I went to NYC last weekend mostly to visit friends, but also to see Christo's gates. In the end my laziness got the better of me and I went to visit the Strand instead of orange-shrouded Central Park. This means that I cannot, in good conscience, post about why I think Death's post about the gates is wrong, why the gates are not beautiful and not good. (C.f. Angus Dwyer).

However, I will note an ancillary concern which I mentioned to Ms. Death as we were walking out of the law school this evening-- I think New York City may be opening itself up to some First Amendment claims, if it refuses to grant use of the park to the next public artist who wishes to use the park for some megalomaniacal megaproject. To be sure, since Christo used only his own money for this, the number of other people willing to spend 30 million dollars to drape the park with flags may be small, but because Christo used only his own money, the city would be particularly hard pressed to argue that this was not private speech but government speech.

And since it has opened up a public forum (parks are traditional public fora, and Central Park is the ultimate park) for one speaker, it will have a hard time explaining why it won't open up the same park to later speakers who want to make similar use of it. This means that when the neo-Nazis wish to drape Central Park in swastikas, when NARAL wishes to drape the park with pro-choice propaganda, when I wish to drape the park with ads to come visit Crescat, the city will be hard pressed to explain why we cannot, so long as we are willing to do so on our own dollar.

This isn't to say that it will be impossible for it to produce viewpoint- (and perhaps content-) neutral justifications, just that it will suddenly be forced to do so, which will be cumbersome and risky.

My esteemed Land Use professor called on me for the first time today in class, which was fine enough, but afterwards, thanks to the adrenaline rush, I was so punchy that I got in a ten-minute argument in First Amendment where I tried to defend Justice Douglas's concurrence in Brandenburg v. Ohio. My submission that the speech/conduct distinction is the principle of content-neutrality came in for a drubbing, but Steve Sachs has been helping me rehabilitate it.

I decided this morning to spend my day off from work attempting to fix Crescat Sententia's very broken backend by migrating from Berkeley DB to MySQL. Six hours later, I've been rewarded with the first full Crescat rebuild in months. (And for those of you who have been getting error messages when you try to ping us, that should go away as well.) However, the lone casualty seems to have been the category associations for about 90% of our posts. We at Crescat have decided to look upon this as an opportunity to try to make our category archives more useful, so I'm opening up the comments. Do any of our readers use our category archives? Are there things you would like to see done to make them more useful? Or have you never even noticed they existed? Let us know and we'll take your feedback into consideration.

I am sad to announce that our lovingly-created if totally incoherent categories for Crescat posts (in the drop-down menu to the right) have up and disappeared. Hopefully I can re-categorize things manually, but I make no guarantee that this will ever happen. In the meantime, I strongly recommend the Search Function, a little lower down the sidebar, which works very well.

On the bright side, our famously cumbersome archives now rebuild.

Belle Waring discusses the upcoming Supreme Court case of Kelo v. New London. [Full disclosure: The case is being argued by my employers-to-be this summer.]

The Takings Clause has not fared that well in the Supreme Court, especially the "public use" clause. (There are basically three kinds of Takings Clause claims, 1) whether a particular regulation "takes" at all, 2) whether the compensation that is offered is "just" and 3), whether the taking is for a private, rather than public, use and therefore verboten). Since the last two major "public use" cases have been unanimous victories for the government, the decision can hardly be worse than what has come before.

The thing that intrigues me most is why the Court granted cert. on this case at all unless it wishes to finally change course on this question. My Land Use professor suggests (and hopes) that the Court will merely huff and puff about the importance of private property and judicial review before ultimately affirming the lower court's decision, but then again, that is what my father thought would happen in Guantanamo, and that turned out to be quite wrong.

My guess is that Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas side with Ms. Kelo, Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, and Breyer side with New London, and O'Connor and Rehnquist are the tough nuts to crack here. If the majority opinion is written in favor of Ms. Kelo, then Breyer might concur in the result.

Two years ago, I went on a clothes-buying binge and acquired, among other things, a pair of dress shirts that have remained my favorites. They are "Woodward wrinkle-free" shirts, 60% cotton, and although there were loads of them in the basement of Macy's when I was shopping then, I am now unable to find any trace of the Woodward company or of their shirts.

When I nearly lost one to a cayenne pepper incident, this stepped up the urgency to find more of these shirts-- in any color. They are fantastic and durable. I beg any reader with any information at all on how to track these shirts down to email me, at wbaude at crescat sententia dot org.