Yale's Ian Shapiro and Michael Graetz had a book award rescinded because of Professor Shapiro's allegedly anti-grad-student-union conduct. I have heard the rumors about Professor Shapiro too, and I am not wild about GESO either, but it does seem odd to condition a book award on the author's outside conduct. Then again, these things frequently function as some sort of broader achievement award.

My Con Law professor, Akhil Amar, has a piece in Slate discussing the yes's and no's of constitutional objections to the search of William Jefferson's office. In the end he suggests that most of the legal objections come to nought, but he gives them more credit than most serious thinkers have so far, and rightly so, I think.

Despite the drubbing it has taken in the blogosphere, I think Tyler Cowen's symmetry thesis has a great deal to recommend it. But I feel sorry for the commenter to the post who thinks that romantic equilibrium is "boring".

Like other bloggers, I recently got a copy of former Crescatter Jeremy Blachman's new novel, Anonymous Lawyer. I will confess that I never found the blog that amusing (or at least, it was less amusing than the XOXOHTH message boards, which I continue to hope will also turn out to be a hoax). The book, however, really is funny, and worth a quick summer read.

A word about authenticity: The folks in this thread have devoted a disturbing amount of their time to arguing about whether being a summer associate qualifies one to write a book about life at a big law firm. Since a lot of the authors, unlike Jeremy Blachman, will soon be spending their lives at big firms, they are rather eager to suggest that things are not really like they are portrayed in the book.

Granting this to be true, it still suggests that the critics fail to understand what it is to be a joke. Of course Anonymous Lawyer is not factually correct about everything that happens at big firms. If it were, it would not be funny. As a satire it only works by evoking certain commonly-held fears and ideas of the big law firm, but that no more requires those fears to be true than a chicken-to-the-other-side-of-the-road joke requires chickens to be motivated actors.

So the XOXOHTH folks need to lighten up, which is surely not the first time this has been said of them.

When a friend heard that I was living in Dupont Circle with my car, she pointed out that I had failed to really understand the choice inherent in D.C. living. You can get low taxes, open space, and free parking in Virginia, or convenience, good food and an eminently walkable city in the District. I managed neither.

I spent a very unfruitful several hours on Tuesday morning trying to fight my way though the Washington D.C. DMV. The experience confirmed my observations that for some mystifying reason, despite vast differences in demographics and funding, DMVs are equally miserable and maddening everywhere. According to the DMV website, as a temporary resident of the District Columbia I am eligible to receive a permit to park on the street if I produce a Connecticut license, registration, and proof of insurance and a D.C. lease. I have all of these things, but was lectured that I could only have a parking permit if I worked for a member of Congress. I asked to see a manager, but time ran out and I had to go to work, and I couldn't bring myself to spend my Saturday back there.

Of course, I've been equally unable to find a garage that has a monthly spot available anyplace in my general neck of the woods, so at the moment I've been moving my car from place to place trying to dodge tickets, feeling a little bit too much like Murray Tepper. I walked home with a spring in my step because my parking spot is good until Friday morning, and that was when I realized it was a bad sign.

If D.C. were a state rather than a federal enclave, I would be prepared to argue that residential parking regimes are in fact unconstitutional, violating the antidiscrimination rule of Article IV's privileges/immunities clause. I fail to see why a state should be able to make the right to park (and therefore the right to travel) conditioned on the state in which one reside. Alas, the federal government can do what it wants. But what do I have to do to get them to leave my car alone?