations. In one experience, for example, visitors can play President and make decisions about crises the TR Administration faced. One can then see the trade-offs required to satisfy various constituencies, as approval ratings fluctuate in the high-tech choose-your-own-adventure. The Library AI constructs a cumulative record of the visitor's experiences and expressed preferences and generates a summation by email afterward.

Visitors can assess their take on the issues and cast their own votes in the 1912 election.

A recurring delight in the experience vein is a series of stations that use the visitor's likeness to place one in an AI-generated "photograph" in the context of a setting in TR's life. Visitors of all ages, including me, giddily anticipate the images, which appear on a large screen for everyone nearby to see, sometimes eliciting "wow"s, or giggles, and always delight. (Below are my own images from the Library, emailed to me after my visit.)

The crown jewel of the AI system is in the re-created White House Cabinet Room, where a holographic TR (technically, a "life-size interactive avatar") stands behind his desk and answers questions. "TR" invites visitors to come to a lectern in front of the desk, scan their bracelets, and hold down a mic button while asking a question. Along the ceiling above, both visitor and the hologram are captioned for the room.

TR himself answers visitor questions in the White House Cabinet Room.

The AI is good. I mean, very good. Frankly, I expected that the hologram would deliver only truisms and platitudes with the faltering dexterity of an animatronic in the Disney Hall of Presidents.

Not so. This TR was ebullient and on point. He answered questions with surprising depth of knowledge and even what seemed like insight. Even when seconds were required for the AI to formulate a response, the hologram delayed with smooth conversational transitions, such as "Well, let me consider that."

While I was there, one man asked what TR's greatest challenge was as President. That was a softball; TR answered with settlement of the 1902 Coal Strike, a good call. The hologram delivered, though, more than mere encyclopedic recitation, rather an insightful and stirring summary of the experience from the man who was in the room.

A woman then asked whether any of TR's descendants settled in North Dakota. I thought that question might force the AI to dodge. TR did have to "consider" for a few more seconds than for the previous question. He then answered with a capable summary of where his children moved on to, explaining how his family in subsequent generations did fan out across the country. But none, he lamented confidently, followed the old man's tracks back to North Dakota.

A young boy then went up to the lectern—courageously, I thought, with a room full of adults looking on—and eked out a simple question, "Did you like your name?" The hologram bought some time by lauding the question. Then he answered, firmly, no. He then capably explicated his nicknames in life, including "Teedie" as a boy and "Teddy" in politics, and said that he always preferred "Theodore" or "Thee." This hologram has read his David McCullough.

I asked a question, not a hard one, but one I hoped would make the AI earn its keep: "Why do you think you lost the 1912 election?" I made "think" my main verb because I wanted to spur the AI to speculate, not merely orate. I was not disappointed.

To my surprise and delight, the hologram took little time to think and became animated. TR described for the room how, yes, forming the Bull Moose Party had split Republican voters and handed the 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson. Yet, pounding a fist, TR was adamant that he had done the right thing, standing on principle for the needs of people and against the private interests that had captured the Republican party. (Sound familiar? Then you have a sense of what I hope to write more about soon.)

Inevitably, a person in the room asked TR how he would address political division in America today. Here, the AI was programmed with brakes. TR gave an eloquent answer, a dodge at last, about how it's not his place to second-guess political decision-making in a time so different from his.

But he wasn't finished. Again to my surprise, TR went on to give an impassioned description of political rifts in his own time, and how he addressed them, with salient examples, such as negotiating the Treaty of Portsmouth to end the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Speaking further of the higher calling to exhibit integrity in politics rather than pander to popular sentiments, his answer proved to have contemporary relevance with very little inference required. Or maybe that's just how I heard it.

I was reluctant to leave the room. AI TR was enchanting. 

I met a couple of TR impersonators while I was in Medora. Joe Wiegand's Teddy Roosevelt Show at the Town Square Showhall is superb. (Me with Wiegand's TR at left.) But on those occasions, I was always aware that I was watching and interacting with an actor, however well prepared and gifted for the role.

 

TR (Wiegand) weaved rhetoric into a brilliant portrayal at the Teddy Roosevelt Show.

At the Library, there was no actor. It was easier than I imagined to be seduced by the ghost in the machine. I left the Library feeling like I had some authentic measure of the magnetic charisma that so many of TR's contemporaries described. 

