Maureen Craig calls to my attention that the University of Chicago scavhunt has through some terrible error lost its rightful place in the google search results. Scavhunt.

Did you know that Judith Martin (of Miss Manners fame) writes novels? Well, she does, and Style and Substance is not half bad. I can't tell for certain, though, if the book means to be quite as funny as it is:

It used to be that considerate men tried not to embarrass women, and got things done with a minimum of fuss. There would be a sudden tug on the breast at crucial moments, for example, but an apologetic return to respectable kissing once control was reestablished.

Nice men are like shoe salesmen now; they show you all the classic and current styles, and expect you to pick one and be satisfied.

As I mentioned before, Dr. Michael Newdow came to the University of Chicago Law School today to debate Mr. Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice (who, I found myself wondering in advance, could be against law or justice? And why must so many perfectly nice instutitions have such opaque names?) About 250 people crowded into a room that couldn't seat that many.

Newdow spoke first. He began, oddly enough, with Lynch v. Donnelly, and Establishment Clause case where the Court upheld the placement of a Christian creche. Reassuringly, after explaining the case, he simply declared that it was ridiculous. Continuing, he noted that while nine out of the eleven State Constitutions in existence at the time of the adoption of the Constitution [N.B.-- I haven't fact-checked this.] contained explicity invocations of religion, the Constitution did not. Once more, I found myself wondering whether his data helped his case.

Then he got into the good stuff, beginning with Jefferson's bill of religious freedom, moving on to the infamous "Lemon test," Newdow argued that there couldn't possibly be a secular purpose to adding the words "under God" to an oath that had gotten by just fine for 60 years without a mention of religion. His best line:

"If it said 'we are a nation under the apple tree,' you'd get in your head that there has to be an apple tree somewhere."

There have been enough cases on the 'institutionalized persons' half of RLUIPA to create a circuit split. Today, the Eleventh Circuit has handed down one of the earlier 'land use' opinions, Sephardi v. Surfside (link via How Appealing). It's a 60 page opinion, and unfortunately I don't have time to actually read it right now. The quick story is that the 11 Circuit found that the zoning ordinances in the town of Surfside, FL, were too great a burden on two Orthodox Jewish synagogues that wished to establish themselves, and that RLUIPA was constitutional (grounds: both religion prongs of the First Amendment, Section 5 of the Fourteenth, Tenth Amendment

And now I have somewhere else I need to be.

[Earlier posts: Amanda, Ryan Gabbard, me, Amanda.]

In a previous post, I wrote:

However, Mr. Sullivan could have spoken strictly by saying "the people of the big agricultural states" or "voters in such states" are over-represented, which they are.

the Constitution creates a body--call it "the Senate"--in which various groups are going to be represented by geography rather than population, I know that "representation" (in terms of voters per Senator) won't be equal. Saying people are "over-represented" seems to make a judgment about the amount of representation that is desirable (I derive that judgment from the "over" part), and that somehow the group in question exceeds that desired representation.

But, it doesn't strike me as being that clear cut. At least there's an argument to be made that voters are represented exactly correctly -- their strength may be disproportionate to their numbers, but does this make over-representation?

Ben's claim is interesting. As I understand it, his idea is that so long as the rules for representation are followed, it's improper to impose extra normative value on that system. But tempting as this argument is, I don't think it's true, and I don't think it jives with the way sensible people sometimes use the word.

Let's suppose there was a hypothetical election, in which some people (those with white skin) were given 5 votes while others (those with black skin) were given three. Wouldn't it make sense to say that whites were "over-represented" in that election, especially if we were trying to explain the victory of some bill that was popular with white voters in a close election?

I submit that that's an entirely sensible way to speak, that listeners and readers would have a good sense of what I meant (especially if they were familiar with the electoral system in question) and that we do commonly share normative values about what elections should be like. Similarly, if we were to amend the Constitution so that I got one vote in the presidential election and everybody else got zero, I think it would be fair-- darn accurate-- to say that the election "over-represented" my interests.

This isn't open-and-shut. One could quarrel with Sullivan's (and my) view that there's a normative value to voters in Wyoming having only as much say in a Senate election as voters in California do (especially since the probability of a single vote mattering in such an election is nil).

Obviously, the word "over-represented" is vague, until one specifies the metric one is using. If one means, a la Ben, "above and beyond that which the rules specify," then no such claim can be made, no matter what the rule is, so long as the rule is followed. If one means, a la me, "above and beyond the principle of equal per capita suffrage," then it can. And in general, I think there ought to be a principle of coherent construction, so that if a person's words can fairly be construed in two ways, one false and one true, we pick the true one, at least without further information. [Of course, as Amanda tirelessly reminds us, Sullivan wrote that states, not people, were over-represented in the Senate, which is a slightly stickier claim.]

I've always been a little afraid of cooking seafood; I don't know why, but raw fish gives me more trouble than raw chicken, despite the fact that I happily eat sushi on a regular basis. Maybe it's just that I'm more sure of how to acquire quality warm-blooded meat in this meat-packing town.

In any case, my two favorite food writers have pieces today that may just shock me out of my fish-phobia.

The first is The New York Times' Minimalist, Mark Bittman, who has a recipe for what I can only characterize as Italian cassoulet, with broken bits of pasta. The second is Harvard's Waddling Thunder, who has a recipe forn ode to bouillabaise.

Waddling Thunder also distracts himself in class similarly to the way I do:

Some people doodle in class. Others play snood, or surf the web, or chat on instant messenger. A small group might even drift away in the lewd embrace of the more salacious range of mental speculations. But me? Well, I dream about food. I dream about what to cook; and how I’m going to cook it; and where I’m getting the ingredients to cook whatever I’m going to cook; and how I’m going to eat it. I might dream about a specific food, or about all foods – in the morning about what I’m going to eat for lunch, after lunch what I’ll eat as a snack, and later what I should make for dinner. The only constant is that the moment the class demands less than all my attention, food is extremely likely to be the topic of my distracted meditations.