I knew there was a federal law of admiralty. I knew that in many guises, the federal common law still lurked. I did not know that there was a federal common law of contracts, which applies in the explicity and conceded absence of any federal statute regulating the matter to a lawsuit for $50,000 against UPS air services. Or so holds the Seventh Circuit, in keeping with what appears to be the unanimous view so far among the circuits.

I wonder if there is also still a federal common law of negotiable instruments.

UPDATE: Link should be fixed.

There's some interesting stuff at Bainbridge's and David Lat's Abovethelaw about the role of transactional lawyers. There's a much longer post underlying all this, but to be brief: yes, I think transactional lawyers can be pie expanders. How? In addition to what Bainbridge says, because we (and I'm speaking about my bosses here) are good at cutting oddly shaped pies to order for people who want oddly shaped pieces, in a context where everyone might leave pie on the table if they don't get the kind of piece they want. Our clients only cut pie once every several years, if that. We cut multiple pies every month. So they hire us to cut the pie the way they want it to be cut rather than give up on pie. If we accomplish that, I think we've probably done a societally efficient job.

It's not clear to me how this happened, but I somehow played two years of varsity tennis during high school, despite weighing 250 pounds. It was a pretty good team, too - I can brag of having once warmed up Paul Goldstein, now a fairly good professional tennis player, but then a rival school's tennis super-star. Anyway, the point is that I always was puzzled to find that I didn't lose any weight during tennis season. Indeed, I sometimes gained a few pounds. How could two hours of pretty vigorous exercise fail to make a dent in the flapping billows of excess Raffi?

Well, I long ago came to the realization that the Washington Post points out today - liquid calories are a devastating and insiduous fattener. Until my parents handed over their then 13 year old Ford Aerostar (yes, I was the high school kid with a minivan), I didn't have a way to get home after practice, other than with the school's so-called "late bus". There was a crew of about four of us in the bus, so the driver would always stop at 7-11 on the way home. Being virtuous, I didn't join him in his 64 oz soda, but got only the 32 oz. "Big Gulp," with a 48 oz. extravagance on Friday. Hey, I had sweated it out, right?

But as the Post points out, liquid calories are deceptive, in that you don't realize how many you're consuming, and unfulfilling, in that you still eat as much solid food as you would have eaten otherwise. They are dead calories, and almost a completely inexhaustible source of them. A real coke afficianado, like myself, could (and would) easily put away 2 liters in a sitting, and still have space leftover for any number of my mother's wonderful stuffed grape leaves. But the Big Gulp was quite enough on its own. The Big Gulp, in other words, was counterbalancing whatever exercise I was managing to do.

When I moved to Scotland, home of the warm soda and the full price refill, twenty pounds dropped away almost instantly. I then figured it was all the walking. But exercise, in reality, has almost nothing to do with that sort of obesity. It's all a question of intake. And by moving just a few thousand miles, my chief source of superfluous intake had suddenly fallen away.