Angus Dwyer notes that Andrew Jackson was a member of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and marks out a new legal history research project for an enterprising scholar:

I don't think anyone's taken a systematic look at these, which is too bad, because I suspect they might reveal a lot about Jackson, or about efforts to construct a new legal order in the early Republic, or both.

"Tradition reports that he maintained the dignity and authority of the bench, while he was on the bench; and that his decisions were short, untechnical, un-learned, sometimes ungrammatical, and generally right."

A reader writes in with another hypothesis about the sincerity-abortion debate that Quaker and I have been having below:

OR, it could be based on a political calculation that, even though the women deserved to be treated as murderers, that wasn't something the public was ready to accept. And that if they tried to get the whole loaf, they'd end up with none of it, and babies would go on being murdered.

Which, I think, is the real reasoning here, not that the women are less guilty somehow. This business about them having to be somehow deranged to be trying to get an abortion is just an after the fact rationalization to make it look like they won't be coming back for the rest of the loaf.

To Sleep
John Keats

O soft embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower'd from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passèd day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards,
And seal the hushèd casket of my soul.