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December 31, 2005

...Book Fifty-Four

When a co-blogger first saw that Jerry Mashaw had taken over a decade to turn his lectures into Greed, Chaos, and Governance he marvelled at the glories of tenure. I, for one, thought the book was very fascinating, and full of insights I wished I'd had in Admin Law. However, I do think that I will never again read a legal academic book without also reading its legal academic book reviews. Jonathan Macey has one in the Cornell Law Review (I think), and it is at least as good as the book itself. (Mashaw seems to think, in the end, that public choice theory yields almost no concrete answers to normative questions, as modern originalism-skeptics seem to think about originalism. Macey suggests that Mashaw is too hasty by half.)

[50 Book Challenge, Last Second Edition]


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50 Book Challenge, Final Edition (53 and 54)

Captain Alatriste - Arturo Perez-Reverte
Memories of My Melancholy Whores - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I found Captain Alatriste rather disappointing, mostly because there just wasn't much to the story. I suspect it suffers for being the first entry in a larger series, but in that case I don't understand why the publisher is bringing out the American translations at the rate of one a year.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is even slighter by length, but nevertheless feels more dramatically satisfying. It is rather like a distillation of everything Garcia Marquez has written, but one more explicitly hopeful, even sentimental. It somehow seemed like the appropriate book to be reading at the end of the year.

Having squeaked through to fifty books, I have to say that I'd be unlikely to participate in a similar exercise again. Despite the fact that I found reading about what other bloggers read over the course of a year a great source of book recommendations, I still couldn't shake the feeling that what I was writing was approximately as interesting as the index-card book reports my eighth grade teacher made us put together every week.

Now I'm off to eat a phrophylactic plate of pasta and see if I can figure out which of the many boxes scattered around my apartment is most likely to contain appropriate New Year's Eve party-wear.

Happy New Year's.


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Happy Returns

The much-discussed judicial gossip site, Underneath Their Robes, is back online. Thanks to Orin Kerr for the tip.


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Book Fifty-Three

Despite spending two summers during middle school playing Magic The Gathering full-time in the library, more of my own allowances than I can remember on Decipher Star Wars cards and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (second edition) books, becoming an obsessive player of Mario 64 and Super Smash Brothers, and being good friends in middle school with 1996 Spellfire world champion Tim Tracey; despite also dabbling in miniatures games, Dragon Dice, Illuminati, Stratego, Civilizations I, II, and III, I never really read comic books during my otherwise geeky days.

That said, having just finished Alan Moore's and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, I am beginning to wonder what else out there I have missed. (I also liked Watchmen, but those two, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the Superman White Issue are pretty much the only comic books I have ever read. (Not counting Calvin and Hobbes.))

[50 Book Challenge, Last-Minute Edition]


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Unblogged

I am busily finishing up an application due at midnight tonight, but if I were not, I would be blogging about the following:

1: Tyler Cowen provides advice to avoid procrastination. The trouble is that a certain degree of procrastination-- indeed, perhaps an incredibly large degree-- is secretly the consumption of leisure, so it may be that efforts to stamp out procrastination are in fact misguided.

2: Relatedly, Cowen links to Richard Hammings's essay that demands that you ask yourself:

1. What are the most important problems in your field?

2. Are you working on one of them?

3. Why not?

Surely the honest answer, most of the time, to question 3 is "because I don't feel like it". And that answer is obviously a legitimate one. (Why else would Hammings narrow question "1" to "in your field"? If it's legitimate for people to decide to become lawyers even though electrical engineering is more important, than surely it's legitimate for them to wrestle with the law of unpasteurized cheese even though the legal structure of the federal budget matters more.)

3: Angus Dwyer wonders why Pat Riley's alleged trademark on "Three-Peat" seems is not obviously invalid as a legal matter.

4: Richard Epstein applauds the legacy of Calvin Coolidge-- as anti-union governor rather than as president. In particular, Epstein thinks that unions ought to be subject to the same antitrust rules as everybody else. My first inclination is that this goes a little bit far, but I am open to persuasion. I shall have more thoughts when I finish his 1983 article in the Yale Law Journal.

5: Speaking of law review articles I shouldn't be letting distract me from work or exams, Ernest Young also has a new piece out, in the Duke Law Journal. He suggests that the discipline of Federal Courts ought to make sure that it includes the relationship between federal courts and international institutions.


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50 Book Challenge #50-52

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Bachelor List - Jane Feather

The Kite Runner was billed as something of a topical look at the history of Afghanistan, but it's really more just the Amy Tan formula with male characters instead of female. (For those unfamiliar with Amy Tan, she's essentially written the same book detailing a complicated relationship between a traditional Chinese mother with a past and her Americanized daughter six or seven times). Which isn't really meant as a criticism - the story of Amir's relationship with his father and his servant's son Hassam is affecting without being cloying, and told simply but not naively, making it overall an enjoyable read.

Cryptonomicon I read mostly because I wanted to find out if I liked Neal Stephenson. The answer is largely yes, despite the fact that eight hundred pages in, he morphs from a gentler, more normal Kurt Vonnogut into a Tom Clancy clone to disturbing effect. In particular, he seems to be engaged in an undermining, or at least problematization of the idea of war as the highest expression and exclusive domain of what can be called the traditional ideal of masculinity. But having created a view of World War II as essentially won by geeks and secretaries, and a modern world where computers trump guns, he feels the need to turn his geeks into heroes, and his one strong female character into a swooning damsel in need of protection. What gives?

The Bachelor List starts off interestingly enough when a committed Suffragist finds herself romantically entangled with a member of Parliament who has made his name by bashing women's competence to exercise the right to vote. Sparks fly, the battle lines are drawn, and then, about two thirds of the way through, they simply agree to disagree, leaving one with the feeling that this is a doomed relationship.


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A Priest, A Rabbi, and Justice Scalia . . .

The Times also carries a great story about a Green Bag article by Jay Wexler about the number of times each Justice says something during oral arguments that elicits enough laughter to merit a "[laughter]" notation on the transcript. This may be the sort of thing that only an oral argument nerd could love, but seeing as how I have listened to several hundred Supreme Court oral arguments at this point, I think I qualify.

The article also notes that nobody has yet checked to see whether all "[laughter]"s are created equal, which sounds like the perfect task for a research assistant and the Oyez site once they get around to posting the audio for the OT 2005 arguments. Or maybe I will publish the reply.


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