Now Austin, Texas is pretty famous for its music scene. But have you ever heard of that merry band of troubadours who wander the Western District of Texas sharing their music, poetry, and epic tales?

Then again, a more archaic definition of “bard” is “a slice of bacon placed on meat or game before roasting.” Insert your own joke here.

Last night as I was walking from work to a dinner event in midtown Manhattan, a homeless guy approached me and asked: “Sir, could I trouble you for $85.00?”

I guess on Madison Avenue, everyone thinks big.

In all the fuss of finals, graduation, moving, and plunging into that peculiar flavor of hell known as bar exam preparation, I’ve let a lot of things slide. Email conversations lay frozen in mid-exchange, voicemails have stacked up on the cell phone, and forlorn instant message windows linger for days in the corner of my screen. And as you may have noticed, no blogging.

I try to reassure myself with the idea that this is only temporary, but once I start work next week and have my crackberry surgically implanted, it won’t get any better.¹

But before that happens, I’m hoping to fix a few things up around here and also post a bunch of new pictures, including those from the recent “bar trip” spent trekking around the Pacific Northwest. I’ve also got in mind a short series of blog posts about hiking the West Coast Trail. Whether I’ll have the time to write it up this week, however, is an open question…

1.  Don’t get me wrong — I’m really excited about the new career direction and I’m looking forward to it. But let’s not kid ourselves: I’ll be quite busy. Plus, I won’t be blogging about work out of concern for client confidentiality and professional ethics, so new material for this site may quickly become scarce.

The title is a quadruple bonus points spoonerism. Transposing the initial morphemes not only results in one valid English word (bonus points) but two valid English words (double bonus points) that make sense alongside one another (triple bonus points) and can be used coherently in the same simple English sentence (quadruple bonus points). ¹

As in: “I’ve been ducking fun while studying for my finals these past few weeks, but now I am…”

I wonder if the accuracy of the statement might qualify me for quintuple bonus points, because that example sentence is also true: I’m done.

I don’t want to jinx myself before the grades are all in, and there always seems to be more administrative paperwork lurking somewhere, but I’ve finished my last law school exam and my time here at UW is ending this week.

Consistent with the typical shrine-to-me navel-gazing norms of the blogosphere, I should probably say something introspective and profound now. But I don’t really feel anything (except maybe more in touch with my inner curmudgeon). I just want to finish moving and get busy with the preparation for the bar exams.

And it had better be cool on Friday. Nice weather. None of this 90-degree crap like we had yesterday, especially if I have to march around in some damned gown and hood all day.

1.   These rules were established long ago in a obscure process. Don’t ask.

Today is Aldan’s tenth birthday, making the moosh a full decade old in people-years:

Not that huskies can read calendars or anything, but I’ve got an urge to get him something to mark the occasion tonight. Maybe a cheese omelet or big beef marrow bone. You know, something beyond the usual milk-bone or whatever small animal he’s managed to catch this week. (His latest was a bat yesterday. Don’t ask me how — I didn’t see it happen. I just got to be the bad guy who took it away.)

Only trouble is, whatever I do will have to be done in a way that won’t make Panda too jealous. That hooligan has got two more years before he rolls over into double-digits, and he’s certainly not shy about expressing his displeasure at being left out of anything…

Get your additional husky fix here.

Just in case I wasn’t completely clear on that point. It never ceases to amaze me how much stuff accumulates over just a few years. (Although all the casebooks and other school-related stuff I can understand…)

Can someone out there hurry up and invent a teleportation device of some kind so that I don’t have to box up all this crap?

At the beginning of my 2L year, the director of campus recruiting gave me the materials for the Department of Justice’s honors program and recommended that I apply for it. I tried to appear interested, but I was wary. I remembered my wide-eyed incredulity from a short time before when the DOJ’s civil rights division decided to intervene in a discrimination case involving the Boy Scouts of America, Inc. (the ones with the firm policy of no gays and no atheists) — but on the side of the BSA.

Maybe in a sane administration I’d have loved to have spent a summer working for the DOJ. But at that moment, the prospect of not only defending the same organization that had kicked me out in 2000, but having to argue with a straight face that their civil rights were violated when local governments with their own nondiscrimination rules refused to give them handouts just seemed downright Kafkaesque. Logically I knew that I’d most likely be working on something completely different, but nevertheless my thoughts always came back to that. Why the hell would I volunteer to work in that environment? Life’s too short for that kind of masochism.

