I haven't found much to say yet about Justice Blackmun's allegedly-scandalous use of law clerks. My own tentative thought is that the Justices' decisions to delegate a lot of their work to their clerks is no more troubling (and probably less so) than the massive amount of work that gets delegated to congressional staffs and executive departments. So long as the Supreme Court Justices maintain the ability to call the ultimate shots, they should be able to get ideas and guidance from their employees. They're lawyers after all. [It would be more troubling if there were evidence that S.C. Clerks game the cert.pool memos for political advantage, but Garrow presents none of that. Also, I don't even know if Garrow provides convincing evidence that the allegedly-scandalous delegation is going on, I'm just saying that even if he's right, it's not obviously scandalous.]

At any rate, I mention all of this only because I was reading a post at Ex Post that quoted from Blackmun's famous "Poor Joshua!" dissent in DeShaney v. Winnebago. I had read it before, but hadn't noticed until now that Blackmun invokes as the chief authority in his dissent Robert Cover's (fabulous) book Justice Accused.

Now, I loved Justice Accused, but I am not at all sure that the lesson that we should take from the antebellum moral/formalist dilemma is the one Blackmun would have had the court take. He is right, of course, that Cover points out that abolitionist justices frequently erred on the side of liberty in close slave cases, even when unwilling to strike the institution down wholesale. And I suspect Cover might also have welcomed open rebellion during times of great injustice.

But rather than suggesting this, Blackmun instead suggests that the Fourteenth Amendment "(was) designed, at least in part, to undo the formalistic legal reasoning that infected antebellum jurisprudence". This strikes me as exceedingly unlikely. It might have been designed as a limited move against judicial review altogether, but I think there are very few members of the 39th Congress, or of the 1868 United States, who thought that the terrible tragedies of the 19th century would have been obviated if we had only had a less formalist, more free-wheeling Supreme Court. Poor Robert Cover!

I think it would be fun to create a list of "good eating cities" as Raffi suggests below. But I think such a list would probably have to be cross-referenced to Raffi's previous work on good public transportation systems.

E.g., Washington D.C. is a pretty good eating city if and only if you have a car. As Tyler Cowen has exhaustively demonstrated, there are loads of delicious places to eat, at many price ranges and of many ethnicities, and there's also Wegman's, but both are available only to those with wheels. While Whole Foods stores and Safeways dot the downtown landscape, as well as some ethnic food and a lot of ice cream, but the difference is huge. (Non-chain fast food downtown is okay but surprisingly ungreat considering how many people eat there and how many places exist solely to serve their needs).

The same is true, to a lesser extent, of Chicago. If you can travel by car quickly and comparatively safely to the balkanized ghettoes and their respective delicacies (The Indian restaurant on Devon St., 24-hour-Korean-Restaurant in Bridgeport, &c.) then the city is your oyster. If not, there are a few local offerings wherever you are and plenty of high end and mid-high end places available downtown and on the north side, but nothing at the same level.

And if this is true in large cities like Chicago and D.C. it's all the more true in places where some of us live (unfortunately carless) like New Haven.

So London isn't a good place to eat. But what does make a city good or bad? I've been thinking about it, and have come up with this pretty intuitive list. Additions/disagreements welcome.

1. Staple Breakfast food: available for little money and everywhere (croissants/other pastries in Paris; bagels in New York). London, incidentally, has nothing in this category - they've tried bagels, and the only good thing about them is that the shops stock nutella.

2. Good fruit, vegetable, and other produce markets: New York has the Union Square market. Paris has markets all over the place. London isn't bad here either. Corrolary is good suppliers of wine, cheese, and bread.

3. Non-chain fast food under 10 dollars: Paris's baker's sandwiches, for me, are the paradigmatic perfect lunch. A sandwich in a half baguette, a tin of orangina, and then a slice of tart, usually for around 6 euros. New York is packed with great places to get lunch - sandwiches, soups, falafels, etc. London has fish and chips, but the number of places using fresh ingredients and good oil is mighty low these days. In fact, the best cheap lunch in london is probably a Marks and Spencer pre-packaged sandwich, unless you live near Paul.

4. Exceptional high end restaurants : Most cities have these, and for good reason. You need them around for a special occasion.

5. Reliable mid-range food: if you pay around $20, you should always be able to get a good, well cooked meal. This is true in New York. It's also true in any Parisian bistro. It is massively not true in London, with some improvements recently.

6. Good general supermarket : I'm not talking Wegman's here. This is a good supermarket with tinges of upmarket quality for when you're in a hurry. Having a Wegman's around is also good, for near market level quality without the shopping around.

7. Good specialized bakeries for dessert: When you need a cake for a party, is there anywhere to get one?

8. Wide range of cuisine: This is one where Paris falls on its butt, and New York (and even London) do pretty well. You should be able to get Chinese, or Thai, or Indian, or pizza, or whatever, if you want it, in relatively decent form.

So, anything else? Maybe, to stir up real controversy, I should make up a ranking of cities based on these metrics. Given what happens when law schools get ranked, I'd expect fireworks.

UPDATE: Umm, as commenter washerdreyer points out, that's supposed to be the union square market. Not Washington Square.

For those who are addicted to such things, there are a few new oral arguments from the 2003 term available on Oyez.