There are some other gems in the Library. There are artifacts from when TR was shot in an assassination attempt. There is a small room dedicated to the dark day when he lost his wife and mother. I don't want to say too much and spoil the adventure. The joy of visiting the Library is discovering these spaces yourself, and imagining yourself in the same historical context—with a little help from AI.

My AI Images from the Library

"Life in TR's New York"
TR was born to privilege but raised with a powerful ethic that wealth entailed an obligation of public service.

"Ranching in the Badlands"
TR sunk more than half of his liquid wealth into ranching in North Dakota. Ultimately he took a massive loss before divesting. But he never regretted the experience, saying it made him who he was, and he would not have been President but for the time he spent in North Dakota.

"Working on the Police Force"
As president of the Police Commission Board, TR walked New York City streets at night with journalist Jacob Riis to uncover and clean up dirty policing.

"Serving in the Navy"
TR did not serve in uniform in the Navy; he served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the first-term administration of President William McKinley. Later, as President, Roosevelt deployed "the Great White Fleet," a show of American power and deterrent to aggression, from 1907 to 1909.

"Joining the Rough Riders"
TR resigned his Washington post in 1898 to join the U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, "the Rough Riders," in the Spanish-American War. TR is the only President who has been awarded the Medal of Honor, posthumously, for his heroism in Cuba.

"Leading as President"
TR's political opponents in his own party, corporate-friendly Republicans, hoped to sideline him as President McKinley's running mate on the 1900 reelection ticket. To their dismay, TR became President when McKinley was assassinated in 1901. 

My campaign poster, 19-aughts style
TR had pledged not to seek a third term, honoring the example of President Washington. He went on safari in Africa to remove himself from the political fray. But dissatisfied with the performance of his handpicked successor, President William Taft, he threw his hat in the ring for 1912, unsuccessfully.

"Journeying Into the Amazon"
Ever seeking adventure as an antidote to loss, former President Roosevelt joined an expedition in Brazil to chart a river in the Amazon, from 1913 to 1914. Suffering from a leg injury in a portage and from malaria, he very nearly died. Certainly the wear and tear on his health did him no favors. He died at his home in Oyster Bay, New York, in 1919, of pulmonary embolism, at age 60. 

Time has come for permanent DST, but too many legislators prefer to keep Americans in the dark

Google Gemini image CC0

When the clocks turn back to standard time on the first Sunday in November, the sun will set where I live at about quarter before 5 in the evening, and it will set closer and closer to 4 p.m. thereafter.

I'm lucky because I work remotely and get to make my own hours a lot of the time. Still, I feel depression beckon. I often cannot get away from my computer during sunlight hours. There's no time to exercise outdoors, and treadmills are mind-numbing. I gain weight. The sun comes up in the six o'clock hour, but like most people, I have to get my workday going first thing.

My heart breaks to think of people—I once was one—who head off to the office first thing in the morning, an hour-plus commute requiring transit too soon after dawn to have any meaningful personal time in sunlight; who then toil all day in an office with limited windows and violet, artificial light; and who then leave work in darkness. 

And it's not necessary. We squander sunlight in unusable morning hours upon the wildly outmoded notion that we have to get our farming done before the heat of the day.

New England state legislators perennially debate shifting wholly to Atlantic Time, GMT -4, a subterfuge to accomplish permanent daylight savings time without defying federal law. Maine has been most eager for the measure; the sun sets in the 3 p.m. hour in the Bangor winter. But no one state wants to be the first to pull the trigger, an economic collective-action problem.

Congress perennially debates permanent daylight savings time. The House recently passed the bipartisan Sunshine Protection Act. History suggests the bill will fail in the less democratically representative Senate.

Nevertheless, today I sent the following letter to my Rhode Island senators, Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse.

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Letter to Senators Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)

Dear Senators:

I would like to see you support permanent daylight savings time.

I am not an RI native, but in my 15 years here, I have seen, for myself and others, that a full hour of darkness, thus the full termination of twilight, at the time one finishes weekday work is an engine of depression. New Englanders working inside don't see the sun for five days a week.

The testimony of healthcare professionals that standard time is somehow best for "circadian rhythms" is ludicrous, and, I can only imagine, motivated by murky commercial interests I cannot perceive. The House rightly rejected these arguments.