“Well, that’s John Ashcroft for ya…” I thought to myself and stuffed the application in my backpack, where it languished for a few days before I trashed it.

Turns out I had an even better reason not to bother.

The Washington Post reports that for the past few years, political appointees have been dominating the hiring process for the honors program at the DOJ. Apparently, applicants with progressive or Democratic credentials have been passed over while the “Honors” program managed to get thoroughly infested with mediocre Federalist Society members from fourth-tier evangelical law schools:

The Justice Department is removing political appointees from the hiring process for rookie lawyers and summer interns, amid allegations that the Bush administration had rigged the programs in favor of candidates with connections to conservative or Republican groups, according to documents and officials.

Had I bothered to apply anyone who looked at my resume or did a quick Google or Lexis search on my name could probably figure out in seconds that, by those standards, I wasn’t going to be their guy:

The House and Senate Judiciary committees also are investigating allegations from an anonymous group of Justice employees that most of those cut from the application lists had worked for Democrats or liberal causes and that Elston removed people for spurious reasons that included “inappropriate information about them on the Internet.”

Goodness… Given that the process at DOJ was being overseen by political minders rather than career lawyers, I’d just love to know what constituted “inappropriate information” in their eyes.

Maybe Henry Waxman can find out for us.

Only one problem there, though: Guess who’s responsible for enforcing Congressional subpoenas? Yep, you guessed it — the DOJ.

D’oh.

If, like me, you’re a bit perturbed by the recent Supreme Court decision in Gonzales v. Carhart — especially Justice Kennedy’s argument that we can ditch informed consent in favor of simply legislating away a medical procedure that some women may come to regret later — then read this.

Nice thing about the Internet: Someone out there always seems to say it better than I can. Saves me a lot of trouble when I can find it…

But this haiku is a summary of this week’s SCOTUS decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. (h/t to Michael Dorf and the Columbia chapter of ACS.)

It makes me wonder if many key decisions should be summarized in haiku form. Seems like something the BarBri instructors would do in a cooler, more entertaining parallel universe…

Wade Garrett and I were just discussing the latest email from the Student Bar Association asking for nominations for graduation speakers. We were both feeling rather unmotivated about the whole prospect of having to listen to any of our fellow students, and wondered if we couldn’t just vote for skipping that part and going home early.

Then we hit upon a more diabolical plot. We form a cabal of speakers who would compete with each other to deliver the shortest graduation speech ever, and have them all campaign for the spots. It was during this conversation that the notion of a “graduation haiku” was born:

Tedium and toil
has been our lot for these last
three years of law school.

We served our sentence
trapped among the law books, and
now we scatter, free.

Weary yet happy,
we drift away to new lives:
this journey is done.

If only we gunners and proto-lawyers could rein in our tongues long enough to do such a thing as deliver a short speech entirely in haiku! I’d pay good money to see that.

There’s a list making the rounds right now of the most significant 50 science fiction / fantasy books of the last 50 years. I couldn’t resist taking a shot at it to see how well-read I am in the genre, although now I feel like such a lightweight geek by comparison to all the folks over at ScienceBlogs who have also posted their versions of this list. (For some other examples, check out Orac, PZ, Tikistitch, Joseph, John, Bora, and the News Blog.)

Legend:
Bold = Read it
Italic = In the queue / on the shelf (Disclaimer: May have been in the queue for years now, thanks to law school)

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

There is, of course, plenty of room to debate which books belong on this list (I can think of a few glaring omissions). But since I don’t even know for sure where this list got started and what methodology was used to create it, I’ll just skip all that. For now.

But feel free to leave your recommendations in the comments for that blessed day when I’ll be able to do some recreational reading again.

[crossposted at QLaw]

The Michigan Court of Appeals has just yanked all the health insurance benefits for unmarried partners of state employees because of Michigan’s recently passed anti-gay amendment.

Remember when the proponents of the anti-gay constitutional amendments kept saying that they wouldn’t affect the insurance benefits? And when some of us pointed out that the broadly-worded amendments could affect a lot more than just marriage, we were accused of using “scare tactics” and “outright lies?”

Well, take a look at how the Alliance Defense Fund has changed their spin:
This is before the ballot.
This is after the ballot.

I’m guessing we’ll see similar suits here in Wisconsin next, so these arguments and the court decision may be worth a look just so you’ll know what to expect…

Back when I used to work for the Sheriff’s Office, inmates would sometimes file court motions and write letters that would instantly alert you to the fact that they’d gone off their meds. You could even spot these documents from a distance because they were the only ones that used more than twenty exclamation marks in a row. Upon closer inspection, you’d see accusations that the cops were firing up the orbital mind-control lasers and using the penis-shrinking radiation in violation of the emancipation proclamation, or something. These guys inhabited a separate realm where only the smallest bits and pieces of our world dared to intrude.

