Yeah, yeah. Late. I'm studying for the bar. But I do notice just this week that I've expanded my food library by about 50 books in the past year. Largest private food library in the world, here I come.

Breakfast: Maneish - Zaatar, a pungent combination of dried thyme, sumac, and sesame seeds, doesn't make it into most American supermarkets. I buy mine on the occasional trip to what one local guidebook calls "little armenia", a stretch of ethnic grocers in the heart of Watertown. Most people also don't know that it's meant to be eaten for breakfast, mixed into a paste with the purest olive oil, and then spread on either pita, or a pizza like bread dough. Nigella Lawson even tried to use it as a crust for chicken in her Forever Summer, which smacks to me of putting the much abused wasabi in ice cream. But in Damascus, where fierce competition rages among the local women for the title of best maker of zaatar (the best results are achieved by those who gather and dry their own wild thyme), tubs of paste are taken to the local baker, and spread deliciously on fresh pita dough before sliding into the oven for the barest of five minutes. The result is maneish, breakast of champions. And, incidentally, also what I subjected my bar review class to three times last week. For those unfamiliar with zaatar itself, a picture is here, pre-oil.

Lunch: Avocado, tuna, and tomato salad - I'm terribly ashamed to admit it, but this is actually a recipe from the new Martha Stewart sponsored program on PBS (a station, incidentally, which I'm also ashamed to watch, and would happily see cut off from the public teat). These are some of the happier tastes of summer, and work perfectly with fresh romaine, a few slices of red onion, and a crusty brown loaf.

Dinner: Pissaladiere - The maneish making left me with spare bread dough, so I used some of what was left to make this pizza-like delicacy of southern France. Like the Alsatian Flammekuchen, the base of the pissaladiere is caramelized onion, but it differs from its northern cousin in that dough is a bread dough (rather than a butter pastry), and it is topped with a checkerboard pattern of anchovies and nicoise olive. A rather unsuccessful picture of my less successful pissaladiere is here, since I figure some people would still like to see it.

Dessert: Lemon Pie - Have you ever been home on Friday night, desperately hungry, only to find that the fridge contains nothing but half a lemon, and you're hard against your self imposed weekly budget which replenishes on Saturday morning? (six digit debt does funny things to fiscal discipline) No? Well then you're missing out on the tasty results of that otherwise dolorous situation, in the form of this lemon pie, Shaker style. the lemon was sliced thinly, peel included, and placed in a short crust with sugar. A picture is here. The pie was delicious.

Via Charles Black, The Proposed Amendment of Article V: A Threatened Disaster, 72 Yale L J 957 (1963) (available at JSTOR) I discover that in the 60s the Council of State Governments tried to push through a proposal to amend the Constitution and create a Court of the Union, composed of the Chief Justices of all of the State Supreme Courts, to oversee the U.S. Supreme Court. Needless to say, this proposal died, but I wonder, if it existed, which clerkships would be seen as the highest status.

In response to all of the outrage and anti-outrage (discussed infra), I went back to read the appalling Comment, The Public Use Limitation on Eminent Domain: An Advance Requiem, 58 Yale L. J. 599 (1949), which describes, with some unfairness to the historical record but plenty of excavation of then-recent cases, how the public use clause was dead and dying:

The Supreme Court has repudiated the doctrine of public use. Most state courts have arrived at the same conclusion, although rarely with so much directness. Doubtless the doctrine will continue to be evoked nostalgically in dicta and may even be employed authoritatively in rare, atypical situations. Kinder hands, however, would accord it the permanent interment in the difests that is so long overdue.

Kaimi Wenger is "disappointed" and surprised by the outrage that Kelo has engendered in the blogosphere. and Marty Lederman asks similar questions. The answer, which I hope is obvious, is that a lot of people think the court's decision was both legally and morally wrong. It does no good, as Stevens, Lederman, and Wenger do, to waive Supreme Court precedent as a resolution to the problem (let us leave aside the question of whether Berman and Midkiff and Brown command, outside of dicta, the result in Kelo).

After all, "(T)he ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it." Graves v. New York 306 U.S. 466, 491-492 (Frankfurter, J., concurring). C.f. Akhil Amar, The 1999 Supreme Court Term, Foreword: The Doctrine and the Document, 114 Harv. L Rev 26, 84 ("Marbury-style judicial review presupposes that judges are enforcing the People's document, not their own deviations."); U.S. Const. Art. VI ("This Constitution ... shall be the supreme law of the land") (making similar claims about treaties and federal statutes but conspicuously not about statements issued by majorities of the Supreme Court).

The Supreme Court is often unwilling to jettison even erroneous precedent, but why shouldn't critics be outraged? The talk of "shock" does seem hyperbolic, I will grant. But I suppose the human answer to this is that people are optimists when important moral issues are at stake. In a triumph of hope over experience, they expect the court to enforce the law of the land, even when it would shock the legal establishment. The Court rarely has such courage.

Which brings us to Professor Ellickson, who "prefer(s) that the main battlegrounds on eminent domain issues be city halls, state capitals, and state supreme courts, not the federal courts." Though he suggests that this makes him "unlike the IJ," it is worth emphasizing that the Institute for Justice files most of its eminent domain cases in state courts (even though Williamson County probably does not require them to) that they have three state chapters devoted almost entirely to state-law litigation, an active grass-roots legislative arm, relentless media campaign, and so on. Unlike Professor Ellickson, I think that a moderate amount of federal litigation complements rather than contradicts the federalist vision we share (and there are serious concerns about economics-of-scale that a small charitable organization faces); but the battle will indeed be fought in state capitals and state courts, and IJ will be there fighting it.