"Ah noo, Raffi! This is terrible! Terrible! It is like where the pigs live!"

That was my instructor at the Ecole Ritz Escoffier, commenting (in what sounded like a parody of a French accent in English, except that it was real) on the cleanliness (err, lack thereof) of my work surface, where I had just shoved aside my gutted mackerel to chop parsley (it was all going in a soup). This was nothing out of the ordinary for me - those who've seen me cook at home know that I'm often a mess in the kitchen. Being charitable, I put it down to panache.

But as the chef explained, in times of stress, a clean work surface is what saves you. Where are you going to put the flaming pan down if you've left all the bits of fish intestine all over your board? Nowhere! So over my week at the school, I got into the habit of working cleanly, wiping off my board between each different thing, cleaning knives, throwing all the trash away before moving on. Of all the things I learned at the Ritz, this was probably the most startling in its effect. Almost immediately, I noticed that kitchen tasks got easier. And at home, I've kept up the same thing, with the same results. Someone once told me that sieving sauces was the one great different between the home chef and the restaurant chef (though I think it's butter). But working clean comes in a close second.

I'll only add, without further comment as to my current situation, that working clean is relevant during times of stress in more spheres than just cookery. But I guess everyone else knew that.

A reader asks what I think about Harvard's proposed reform of the 1-L curriculum, discussed here by Orin Kerr. Like Orin, I think it's hard to say much without reading exactly what's proposed and how it will be taught. Orin is worried that this will be a mistake because common-law basics are so helpful for later learning. I wouldn't know. At Yale, of the four required first-year courses, one (Contracts) is common law, one (Torts) has basically abandoned law altogether in the interests of the study of economics, one (Procedure) is half constitutional law and half code/rules-based, and one (Constitutional law) is one-third constitutional law and two-thirds social policy.

The result is that I am still rather confused about the common law-- is it made? is it found? is a federal common law of crimes unconstitutional? should a judge who believes that the common law is found rather than made ever be willing to follow a line of doctrine he believes to be clearly erroneous? when do Congress's enumerated powers entitle it to revise the common law? what about the common law of rules of decision? And so on. Then again, I suspect a lot of these questions would not have been settled to my satisfacction even with more common-law courses during my first semester of first year.

Requiring a course on statutory interpretation uring the first year seems like a good idea to me, though. They're not currently taught that way, but in my view a huge amount of the law school curriculum-- from tax to administrative law to corporations to criminal law-- seems like it builds at least as much on statutory interpretation as on the common law.

I liked this post by Ilya Somin about how Democrats might attract libertarians into their tent. Of course, I am the opposite of an expert on elelctoral strategy, and there are presumably good reasons that Democratic candidates don't try to adopt the Somin platform; for every libertarian-leaning 5% of the vote they could grab, they would alienate a moderate 20% or what-have-you. Too bad.

I was amused that in the Talent/McCaskill debate on Meet the Press this morning, when Tim Russert asked Jim Talent to reconcile his belief that life begins at conception with his support for rape/incest exceptions to abortion restrictions, Talent couldn't really do so. Score one for Scott Lemieux.

As a relatively recent Columbia alum, I feel like I should say something about recent events on campus. Let's see:

1) What the ISO did in trying to prevent Jim Gilchrist from speaking was shameful and unacceptable. Columbia should take action to prevent it from happening again. You think the Minutemen are a bunch of racists? Fine; I can't say as I disagree. You want to have a demonstration to make it clear what you think of the Minutemen and their being invited to speak on campus? Fine; good idea. You want to shut them up by trying to get them off the stage? That's where I get off the bus.

1a) Why am I utterly unsurprised that it's the ISO that's causing trouble?

2) I was once told by a student who was heavily involved in the Columbia College Republicans that their goal in inviting speakers was to choose guests (such as Ann Coulter and David Horowitz) who would draw attention to themselves, and thus to the College Republicans, rather than necessarily inviting the most subtle and sophisticated conservative thinkers going. Inviting Jim Gilchrist seems like the simultaneous apotheosis and nadir of such an approach.

2a) The Minutemen? Honestly?

3) If you prevent an invited speaker from giving a videotaped talk by rushing the stage, it might be a bad idea to give an on-the-record interview about your actions to the campus daily paper.