Yesterday’s press release from the Landmark Legal Foundation took me back to those days.

Was this a joke? A knee-jerk reaction to Al Gore’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize? Or do they live in a reality distortion field that would put even Vice President Cheney’s to shame? Just read it and see what you think…

Update: Looks like he’s wasting no time positioning himself for the prize. Stunning.

If you’ve ever been subjected to Death by PowerPoint™ and rolled your eyes at the display of yet another Venn diagram, then you’ll appreciate this clever and funny video commentary on the “PowerPoint culture.”

h/t Presentation Zen, which has some good discussion and links to related materials.

P.S. Yes, I’m back in Madison getting ready for the start of classes. Finally.

I submit this editorial from Virginia, which is one of seven states (including Wisconsin) that passed an anti-gay constitutional amendment yesterday. The editorial excoriates the decision to write discrimination into the fundamental law of the state and to deny recognition for same-sex families, even in the form of civil unions, domestic partnerships, or private contract:

If you’re OK with that, we’re not. The majority of you voted for it. Now go to bed and say your prayers. And pray you are right and Christian and not just hateful and wrong.

Amen, but my money is still on the latter.

Right now, I’m too tired and too discouraged to say much else. But I see the shrinking margins of opposition and our victory in Arizona yesterday, and I know that once I get my batteries recharged, we’ll be going another round.

Oh, and here’s a quick message for Mark Gundrum and Juliane Appling and all the other righteous bigots out there behind the anti-gay amendment in Wisconsin:

Buckle up. And pack a lunch. This isn’t over — it’s just getting started.

The New Jersey Supreme Court has just ruled 4-3 in Lewis v. Harris that same-sex couples are entitled to the same rights and protections of marriage as opposite sex couples under the New Jersey Constitution:

Here’s the full decision (PDF).

This is a civil unions decision similar to Baker v. State of Vermont from 1999. They give the legislature 180 days to either amend the marriage statutes to allow same-sex couples to wed, or to enact a parallel structure by some other name. While this falls short of full marriage equality (separate but equal is never really “equal”), it is a very tangible win for same-sex couples in New Jersey. And I suppose there’s always the chance that the state legislature will do the right thing and grant full marriage equality rather than some dorky-sounding parallel thing.

Yeah, right. New Jersey residents, prepare to get civilunionized.

But it’s still a win, and I’ll take it — especially since the dissent in this 4-3 decision was in favor of full marriage equality and not just civil unions. So really it was 7-0 on equal rights and benefits, and then a split on whether a separate legal institution by some other name was actually “equal” or not. Talk about moving the goalposts…

You want to know why lesbians and gays fight for marriage equality? Then check this out.

A congressman convicted of a felony and sent to federal prison still gets to draw a pension. Upon his death, his spouse would still be eligible for it, too. But the legally married spouse of a congressman with 25 years of service in the House of Representatives gets absolutely nothing, because the federal government won’t recognize some marriage licenses from Massachusetts.

Nineteen years ago in Turner v. Safely, 482 U.S. 78 (1987), the Supreme Court held that even convicted felons who are still incarcerated have a constitutionally protected right to marry. That’s right… prisoners can marry, but we can’t. And because of this exclusion, our families are constantly getting left out in the cold like this.

Had enough?

Get to the polls on November 7 and do something about it. In fact, do something about it — no matter how small — every day between now and November 7.

The LA Times reports today on the latest court defeat for the Boy Scouts of America, Inc. The United States Supreme Court denied certiorari for Evans v. City of Berkeley, allowing the California ruling to stand:

For many years, Berkeley had given a rent-free berth in its marina to nonprofit community service organizations, including the Sea Scouts. An affiliate of the Boy Scouts, the group teaches sailing and seamanship to teenagers.

But the Berkeley City Council adopted a policy that required groups who wanted a free berth to agree in writing that they would not discriminate against persons based on, among other factors, their race, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. The Scouts did not sign the agreement because the Boy Scouts’ policy excludes gay and atheists.

Eugene Evans, an adult leader of the Sea Scouts, agreed to pay $500 a month to maintain the berth in the Berkeley marina, but he also led a lawsuit challenging the policy as violating the group’s rights to freedom of speech and the equal protection of the laws. He argued that the Scouts were being treated as “second class citizens” because their views on religion and homosexuality were disfavored by the government.

