Announcing Techdirt’s March Madness: Get Your Bracket For The Most Misunderstood Legal Concept
It's that time of year - March Madness - when tons of people have filled out brackets and are watching college basketball. Way back in 2020 I had jokingly suggested on Twitter that we should set up a bracket for the most frequently misunderstood legal concepts, and people seemed to really like the idea. Of course, then I got busy and did nothing with it... until now. Introducing the inaugural Techdirt March Madness to determine what is the most misunderstood legal concept.
If you want to fill out your own bracket, you can get the spreadsheet here - you just need to make a copy and save it your own Google drive, and then fill out your bracket, take a screenshot and share it on Twitter (and tag @techdirt).
Each day that this is running, we'll be posting Twitter polls of the competing legal concepts to see which one is more misunderstood. The winner will advance to the next round, eventually crowning the most misunderstood legal concept for 2022.
A few notes on how this initial bracket came together. Back in 2020 when I suggested this idea (jokingly, I swear), people sent in lots and lots of suggestions. Initially it was just supposed to be misunderstood laws, but that was too limiting to get to a 64-entry bracket (or at least an interesting one), so I expanded it to legal concepts. That does mean that there are some overlapping concepts (e.g. free speech" and 1st Amendment"), but I don't much care. We'll see how it goes.
As for the seeding, I loaded all these concepts into an AI system to see what it said and then ranked them accordingly... or, actually, I just kind of made up the seeding with a few obvious ones closer to the top and then a lot of just randomly throwing together ones in the middle. You can disagree with the seeding, and we'll see how the eventual voting turns out.
That's basically it. Fill out your brackets and tweet them at us in the next day or so, because we'll start running the Twitter polls tomorrow morning...