Time zones are based on longitude,* Greenwich, which is arbitrary. The medical claim seems to be based on the idea of workers having to rise before the sun, which happens regardless, and meanwhile ignores the problem on the evening end. How is NO sunlight during waking hours possibly the better option for human health?

If there's a healthcare problem you want to address, let's start with food and shelter for all persons, or compulsory vacation and family leave comparable to Europe, or a shorter work week, freedom from 24/7 responsiveness, efficient public transit, and living wages. Rising before or after the sun is meaningless in comparison.

At minimum, the states should be free to decide. You must know that already there is a New England state pact in the works to move the region to Atlantic Time so as to subvert the federal scheme. The plan never gets going, because no state wants to be the one that pulls the trigger. But subterfuge should not be required anyway.

It's easy now, in summertime, to buy into the weak arguments against permanent DST. If the Senate cannot pass the House bill, I would like you to have a press conference at 5 p.m. on the first Monday in November. In the dark. Then you can explain to constituents why Congress made an arbitrary choice that they don't deserve to see their families in sunlight until the weekend.

Sincerely,
R.J. Peltz-Steele

* Word corrected from my typo in original. 

Workplace mobbing researchers convene in Niagara

The Third Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing opened today, and I was privileged to participate in the opening session.

I've been likewise privileged to be part of the leadership team of this conference, though all recognition for the heavy lifting must go to fearless chair Professor Qingli Meng and legendary sociologist Ken Westhues. As host-Niagara University President Father James Maher recounted in his opening remarks, the progress since our inaugural conference is astonishing, including the founding of the World Association for Research on Workplace Mobbing (WARWM) and the Journal on Workplace Mobbing.

 

(UPDATE, July 29, 2026: Conference videos are now posted on the WARWM YouTube channel.)  

 

Baron Nigel Biggar (2023)
Elekes Andor via Wikimedia Commons
(2023), CC BY-SA 4.0

This morning's opening featured greetings, besides Father Maher's, from Nigel Biggar, an academic and member of the U.K. House of Lords (read more at, e.g., the Hoover Institution); Constanza Ceruti, University of Salta, Argentina; and John Mueller, University of Calgary, Canada.

 

I paste below the Niagara University press release on the third annual conference. The impressive conference program includes these multi-national presenters and subjects:

• Linda Shallcross & Summer Bland, Workplace Mobbing Australia and Summer Bland, Workplace Mobbing Australia, When Organisations Perpetuate Workplace Mobbing: Race, Gender, and Institutional Responsibility
• Linda Shallcross & Summer Bland, Workplace Mobbing and Organizational Response: Why Escalation Persists
• Qingli Meng, Niagara University, Institutionalized Mobbing and the Mobility of Power: Leadership Networks, Culture Transfer, and Accountability in Higher Education
• Lindsey Brown, Rochester City School District, Open Secrets: Inaccessible Texts as Roadmaps to Mobbing
• Catherine Koverola, licensed psychologist, When Workplace Mobbing and Moral Injury Co-occur: A Path Forward
• AnnMarie Flynn, independent scholar, Academic Mobbing as It Unfolds for Targets: An Inflection-Point Model of Psychological Injury
• Tamara Thermitus, McGill University and Toronto Metropolitan University Diversity Institute, When Silence Becomes Violence: Institutional Silencing of Black Women in Leadership
• Heliana Ramirez, Workplace Trauma Recovery, LLC, M.O.M. (Mobbing on Maternity) Leave: Impacts of Mobbing on Pregnant Workers and Their Babies
• Jocelynne Scutt, University of New South Wales, Mobbing "the Mob": When Workplace Dynamics Promote Mobbing Power
• Roselle Aranha, Niagara University, Ethical Leadership and Systems Thinking as Safeguards Against Workplace Mobbing in Higher Education: Lessons from Faculty Development and Appointment Processes
• Deitra Payne, Fabulous Coaching, Training, and Productions, LLC, From Silence to Safety: Human Resource Strategies for Preventing and Addressing Workplace Mobbing
• Cevat Celep, Girne American University, Mobbing Directed at Teachers in Türkiye
• Linda Crockett, Canadian Institute of Workplace Bullying Resources, Working With All Parties Without Excusing Harm: A Trauma-Informed Accountability Pathway for Mobbing
• Steve Fellner, SUNY Brockport, Academic Mobbing and the Fragmented Memoir
• Mariya E. Ivanova, Trakia University, From Experience to Analysis: Workplace Mobbing as a Systemic Phenomenon: Structural Amplification, Triggers, and Recovery
• Gisèle Yasmeen, McGill University, Let No Good Deed Go Unpunished: Whistleblowing and Workplace Mobbing in Publicly Funded and Regulated Institutions
• Maritza Reyes (at The Savory Tort), attorney and independent scholar, Qualifying Workplace Mobbing for Expert Testimony in U.S. Federal Courts
• Sandra Kouritzin, University of Manitoba, Civility as Governance: Linguistic Regimes of Credibility and Exclusion in Higher Education
• Paul Siskind, New York Healthy Workplace Advocates, Workplace Bullying and Mobbing: Legal Basics and Legislative Challenges
• Peter Coughlin, EconPolicy Research Group (Maputo, Mozambique), Canadian Credit Unions’ Vulnerability to Capture by Administrators and Directors: Remedies for Mobbing and Other Takeover Tactics
• Martin Sawma, Edwin Mellen University, Extending Conceptual Analysis of Reflective Motives to Causal Motivations
• Peter Wylie, University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Workplace Mobbing Victims Beware: Why Your Union Will Side With the Mobbers and Not You
• Paul Siskind and Mike Schlicht, New York Healthy Workplace Advocates; Qingli Meng, Niagara University; and Kenneth Westhues, University of Waterloo, Addressing Workplace Bullying and Mobbing Through Legislation
• George Perry, independent writer; Dave Scott-Thomas, coach and independent writer; Jonah Arnold, Health Law Firm; Christine Marie, independent writer; Michael Capiraso, independent writer, Media Coverage Transforms Workplace Mobbing Into Full-blown Cancellations
• Janet Glover-Kerkvliet, Kerkvliet Counseling Associates LLC; and Sonja Pitts, Reign Consulting Group LLC, From Crisis to Coordination: Toward a National Network for Workplace Mobbing Target Survivors

