Holy Hullabaloos, The Blog

Law Professor Olympics

So, I'm guest blogging over at PrawfsBlawg this month, and my first post that I put up today is about how the legal academic community needs a law professor Olympics as an outlet for our pent up competitiveness.

Why Do I Keep Dreaming That I'm in President Obama's Law Class?

Like everyone, I am subject to nightly anxiety dreams.  You're subject to nightly anxiety dreams, aren't you?  Anyway, many times in these dreams I find myself in a colleague's law class, and usually I haven't done the reading and don't understand anything that they're saying and am hoping against hope that they don't call on me.  Sometimes I tell them this when I see them in the faculty lounge the next day or something.  For the past six months or so, however, whenever I find myself in someone's law class in a dream, the professor is always Barack Obama.  Of course, Obama was a law professor, but he wasn't my professor, and I don't know why I am always having this dream.  Usually I can't find my books anywhere.  Sometimes they are in a locker, but I can't find the locker, or if I find the locker, I can't figure out how to open the locker, or if I can figure out how to open the locker, it turns out the books are not in the locker after all.  Last night, for the first time, Obama called on me to answer a question during the class.  The question was "what is the second most prevalent reason why people complain about the Star Spangled Banner?"  I answered, "because it interrupts the game?"  He said, "not the game, but a book."  I have no idea what that meant.  The best part of the dream, though, is that when Obama called on me, he thought my name was "Jason Wiebe."  He said, "Jason, Wiebe, what's your answer?"  I pointed at myself and said, "Me?  I'm Jay Wexler."  He said, "yeah, you."

The &Now Awards Volume Now Available

Just a quick pre-Thanksgiving note to let you know that the perfect Christmas present is now available for you to buy for your favorite lover of avant garde literature, maybe your 8 year old nephew or 92 year old great-grandmother, or perhaps just for you.   "The &Now Awards: The Best in Innovative Fiction" volume, published by Lake Forest University Press and edited by Robert Archambeau, Davis Schneiderman, and Steve Tomasula, has been published.  You can get it from Amazon here.  It's a nice looking book with 350 pages of weird stuff, including my weird story E=mc3, which is basically about how I wish that once, just once, I could observe the physical laws of the universe violated, and which originally appeared in Opium Magazine, I think #3 of that sweet journal which you should also maybe buy.  Happy Thanksgiving.

The Delta Dawn Project

For some reason, the other night I had a dream where I started a rock band with a bunch of guys and my first suggestion for the band was that we cover "Delta Dawn," the old country classic recorded by Tanya Tucker, among others.  So this of course resulted in my having the song stuck in my head for days, and since I was singing it non-stop, now Walter my son has the song stuck in his head.  We've been watching old videos of Tanya Tucker singing the song, and now we both know all the words.  Yesterday I got out my guitar and learned how to play the chorus (I suck at the guitar but I can play a few chords), and now we're going to be rehearsing over the next few days in the hope that we can produce a little music video for your enjoyment.  So, consider that my Christmas present to you, okay?  Thanks.

Is Yoga a Religion?

There's a little hullabaloo brewing in Missouri over whether the state can require yoga centers to collect sales tax from their customers.  The yoga people claim that they should be exempt from the tax because yoga classes contain spiritual element.  The nice folks over at Immanent Frame asked me and three other scholars to comment on the yoga as religion question.  Here's what we said.

Reason to Live in the Leather District #161: the SL4

When we were first looking to buy a loft in the Leather District back in 2002, we went to an open house where the real estate agent explained that the neighborhood is located so conveniently to all sorts of transportation options and outlets that it was "stupid."  Apart from the stupidity of saying "stupid" (a good friend of mine used to say that it's impossible not to sound stupid when you say "stupid," and I think he's right about that), the agent had a point.  The LD is within easy walking distance of the red line at South Station and both the green line (Park Street) and the orange line (Downtown Crossing), not to mention the commuter rail and Amtrak, which are both at South Station.  Onramps to 93S, 93N, and the Mass Pike are basically in the neighborhood as well, and the airport is a 15 minute drive at the most.

