Stuart Taylor and Benjamin Wittes suggest that we should get rid of (some or all of the) Supreme Court clerks because the justices are too powerful and too lazy. I confess that this idea continues to seem quite silly to me, as it did when David Garrow suggested it in his review of the Blackmun papers.

Modern Supreme Court opinions tend to be long and comparatively scholarly, and I for one do not number this as a bad thing. Neither is the alleged profileration of concurrences and dissents, so long as the Justices can continue to produce a majority opinion with the force of law, which most of the time they can.

And it's profoundly weird to get so upset at the delegation of work-production. Senators no longer write their own speeches, and neither do Presidents. Both rely on massive retinues of writers, researchers, and advisers. These folks are expensive, and some of these jobs are probably more useful as a means of patronage and resume-building than they are to the nation, but I highly doubt that the country would be a better place if we fired 75% of the lawyers in OLC, or the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

So too with the Court. Supreme Court Justices retain the ultimate authority about what is published in their name, and in how they decide the cases that they choose to hear. I fail to see what is so troubling about allowing them to have other people do some of the writing and researching. [Orin Kerr has a very funny version of this point here.]

I came across this interesting, if troubling case from the Tenth Circuit today by the eminent Judge Michael McConnell. An 18-year-old immigrant fathers a child with a consenting 14-year-old girl (with the consent of their parents). He's prosecuted for statutory rape in California and gets a short suspended sentence and 4 years probation and is eventually deported. He continues to support the child. Years later he is apprehended trying to re-enter the country and is sentenced to over 4 years in prison, since the prior conviction is legally considered to be a violent felony, even though in fact it is not really violent and not particularly felonious. The court affirmed the sentence.

Alas, this decision appears quite sound, and I'm glad the court added a special section to complain about the perverse injustice of the relevant sentencing rules. Still, I wonder why the court is forbidden from raising the "reasonableness" issue sua sponte.

Sonnet: On the Sonnet
John Keats

If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd,
And, like Andromeda, the Sonnet sweet
Fetter'd, in spite of pained loveliness,
Let us find, if we must be constrain'd,
Sandals more interwoven and complete
To fit the naked foot of Poesy:
Let us inspect the Lyre, and weigh the stress
Of every chord, and see what may be gain'd
By ear industrious, and attention meet;
Misers of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage, let us be
Jealous of dead leaves in the bay wreath crown;
So, if we may not let the Muse be free,
She will be bound with garlands of her own.

Forgive the frequent posting--today's been a day with long spaces of white noise.

But the New Yorker saves the day with a story by none other than Italo Calvino, and briefs written in a section called Live During Wartime by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Sierra Leone, '97), Tony D'Souza (Ivory Coast, '00), Aleksandar Hemon (Yugoslavia, '91), and Wendell Steavenson (Iraq, '04).

On a completely different note (no pun intended--well, maybe a little) was an article by Alex Ross on Joseph Volpe's farewell gala at the Met, which had a brief discussion on the popularization of opera ("popera," he calls it--it's great), somewhat resonant with a discussion found here and here. Natalie Dessay seems to have done well for herself, as well as a certain Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who recently also made waves with an all-Russian program here (Boston) and a performance of Shostakovich's settings of a few Michelangelo sonnets (I had no clue these settings existed) abroad (New York).

1995 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, Christiane Nuesslein-Volhard's new book, Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development has just been reviewed (favorably, I suppose) in this week's Nature.

Nuesslein-Volhard & Wieschaus's epic struggle to found developmental genetics in the fruit fly, both politically and scientifically, is of lore around these parts (especially around the fly-folk). Sadly, this narrative seems to be covered nominally in this book.

I know it's fairly late to be noticing this, but Will's question, below, had him blanching at the thought of bringing his own spices to the table. I, however, would prefer to rouge.

Are both appropriate?

Tyler Cowen explores what Superman should do with his time if he is a social welfare maximizer. His answers are interesting, but I think he undersells the quasi-conventional wisdom. Superman should seek out and kill or torture the biggest warlords and crimelords. Yes, this is to some extent redundant with what police forces already do, but Superman is much better at this, and by hypothesis uncorruptable.

Supervillainy appears to run on a tournament system, with a huge number of people trying to take over the world and only a few approaching success. The massive personal gains to becoming Saddam Hussein or Lex Luther make up for the very fall small probability of making it. If Superman can dependably eliminate those who win the supervillain tournament, the incentives to supervillainy basically disappear, forcing these people to go into options trading or trial lawyering or some other parasitic pursuit.

My home institution has been making news lately.

For one, there's this commencement speech by Professor Dan Kahan, in which he explains that being a good lawyer involves being responsible for the practical consequences of your legal conclusions. Therefore, the argument goes, John Yoo was a bad lawyer and Jack Goldsmith a good one. (In keeping with Yale's ego-centrism, both are of course YLS grads.) There are some interesting responses to this in the comments at PrawfsBlawg and Orin Kerr. Now, I agree that people should be morally responsible, but I wonder why Kahan so discounts the possibility that getting the law right, to the best of one's ability is itself a moral good. One wonders what he would have advised James Madison as a young lad.

In other news, this story has been making the rounds. I wonder whether confessing to or being convicted of a state felony is enough to get you kicked out of Yale Law School, and whether one can get a year's leave of absence in order to serve a prison term. A few months ago I scandalized co-bloggers Peter and Jeremy by insisting that academic institutions should not punish their members for felonious conduct unless the conduct also constitutes some violation of the rules of the institution, and actually harms the institution in some relevant way.

Of course, YLS rarely adopts my view about the proper role of group morality at an academic institution, and given that recording your roommate and his girlfriend in the shower might be enough to keep you from being admitted to the bar in many states, you might think that it's the sort of thing a law school would frown upon. Then again, he wouldn't be the first YLS grad not to take the bar or practice law. One wonders what Dan Kahan would do.

Two of my classmates each have an interesting new paper up at SSRN.

David Pozen has this exploration of the charitable tax deduction and its application to overseas rather than domestic charities, suggesting that all of the charitable deduction literature needs to be reworked.

Jacob Loshin has this piece on sign regulation, exploring the neglected land-use aspects of sign regulation rather than the well-trod first amendment aspects.