Lexis alerted me on Friday that the new volume of the Harvard Law Review is out. Richard Posner is the author of this term's Foreword, and the piece is, as usual, very good. I can't currently find a link to it online (the HLR website is out of date) and I need to read through it a little bit more carefully, so for now I will limit myself to one observation.

Judge Posner criticizes the Court's decision in a number of the cases, explaining how he would have decided them differently under his own pragmatic theory. One of the cases he criticizes is the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in U.S. v. Booker, striking down parts of the Sentencing Guidelines. Posner says that he would have sided with the government in the case. What is odd about this is that Posner wrote the lower court opinion in U.S. v. Booker, and he struck the guidelines down.

Now, normally there is nothing that weird about a judge saying that he would decide a case differently as a Supreme Court Justice than he did as an appellate judge, but given that many people criticize Posner's methodology for being a little too loosey-goosey, and given that Judge Easterbrook's dissent in that case poked Posner for arguably overturning a Supreme Court precedent without getting authorization above, I do think the Booker puzzle will be a reminder to many that Judge Posner's "pragmatic" methodology is much more complicated than it seems.

[This issue of the Harvard Law Review also contains a great essay by the great Professor Ernest Young on nose-counting in citations to foreign law. More on which later.]

When I bought Gabriel Garcia Marquez's new book-- Memories of My Melancholy Whores-- I had somehow thought that it was going to be the second volume of his autobiography, and I was very excited. I was wrong-- it's a new novella, but who cares?

What I want to know is, why is it Vladimir Nabokov who gets the bad rap for writing about child sex? The General in his Labyrinth, Love in the Time of Cholera, Of Love and Other Demons, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Innocent Erendira-- all of these books feature weird old men doing all sorts of speakable and unspeakable things to very young girls. Memories does too, although it is one of the best installments in the lot, at least partially because it's distinctly different, or maybe it's so much a bit of all of them that the take is truly fresh.

At any rate, the book is very small, and the type is very large, so it hardly counts as a book. Given that Amy and I are in a rather high culinary wager about who will polish off more books by the year's end, it only seemed fair to leave it with her this weekend, and I am sure she'll finish it soon.