Kelo

There's not anyone in the world who's not blogging about this opinion right now. Even sites that might normally dedicate themselves to delightful pornography are instead chattering about the Court's decicion, so I'll be brief myself:

You know the majority is way off base when Justice Thomas has to take up the good fight on behalf of the powerless. In short? The Court simply screwed up.

[sic]

I'm learning that of all the appellate tricks in the attorney attache-bag, the favorite seems to be dropping the [sic] bomb. The idea is to scour the opposing counsel's brief, find every typo you possibly can (and you'd be amazed at how many seriously bad typos you'll find in briefs, it makes this blog look like it's edited by the folks at The New York Review of Books) and then find ways to incorporate those typos into your filings in opposition.

For example, if you find a line that says "has exhausted hi claims" in a habeas petition, then you write in response "petitioner claims that he has exhausted hi claims" [sic]. Those three letters really say a lot, because as everyone knows "sic" is latin for "opposing counsel is an illiterate jackass." At least, that's the impression I feel the quoter is trying to convey when I read this stuff. I don't have any empirical evidence on this yet, but I have a feeling that putting a typo in a sentence triples that sentence's chances of being quoted. That's just fcuked up.

It Is So Hot

It seems like all kinds of great material should be coming out of summer work, but I don't really know what kind of things you're allowed to say. I do know that the assignments don't feel that much more real than anything we did in legal writing. I have to constantly remind myself that there are real parties with real interests who'd prefer I don't take the write-whatever's-easiest approach that saw me through my first year.

In a moment of regression a couple of days ago, I headed up to the city bar association to watch a panel entitled "The Role of the Federal Courts in the War on Terrorism." It was co-sponsored by the federalist society, so I knew there'd be some serious legal action going down. It always amazes me to watch a forty-two year old lawyer (who has never worked outside the beltway in his life) presume to explain to a retired rear admiral and life-time jag officer how military law works. Before you can recover from the shock, he's gone on to explain to a 2d Circuit Appellate Court Judge what the Padilla case was really all about; ignoring the fact that this particular judge had actually sat on the case in the intermediate court. What they lack in consistency they make up for with what I heard politely referred to as "testicular fortitude" today.

Of course, these are people who cite approvingly to Quirin and Kortematsu because "hey! they haven't been overruled yet! (knock on wood)." Two completely different worlds: I live in the world not steeped in paranoid fantasy. It's warm and humid lately, but otherwise better in every way.