Auditorium at Niagara University this morning

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Niagara University Press Release

NIAGARA UNIVERSITY HOSTS THE 3RD ANNUAL NIAGARA CONFERENCE ON WORKPLACE MOBBING

NIAGARA UNIVERSITY, N.Y. — Organized in partnership with the World Association for Research on Workplace Mobbing (WARWM), Niagara University is hosting the 3rd annual Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing (NCWM) on July 20–22, 2026 (in-person and virtual).

Workplace mobbing is a subtle social process in which an employee from multiple levels of positions in an organization becomes the target of a systematic, persistent, and collaborated campaign of collective aggressions in the workplace, with the goal of eliminating the person out of the organization meanwhile destroying their identity. Workplace mobbing differs from ordinary workplace conflict. It is a social process in which multiple actors participate directly or indirectly in ways of psychological attack against the targeting, with a predetermined goal of eradication.

By supporting the scholarly study of workplace mobbing as a distinct academic discipline, Niagara University is becoming a significantly recognized hub for research, scholarship, and global dialogue on workplace mobbing.

The workplace mobbing initiative aims to establish an academic framework for understanding, researching, and preventing workplace mobbing, distinct from general bullying. It also aims to publish research and influence policy, moving toward treating workplace mobbing as a recognized, serious form of systemic psychological violence.

The efforts have led to the creation of the Journal of Workplace Mobbing, the first ever refereed and peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated exclusively to the topic. Its inaugural issue (2025) includes multiple articles originating from the 2024 NCWM at Niagara University. This journal–conference pipeline further cements Niagara University’s role in shaping this field. The second issue is ready to publish.

The initiatives also bring together experts globally, notably Dr. Kenneth Westhues from the University of Waterloo, Canada, "the world's most renowned expert on mobbing in higher education" (The Swiss magazine Republik), "the world’s leading authority on academic mobbing" (Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars).

Niagara University welcomes scholars, professional experts, practitioners, and students to join us as we work together to advance the science of workplace mobbing.

About Niagara University. Founded in 1856, Niagara University is a Catholic and Vincentian institution dedicated to educating the whole person through a values-based education rooted  in justice, service, and compassion. For media inquiries, please contact: Alaina Jonathan, Asst. Director of Communications, phone (716) 946-2110, email ajonathan@niagara.edu.