Law School Miscellany

The Tribal Sovereign Immunity professor wrapped up the class by giving everybody two $25 meal tickets for Table Mountain Casino. Not a bad deal. He said to give him a call to let him know when we’ll be there to use them and he’ll send someone down to give us the VIP treatment, show us around and whatnot. Pretty sweet.

Meanwhile, I’m scouring the internet for sources to cite in my law review comment. Things are looking good. Basically, my comment will criticize statutory schemes that offer various market incentives to ensure that land is used for agriculture rather than developed for urban or suburban purposes. So I’ll be challenging all the Malthusian anti-”sprawl” rhetoric, according to which population growth is expected outstrip food production capacity unless we legislate protection for farmland against the interests of urban development. Yes, I live here in the middle of the “Bread Basket of the World” where agriculture is the biggest industry and the strongest lobby, but I will be writing against protectionist schemes for agriculture. It’s what I do.

Finally, the summer session is almost over. There is one more class session on Monday night (and a make-up session on the following Saturday), then two final exams. Most of my reading is finished. It’s good to be done. Two classes with two adjunct professors both teaching for the first time was difficult to deal with at times. You don’t realize the value of experienced instructors until you get stuck with a couple of newbies. It’s not that they didn’t know their stuff or weren’t prepared; they just didn’t offer a very smooth experience.

At any rate, back to the salt mines of internet research.

Table Mountain Lawsuit

Here’s an interesting story about a local guy who is trying to sue the tribe on the Table Mountain Rancheria. If you read the article, you’ll notice that one of the lawyers for the Rancheria is a fellow by the name of Dan Casas; he’s my professor of Tribal Sovereign Immunity this summer.

Ruby Slippered Foot in Mouth

Since I don’t have time to write anything funny right now, read this humorous anecdote from my friend Alison, who, like me, doesn’t believe that the truth changes when the audience changes.

Terminological Terrorism

Since I don’t have time to write anything, read this article by Dave Lindorff, which almost sounds like something I would write.

How are Americans going to understand the depth and passion of the resistance to U.S. aggression in Iraq, if they are led by the media’s misuse of language to believe that our troops are simply fighting bandits and criminals? How are we to understand the interminable horrors of the Israel/Palestine conflict if we are told that it is simply a battle between the good guys (the Israeli Defense Force), and the bad guys (a bunch of Palestinian hoodlums)?

The media should at least be forced to be even-handed. If Palestinians are “kidnapping” Israeli soldiers when they capture them, then the Israelis are “kidnapping” Palestinians when they do the same. Otherwise, let’s concede that both are capturing their opponents and holding them prisoner.

And while we’re at it, let’s start calling Iraqi fighters what they are: resistance fighters, not terrorists.

Read the rest.

Books Are Here To Stay

John Updike, writing in the New York Times, gently but firmly pushes back against the rabid communalist visions of the deconstructionist digitizers:

The printed, bound and paid-for book was — still is, for the moment — more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other’s steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness. Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village. “When books are digitized,” [Kevin] Kelly [of Wired Magazine] ominously promises, “reading becomes a community activity. . . . The universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book.”

Books traditionally have edges: some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained. In the electronic anthill, where are the edges? The book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets.

As I have reminded two different friends in the last two days, linear, structured thought is still a more powerful tool for accomplishing feats of reason and creativity than any mishmash diverse details will ever be. Even a unique and freely chosen trail through a web of decontextualized hypertext is ultimately constituted as a linear experience in the mind of the reader. But once a reader has constructed an interesting narrative out of the mishmash of sources, there will always be an impulse by the reader to pass that story along — and thus become a storyteller, an author — and a desire to see how other minds configure the vast array of data. There is no meaningful difference between the long tradition of linear text and the foolish, fantastical visions of the futurist digitizers, who believe that cutting, pasting, sampling, and building webs and collages and mise en scene from pieces of the works of others is something new and revolutionary; they only celebrate the latest iteration of the same complex of memes that has always been human culture.

Books and authors and linear texts will not be leaving us any time soon because those things are the artifacts of a species whose members are all unique and possessed of a desire to explain the world to each other in their own unique ways. Diversity is a function if individuality, not the other way around.

Meet and Greet; Law Review

This morning I had the pleasure of meeting an actual reader and occasional commenter (here, here, and here), who identifies herself online as “Kat.” Excellent.