He lost decisively in the California courts, however.

In March, the California Supreme Court upheld Berkeley’s policy in an unanimous ruling. “Berkeley had not attempted to muzzle anyone’s speech,” the state high court said. “A government entity may constitutionally require a recipient of funding or subsidy to provide written, unambiguous assurances of compliance with a generally applicable nondiscrimination policy,” it said. [MN: Emphasis added]

First, allow me to comment on the complaint that the BSA, Inc. was being treated as “second class citizens” by the government:

Whaaaaaah! *sniff*

The BSA, Inc. has a Congressional Charter that dates back to 1916 and has enjoyed all manner of entanglements and special deals with every level of government for almost a century. And now it wants to complain that it’s being treated as a “second class citizen” because one city has finally held it to the same standard as everyone else?

Boo hoo hoo. Cry me a river.

Second, let’s turn to the actual legal analysis: The city wants to achieve a legitimate and perfectly rational goal of avoiding the harms that result when any class of citizens experience invidious discrimination in some form. Therefore, it decides that it will only give away special benefits to groups that voluntarily agree to abide by its nondiscrimination policies, so that it would not be subsidizing discrimination that was contrary to its own policies and goals by giving aid to discriminatory organizations. The BSA, Inc. could not or would not agree to this offer, but they wanted the freebies anyway.

The BSA, Inc. essentially argued that this was unfair because the city’s wouldn’t grant benefits and therefore lend its direct support to the BSA’s discriminatory policies. Furthermore, BSA argues that the city’s general policy interfered with the BSA’s freedom of speech, association, and religion because they really, really wanted to discriminate and the city wouldn’t make an exception just for them.

Sounds a bit like “special rights,” doesn’t it?

See also:
Supreme Court Refuses Calif. Scout Case
Boy Scouts face setback in Supreme Court

Or maybe I should say in that old video-game-voice: “fatality!” This ad has got to be the most effective one I’ve seen this whole cycle, and in a rational world, whoever produced it should be getting a ton of work. The only thing better than seeing science finally fight back against ignorant politics is seeing science fight back effectively. Warms my heart.

Today was homecoming at Wisconsin, which means many things. Today it meant beer and brats and a good, old-fashioned ass-kicking for Minnesota at a game that ended 48 - 12. And just in case you’re wondering about that last number, it wasn’t four field goals, either. This game featured a scoring play so rare that I had to Google it when I got home to figure out what it was called. Wisconsin fumbled the extra point on the extra point, and Minnesota picked it up and ran it all the way down the field to the other endzone. Apparently in U.S. college football, this is a type of “safety” (distinct from the more common type of safety where a player in possession of the ball is tackled in his own endzone) and is also worth two points for the defenders. Learn something new every day…

But I digress.

For the law school, homecoming also means the annual “Running of the 3Ls,” AKA the “Cane Parade.” This odd tradition dates back to somewhere around World War I, and no one is quite sure how it started, so don’t ask.

Image, if you will, a gaggle of (partially inebriated) soon-to-be lawyers taking to the field sporting bowler hats and canes, running across the field and then tossing their canes up into the air through the goalposts. According to legend, graduating students who toss their canes through the goalposts and successfully catch them on the other side before they hit the ground are guaranteed to win their first court case.

As you may have gathered from the title of this post, I have some reassuring news for whomever I end up representing first. Not that I necessarily believe in any of these superstitions, but if it makes the client happy…

The University of Wisconsin, like many other large, old campuses, is heated by a maze of steam tunnels that radiate out from large physical plants. Somehow, the steam tunnels feeding the law school were still being worked on — and thus not operational — when the cold snap came through yesterday. (Work had apparently started in May.)

Result? No heat in the building. This has been enough of an ongoing problem that at least one student in my Contracts II class has been clever enough to bring her own electric blanket. (We took that picture a few weeks back to send to the Dean of Students along with our comments about the classroom temperature.)

But today, at least, they provided free hot coffee. So we can be both grumpy and wired. Maybe they’ll finally get the heat working before we start burning old case books in the atrium…

I was driving home the other day and I passed a sign stuck into the median of the roadway:

PSYCHIC FAIR
10-5 Today
Something-or-other Hotel

Never having been to such an event, I guess the sign was meant for non-psychic visitors? After all, if it was for the psychics themselves, shouldn’t they already know where to go?