John Milton

Arcades, III. Song

Nymphs and Shepherds, dance no more
By sandy Ladon’s lilied banks;
On old Lycæus, or Cyllene hoar,
Trip no more in twilight ranks;
Though Erymanth your loss deplore,
A better soil shall give ye thanks.
From the stony Mænalus
Bring your flocks, and live with us;
Here ye shall have greater grace,
To serve the Lady of this place.
Through Syrinx your Pan’s mistress were,
Yet Syrinx well might wait on her.
Such a rural Queen
All Arcadia hath not seen.

I don't know if I made clear in my last post how good Judge Posner's foreword in the Harvard Law Review is. A conversation with a classmate (who will be clerking for the judge next year) inspired me to go back and re-read it, and I repeat that it's really good, especially for those who are already familiar with (and/or skeptics of) Posner's work. Here's a part that grabbed me this time:

I do not pretend that the pragmatic approach, which, at least in my version, asks judges to focus on the practical consequences of their decisions, is demonstrably correct as applied to constitutional law. It has certain advantages, but whether they outweigh the concerns that are expressed about it — that it is vague, that it lacks a moral compass, that it asks too much (or too little) of judges, that it is not “law,” that it ignores soft values such as “justice” in its manifold meanings — depends ultimately on the observer’s temperament, prejudices, etc. The pragmatic approach is correct for me, in this era of our constitutional history, and for people who think and feel approximately as I do. But that is as far as I will go to defend the approach.

Spindle's End - Robin McKinley
The Divine Husband - Fransicso Goldman

Since childhood, I've been utterly unable to resist fairy tale retellings, which at their best, can make those familiar stories seem strange and new again. Spindle's End is a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story, one in which Sleeping Beauty is transformed from a passive recipient of the evil godmother's curse to an active participant in the struggle to overturn her influence on the kingdom. It was enjoyable, but the flow of the story was marred by an odd switch, midway through, from the point of view of one of the fairy godmothers to Sleeping Beauty herself.

The Divine Husband, is an odd, epic sort of story set in an anonymous Latin American capital, describing the lives of two childhood friends, one of whom marries the country's brutal dictator, the other of whom has a child out of wedlock. Francisco Goldman can't seem to make up his mind whether he wants to write magical realism or historical fiction, resulting in a hybrid that's often mystical without ever being magical, and for what is obviously a deeply researched historical novel, strangely detacted from actual historical context.

What better way is there to procrastinate writing one's paper on water than to blog about water?

Via Alex Tabarrok I see this paper exploring the relationship between water privatization and child mortality. The bottom line is that privatizing water in Argentina appears to keep kids from getting sick, and the poor are helped the most. This is roughly consonant with what I learned about privatization elsewhere in South America and Africa. The authors seem a little unduly rosy about this to me, but it's still good news.

Meanwhile, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are all working out the Great Lakes Basin Water Resources Compact which the governors are scheduled to sign on December 13. Thanks to Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution, this compact will be no good until it's ratified by Congress. (A copy of the compact is here.

The fights about the lakes largely seem to revolve around "who owns" them. Under normal principles of riparian ownership, the great lakes states (or their residents) seem to win, although under the doctrine of prior appropriation things are less clear, since large sections of the lake are not yet appropriated. If we believe in Coasean bargaining we might wonder why we don't just let the state bargain it out, but states hate selling water for political reasons I don't entirely grasp.

It's something like Ross Perot's fear that all of our jobs would go south to Mexico and never come back. I think there's a vision that once Arizona gets access to Lake Michigan, they'll just drink it all up.

So a recent classmate and I were talking about was to ensure that Steve Sachs's Law Merchant paper got as many downloads as possible. This got me thinking about Vic Fleischer's post pointing out how hard it is to know what counts as "gaming" the download rank and what doesn't.

Things get even knottier when third parties are incorporated, I think. Suppose I downloaded a paper by a Chicago professor over 20 times because I liked it a lot. I presume the SSRN regulators think that the paper doesn't "deserve" to have 19 of those downloads counted. What if I simply stump for a paper because it is written by a friend? Is this illegitimate if I wouldn't have stumped the same amount for the paper written by a stranger? How would I even know?

And once one has sorted out codes of conduct, whatever they are, who's to blame when they're violated? If a friend goes out and artificially inflates my SSRN download score, should I be punished? Should he? What if the friend isn't a legal academic and is therefore immune to the usual shaming punishments that the legal community can level. Does all of this apply to blogging, too? Is it illegitimate to link to one's friends' blogs if one wouldn't have done so if they were strangers or enemies? The whole thing is woefully undertheorized.

I don't mean to quibble (he said, quibbling), but what is a group blog for if not internecine (perhaps we are so sub-subcultural that this is intranecine) squabbles? So, as the French do, let us fuck shit up.

When I speak to my parents, I am Jeremy (or occasionally, if rude, Jeremy Barnett). With my brother, I am Goosh. Old friends, roommates, travelers attempting to be cute: Jer (rarely though-it's a shortening I much detest). A few professors, some more affected club friends: Mr. Reff (thank God my father is Dr. Reff, so I don't have to look over my shoulder in the drawing room). As there are three Jeremies in my close circle of friends, we are, when together or in context, usually Reff, Funke, Blocker (or if we are feeling particularly cruel - Barney, Bob, and Bill). On the dotted line (for checks and health insurance), my middle name, graft gift of a great-grandfather makes its appearance as a B with point, Jeremy B. Reff. In work correspondence sometimes descibed: Jeremy Reff, [job title]. In slacks, I go by Lola.

But in my correspondence, and especially email, I am J. For a few notable exceptions (as all the best people are), I am also J in vocal anti-Terra, blurbling over the hydrophone out in late night oft drunk spurts of over-honest speech, but in writing, not as a matter of shorthand or affectation, I am just J, plain J, unvoiced J, quiet J, fading out of the text without even the pointe assassine of the final period. It is not a matter of saving time - mine or yours, but rather a matter of the texture of time - ours. I am not in my text (only sometimes in my speech), and in your memory I might have changed even further from caterpillar to Deilephila elpenor. Our fixity is a shared fiction. But on the printed page, so easily quotable, maintained now by electronic graveyards as evidence of our previous selves as only love letters and war records were formerly kept, I demand some lesser notion of identity and authorship.

Affectionately,
J