Jacob Levy emerges in the comments of a blog where I haven't caught him before-- he discusses pharmacists' freedom of choice at Tom Palmer's.

Steve Dunn challenges that nobody (including me) has a principled position on the Senate filibuster. Well, I have one:

I think that the filibuster is a rule, and that the Senate has rules about how to change its rules, and that so long as those meta rules (which may include the so-called "Constitutional option," and may not) are followed, that the concerns are purely political. (To use Steve's basketball-hoop analogy-- there may be no particular reason to have a 10' basketball hoop, but there are still principles that apply to the heights of basketball hoops: for example, their height should be changed only according to the formal rulemaking of the NBA, subject to the relevant notice and uniformity.)

This still doesn't answer the question about whether it would be prudent or good to eliminate this filibuster at this moment, but it answers its answerability, if you will.

I continue to be amused by people who 1: post text on the internet, and then 2: request that people neither cite it nor quote it without permission, as if they did not know that there is a cadre of ornery bloggers out there set to protect the quote-freely cite-freely norms of the blogosphere. See, e.g., Rebecca L. Brown, The Art of Reading Lochner, N.Y.U. J. L. & Liberty (forthcoming Summer 2005) available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=709103 ("This is a draft-- please do not cite or quote without permission.") I did not ask Ms. Brown's permission to post this.

UPDATE: I suspect that what many of these authors do mean is that citation and quotation in other academic articles should be done cautiously and only with permission (which is fair enough). If so, though, they should say so.

I was listening today to the oral arguments in General Dynamics v. Cline, where the Court decided that the Age Discrimination Act (which prohibits discriminating against people over the age of 40 on the basis of age) applied only when employers discriminated on the basis of old age.

There are some pretty good intuitve reasons to suppose that that's what Congress meant (although some other good reason that the Court might have gone the other way) but I wonder if the Court would apply this gloss to the 26th Amendment, which provides that "(t)he right of citizens of the United States, who are 18 years of age or older, to vote, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of age."

(The text has the same form: no person over age X shall be subject to age discrimination. But surely discriminating against 18-21-year-old jurors on the basis of their young-age isn't allowed).

As readers of this blog are probably aware, my partisan political affiliation is ephemeral (I am a registered independent and I split my vote three ways last election). Nonetheless, occasionally I gain a clear vision of a political affiliation I emphatically don't have. For example, at tonight's panel on "What's the Matter with Wal-Mart".

To be sure, if Wal-Mart is guilty of gender discrimination, torture, or child abuse (as tonight's speakers alleged), I think it should be prosecuted under the applicable laws. But I was very turned off by the too-slick segue into broad opposition to, inter alia, large box stores, the corporate form, and the rich. I understand that this sort of issue-blurring is an important political ploy (rich people and corporations are both more popular than torture) but I don't enjoy it.

I don't even like shopping at Wal-Mart (having grown up shopping at Target and spent many high school hours in a K-Mart), but something about tonight's attack made me almost want to go find one and shop at it as a gesture of protest. I don't care that Wal-Marts have their temperatures and music selections centrally managed, that the Walton heirs have more money than I do, or that people buy lots of tires at Wal-Mart, and I don't see what any of that has to do (or should have to do) with the suits against it.