For a while, there weren't any good public transportation options to the South End (it's walkable, and about a 5-10 minute drive, but the subway doesn't go there), but now even that's changed.  A few years back, the Silver Line started up,  and that goes right down Washington Street in the South End.  Up until a month ago, though, you had to walk either to Chinatown or the Medical Center or the Common to get the so-called SL5.  All these stops are pretty close, a 10 minute walk at the most, but now, with the advent of the SL4, which stops right on Essex Street directly in front of South Station, there is essentially a direct South End-LD T route.  You can use a basic T pass to ride the Silver Line; it's a totally comfortable bus; and as a bonus, there are always some bizarre characters to share your ride with.

Video Recap

Just in case you missed these Oscar-nominated Holy Hullabaloos-related videos, maybe this would be a good chance to take a look.

Clerkin' for RBG: The Whole Essay

In case you are interested, here is the entire five page essay on Clerkin' for RBG that I reference in yesterday's post that has now received something like 4,500 hits because Elie Mystal at Above the Law totally rules and linked to it.  Thanks, Elie.

Download Clerkin2

 

Justice Ginsburg's Weird, Weird Cite

Look, I love Ruth Bader Ginsburg, don't get me wrong.  Where would I be right now without her (hint: it involves shoveling manure somewhere in the Midwest)?  She was a pioneering pioneer for gender equality when she was practicing law, and she's a damn fine justice.  But let's face it, sometimes she puts some pretty frickin' weird things in her opinions.  When I was clerking for RBG in 1998-1999, we clerks would marvel at drafts returned to us with phrases like "homed in on" added in the margins.  But, hey, what fun would it be to be a Supreme Court Justice with life tenure if you couldn't exercise your idiosyncracies from time to time--in other words, whenever the hell you want?

Here's the latest.  I was teaching a Supreme Court decision the other day in my environmental law class, in which Justice Ginsburg was the one dissent on an otherwise unanimous Court.  The case is about the Superfund law, or CERCLA.  One of the questions in the case is whether the federal trial court, or district court, properly apportioned damages between the two solvent defendants.  The parties in the case had not presented any evidence or advanced any arguments on the matter, but the district court decided on its own to split up the damages.  Addressing this issue, RBG said this:

Given the party presentation principle basic to our procedural system . . . it is questionable whether the court should have pursued the matter sua sponte.  See Castro v. United States, 540 U.S. 375, 386 (2003) (Scalia, J., concurring) ("Our adversary system is designed around the premise that the parties know what is best for them, and are responsible for advancing the facts and arguments entitling them to relief.").  Cf. Kaplan, von Mehren, & Schaefer, Phases of German Civil Procedure I, 71 Harv. L. Rev. 1193, 1224 (1958) (describing court's obligation, under Germany's Code of Civil Procedure, to see to it that the case is fully developed).

What's going on with this Cf. cite to a 1958 law review article about German civil procedure?  I love it!  The fact that it's a "cf" cite instead of a "but see" or something; the fact that it's to a law review article, that the article is from 50 years ago, and that it's about Germany.  Now, in many ways, the cite is not surprising--Justice Ginsburg started off as a scholar on comparative civil procedure.  If I'm not mistaken, she wrote a book about Swedish civil procedure or something.  And, she was also on the Harvard Law Review in 1958, so perhaps she edited this piece.  Perhaps it's even the piece that inspired her to go study comparative civil procedure.  If that's true, then maybe it's in some way responsible for her success in the legal academy which then translated to becoming a Supreme Court Justice.  So maybe in some ways she's paying homage to an article that changed her life.  I don't know.  But one thing I do know is that, as a cite in a Supreme Court opinion, it's really, really weird. 

(UPDATE: I've put the entire "Clerkin' for RBG" Essay here: Download Clerkin2)

News Flash: HH Not Named as one of Publishers Weekly's Top 100 Books of 2009

Well, Publishers Weekly's annual top 100 books of the year list is now out, and shockingly Holy Hullabaloos is not, I repeat not on the list.  I know because I've read over the list five times, and HH is not on it.  That's how I know.  So, of course you're wondering whether HH deserves to be on the list, and on that question, all I can say is that I've read exactly two books on the list (Cullen's book on Columbine, and Jon Crackauer's (yes, that's how I spell it, because his writing is as addictive as smoking crack, which I hear is in fact quite addictive) book on Pat Tillman), and I can say that those two books are indeed better than my book.  So if those books are any indication of the general quality of books on the list, then yes, HH did not deserve to be on there.