In response to my past musings about Inauguration Day, Lyle Denniston reports that the President and Chief Justice will not buck tradition.

Steven Landsburg invokes Scrooge as the paradigmatic philanthrope. Actually, Landsburg suggests, Scrooge serves a cause far greater than philanthropy -- miserliness. After an entertaining economic analysis showing the postive effects of miserliness, Landsburg notes the value of saving and concludes:

Great artists are sometimes unaware of the deepest meanings in their own creations. Though Dickens might not have recognized it, the primary moral of A Christmas Carol is that there should be no limit on IRA contributions.

All this talk of Scrooge has me nearer the holiday spirit -- or my peculiar version of it, anyway. So with apologies to Tiny Tim, here's more Scrooge:

If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!

The New York Times reports the rising phenomenon of porn movies in cars. States are interested in banning the placement of DVD screens where the driver can watch them-- which may be wise (under the same rationale as bans on drunk driving, the drivers' license regime, and other ex ante infringements on liberty), although presumably there are some good uses of such screens, too, like transmission of map and weather information.

But states are also interested in stopping passengers from watching dirty movies on the screens if others can see them (at red lights, from the side of the road, etc.) This, if it stretches to reach non-obscene material, is unconstitutional. See City of Jacksonville v. Erznoznick (protecting a constitutional right to show bare buttocks or female breasts on a drive-in movie screen visible from the road). Powell's opinion leaves some room to draw a slightly broader statute (perhaps reaching material that is "obscene as to minors").

As always, complicated queries ensue. If Erznoznick is still good law, and it's constitutionally protected to show movies of nude people in the backseat of your car, would it be constitutionally protected to be nude in the backseat of your car? If Barnes v. Glen Theatre is still good law (is it?) then surely not. In general, this isn't a surprising result (movies that show murder are constitutionally protected; murder, of course, is not) but it would be interesting to see what the justification was in this case, what the harm was that justified banning nudity but not pictures of nudity. I suspect that in the end, something's gotta give.

The Slithery D and Adam Gitlin separately send along this Onion article about Supreme Court obsession, which hits way too close to home. [Reminder-- you can listen to both Supreme Court oral arguments and opinion presentations at Oyez; I particularly recommend Brown v WLF and Dept. of Commerce v U.S. House; you can also download a great number of them as MP3s for IPod use.]

Suffice it to say that time that ought to be spent reading my casebooks and preparing for class is getting swallowed by the combination of my terrible work habits, the Oyex project, and free LEXIS printing-- there are just so many fascinating articles to read, cases to listen to.