Tom Stoppard denies the existence of human rights to free speech (and probably human rights at all), but still ends up defending and glorifying free speech as a matter of legal realism. Amber Taylor isn't a fan, since she believes that individual rights are something other than political grace or subjective fiats.

Fine. Oddly enough, I agree with Stoppard more than Taylor here; I do believe in rights that pre-date and pre-exist the legal rules that (sometimes) protect them. But I have little hope about the ability to demonstrate these rgihts in any but the most cursory fashion. So my real puzzlement is why Stoppard decided to write this article at all. It is surely my ignorance of the current state of British politics, but what's Stoppard gunning for?

It was some non-descript time the twentieth-century thirties when Mr. John Samuel Brook stumbled on a time machine on his way home from work one weary February afternoon from an afternoon concert. Time machines weren't as scarce as they seem to be now: physicists had just had relative consensus on a theory of quantum mechanics, and nothing much seemed to be quite so sure anymore--time, least of all.

Mr. Brook was a conductor, of course, and things were much more difficult for conductors back then: it required them not only to stand on one foot for extended periods of time (all the while singing, hopping, &c.) to the discordant tunes of a barely-tuned orchestra that needed to retune between each chord, not to mention the choir, which consisted of three-hundred men all improvising their own parts.

Life was not good.

And the time machine was respite. Mr. Brook hopped in, and went back to the last semi-decent time he could think of: early eighteenth-century Germany.

Upon arriving, Mr. Brook found himself out of sorts: he had no wig, he had no stockings. Heaving a sigh and trading in his wristwatch and spectacles (both of which the pawn-shop regarded with parenthesized eyebrows), Mr. Brook next turned to changing his name: "Something German," he said, "something very, very German." The first and last name wrote themselves: Johann Bach. But there was something markedly old testament about Samuel, doomed to be denegraded by prevalent anti-Semitism: Sebastian seemed likeable enough (named, of course, after the Twelfth Night character).

But what about a back-story? A man of thirty-odd years (depending on what degree of twentieth-century thirties it was--again, people weren't too big on keeping time back then), it only made sense: thirty years prior would place him roughly in 1680. And what month? Well, equinox sounded nice, spring too--March 21st it was.

And what else, then, but a profession: Mr. Bach nee Brook had no problems: music. A huge fan of Buxtehude, and hater of Handel, it seemed only appropriate: Johann Sebastian Bach, Bach the elder, Papa Bach, would compose. And compose he did.

Happy 326th, old man, and many happy returns.

ERRATUM: Bach was born in 1685, making him (now) 321. How embarassing.

There's no real hope that I'll catch up on all of the things I meant to blog about while in San Francisco but that were lost to my spotty wireless connection. But in an effort to make an effort:

Alex Tabarrok wonders why french bread is so hard to get outside of france. I note that Breadline in D.C. does a tolerable imitation, and I think it is probably better than the 35th percentile bakery in Paris. Much discussion can be found in the comments there.

Meanwhile, Orin Kerr comments on an article in the Journal of Law and Public Policy about the relationship between the Harvard Federalist Society and conservativism at Harvard. While I agree with Professor Kerr's skeptical about the Federalist Society's causal role, I think he is too quick to dismiss a well-organized conservative group as a bunch of free pizza and the occasional speaker. To the degree that a federalist society acts as a social group during admitted students weekends, I think it really can make potential students more likely to matriculate at a place when they are on the fence.

Professor Kerr also has some interesting observations on a pair of cases just argued in the Supreme Court about the scope of the Confrontation Clause after Crawford. The question is whether certain statements made to the government via 911 or when the police officer was investigating a domestic disturbance are permissible exceptions to the Confrontation Clause's requirement. Professor Friedman and Jeff Fisher say no, the governments say yes. Orin Kerr predicts that the Court will split the cases; I predict narrow wins for the defendants on both counts.