This morning going through the 110th St. station, for the first time I saw two policemen checking bags. They were pretty lackadaisical about it; people who volunteered could go through the gate for free instead of sliding their card to go through the turnstile for $2.

Tonight coming back from Brooklyn, I got onto the uptown 1 train at 96th St. There were two policemen in my car, and they looked much less cheerful than the guys at 110th twelve hours earlier. I discovered why when I got home and opened a browser.

New York Named in Terror Threat Against Subways
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM 10:46 PM ET
Officials said they were notified of a terrorist threat that for the first time specifically named New York City's transit system.

In other news, as I was looking for information on obtaining a temporary liquor license, I noticed that many forms pertaining to interstate wine shipments have been made available. Does anyone know at what point putting up extra bureaucracy would become an actionable impediment to interstate commerce?

PG, as usual, catches me up on sloppy reasoning. (See her post below responding to my post on gas stations). I suppose I should ponder the analogy more carefully.

Lawyers are to the law of their state as gas station owners are to . . . what? Lawyers use barriers to entry to ensure that they get unique privileges to deal with the law of their state (this is Ribstein's argument as I understand it). So wouldn't it be right to say that the proper analogy is to the distribution and sale of gasoline in their state? Lawers : their state's law :: gas station owners : the sale of gasoline in their state.

It's still the middle of on-campus-interviewing and my first callback isn't for a few weeks, so I can't offer advice on how to politely decline a firm.

Can the well-mannered writers and readers of this blog tell me how one turns down job offers in such a polite way that future employment opportunities will not be foreclosed? I had to say no to a couple of options when I was working between undergrad and law school, but as they were both very different from the job I took, explaining my decision and voicing the appropriate regret over not being able to enjoy the opportunities they were offering was not difficult.

Law firm jobs, on the other hand, are rather difficult commodities to distinguish and thus I am having trouble coming up with something that doesn't sound like, "You're too low on the totem pole." [Stops to think about what a law firm totem pole actually would look like.] Also, should the refusal be a call to the recruiting manager or to the partner/ associate who called to give the offer? or should it be made by regular or e-mail?

Incidentally, Will slightly confuses what Prof. Ribstein believes about the barriers to entry for the legal profession. Compare

Of course, given Professor Ribstein's dubious belief that the bar exam might be good because it gives lawyers a "quasi-property right" in their profession, why not suppose that this sort of guild-protection legislation gives gas station owners a "quasi-property right" in the business of gas stations, encouraging them to, I don't know, participate in the development of the gas station industry or something.

I argue ... that, by imposing entry barriers, lawyer licensing gives lawyers a kind of quasi-property right in the law of the state in which they are licensed. Like all property rights, this gives them incentives to maintain the "product," as by working on new laws and maintaining existing laws.

Larry Ribstein has discovered the interest-group rent-seeking of no-self-service laws in Oregon and New Jersey. As he notes, these laws appear to survive thanks to the combined efforts of large gas stations, the disabled, and their supporters.

But, as a commenter to his post makes clear, consumers don't care much about diffuse economic costs (if they even believe in them), which is how a wide variety of extortionate barriers to entry survive. Of course, given Professor Ribstein's dubious belief that the bar exam might be good because it gives lawyers a "quasi-property right" in their profession, why not suppose that this sort of guild-protection legislation gives gas station owners a "quasi-property right" in the business of gas stations, encouraging them to, I don't know, participate in the development of the gas station industry or something.

I find unpersuasive the quasi-property right defense of guild legislation, but if one finds it persuasive for lawyers, why not for gas stations?

The University of Michigan has collected an array of documents by and about Harriet Miers here.

Meanwhile, Virginia Postrel floats the idea of using the judiciary hearings to test not Miers's substantive views of the law, but simply her knowledge of current con law doctrine, something Roberts was particularly deft with.

Meanwhile Mark Liberman at Language Log attempts to refute at least one of the allegations that Harriet Miers is an awful writer.