We both attended a breakfast put on to receive new candidates for Law Review. We were there because both of us ranked in the top 20% of our class — I was second and she was third, separated by 0.3 points. (Therefore I am, she says, her “arch nemesis.” Good place to be. Competition breeds innovation.)

Law Review, for those who don’t know, is a prestigious thing for law students. As I said, candidates for law review are culled from the top 20% of the class. To advance to membership, you have to write a publishable “comment,” which is a paper of about thirty-five pages, suitable for academic publication. Student law review comments are read and referred to by lawyers and judges, and some have had substantial effects on the law. Having Law Review on your résumè demonstrates to potential employers that you can do substantial legal research, produce writing suitable for academic publication, meet deadlines, and work as part of a team. Yes, it’s muy bien. We were told this morning that only about 3% of lawyers can claim Law Review membership. That’s pretty exclusive.

So I need to get cracking, choose a topic, find a faculty advisor, and start researching.

Property Schmoperty

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has posted a critical look at yesterday’s executive order from President Bush, in which our dear Executive pretends to address the fears raised by last year’s Kelo v. New London decision from the Supreme Court. He writes, in part:

Read carefully, the order does not in fact bar condemnations that transfer property to other private parties for economic development. Instead, it permits them to continue so long as they are “for the purpose of benefiting the general public and not merely for the purpose of advancing the economic interest of private parties to be given ownership or use of the property taken.”

Unfortunately, this language validates virtually any economic development condemnation that the feds might want to pursue. Officials can (and do) always claim that the goal of a taking is to benefit “the general public” and not “merely” the new owners.

Good job, Mr. President. Way to make it look like you’re taking a stand. Mission accomplished.

The World Schmuck in Germany

Why did this guy have to be an American?

Police took the American to the area that matched his vague description in the city of 500,000 and spent an hour driving up and down streets in that quarter until he recognized his hotel just before dawn Wednesday.

Idiot.

Citywide Wi-Fi

This is super cool:

In Anaheim, California, EarthLink has attached little white boxes to 1,500 traffic lights. At the end of the month Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle will cut a ceremonial wire, turning on those boxes and powering up America’s first big-city Wi-Fi network, which will offer residents high-speed wireless web access across Anaheim for $22 per month.

Oh, how I would love high-speed wireless access for $22 per month, instead of this cable from Comcast that sets us back $57 per month.

Mechanical Bunny Messiah

Here are some highlights from an article on “end times” fever in the Los Angeles Times:

According to various polls, an estimated 40% of Americans believe that a sequence of events presaging the end times is already underway. Among the believers are pastors of some of the largest evangelical churches in America, who converged at Faith Central Bible Church in Inglewood in February to finalize plans to start 5 million new churches worldwide in 10 years.

. . .

A growing number of fundamentalist Christians in mostly Southern states are adopting Jewish religious practices to align themselves with prophecies saying that Gentiles will stand as one with Jews when the end is near.

. . .

Bill McCartney, a former University of Colorado football coach and co-founder of the evangelical Promise Keepers movement for men, which became huge in the 1990s, has had a devil of a time getting his own apocalyptic campaign off the ground.

It’s called The Road to Jerusalem, and its mission is to convert Jews to Christianity — while there is still time. . . . Jews and others who don’t accept Jesus, he added matter-of-factly, “are toast.”

. . .

“For me,” [Rabbi Brad Hirschfield] said, “the messiah is like the mechanical bunny at a racetrack: It always stays a little ahead of the runners but keeps the pace toward a redeemed world.

“Trouble is, there are many people who want to bring a messiah who looks just like them. For me, that kind of messianism is spiritual narcissism.”

What drives me nuts is the way these people, when you meet them in public, just assume that everybody thinks and believes the way they do. I’ve had folks say to me things like, “Well, you know, it’s pretty clear that we’re living in the end times.” The incongruity of hearing something that sounds so much like crazy-talk from people who couldn’t get certified as crazy if they went down and asked for it is almost too much for me to take. When somebody who is otherwise functional looks me in the eye and says, “Jesus is coming soon,” they might as well be saying, “I just got back from the moon.” Christians freak out about this kind of thing, but I would really like to see certain kinds of religious belief listed in the DSM-IV. That would just make my day.