Huh?

Democrats Seek No-Confidence Vote on Gonzales

A vote of no confidence has a technical meaning in parliamentary systems; it seems strange to me to borrow that term for a nonbinding "we're not happy with you" Sense of the Senate resolution. It makes perfectly good literal sense-- I don't have any confidence in Gonzales either-- but comes across as an attempt to borrow very serious language from other constitutional systems for an action that's meaningless in the U.S.

Has this ever been done before? Has either house of Congress ever passed something it called a "no-confidence" resolution?

Update: Asked and answered. Thanks to Professor Markell for the pointer.

Recommended reading

1. Omar at orgtheory on "the germanic and french political culture traditions and the titles of classic social theory books."

while joking around with a friend in grad school we noticed that a lot of German classical social theory work were always about something and something else (i.e. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), while the titles of a lot of the classic (Durkheimian) works were only about a single unitary process (i.e. Suicide). In retrospect, I now see that Jepperson’s typology provides the crude basis for a “reflection theory” sociology of knowledge account (as in that classic work in the French tradition Primitive Classification) as to this anecdotal observation: in the Germanic tradition, the cosmological order is conceptualized as a “clash” between two highly culturally elaborated and distinct structural orders (state and society); in the French tradition only a “single” collective order exists. This follows if we believe that totemic classifications are simply reflections of society, and if in science concepts are just totemic classifications.

Thus, the Chomskyian “deep structure” for the title of a work in the Germanic tradition will be:

Concept 1 and Concept 2

The corresponding French deep structure is simply:

Big single concept

2. Tyler Cowen on the late Alfred Chandler, and links and obituaries from there. Chandler's Visible Hand was, when I first read it as a junior in college, probably the most challenging and engaging work of social science I'd ever read; it did a great deal to convince me about the complexity of the empirical social world, and the dangers of trying to force that reality into analytical and conceptual categories derived from normative theory.

3. Back at orgtheory, Fabio on your dissertation family.

Mine, I think: Jacob Levy -> Amy Gutmann -> Judith Shklar -> Carl Friedrich [the founder of the ASPLP, as it happens] -> Alfred Weber. (I can't actually tell from wikipedia whetherwas Friedrich's undergraduate or graduate advisor, but in the absence of any further knowledge I'll put him on the tree.)

Michael Walzer was also on Gutmann's commitee (and might have been chair, I'm not certain); I think Walzer studied under Sam Beer.

If we extend through the rest of my dissertation committee, through Jeremy Waldron I reach Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz, and thence Lon Fuller and H.L.A. Hart; through George Kateb, Herbert Deane.

Discuss amongst yourselves

I submit that 1997-98 was the best year ever for genre/ geek TV.

Season 2 of Buffy, the traditional choice for best season of that show.
Season 5 of X-Files, the last great season of that show before it all went to hell.
Season 6 of Deep Space 9, which I think was the best single season of any Star Trek show, ever.
and Season 5 of Babylon 5, the denouement of one of the finest SF shows ever.

In the background, Hercules, Xena, Stargate SG-1 Voyager (ugh), and Highlander were on the air as well.

1996-97 had the same shows on the air except for Stargate, with strong seasons of X-Files, DS9, and B5, but only half a season of Buffy-- and Season 4 of Lois and Clark, which saddles the year with demerits.

If you just go by shows on the air, there's something special about 2000-1, when Buffy, Angel, Farscape, X-Files, and the good season of Dark Angel were all on the air, along with Voyager (ugh) and Xena in the background. But it was Season 8 of X-Files, which stank up the joint beyond redemption. The following year added Alias and Enterprise, but: Season 9 of X-Files, and Dark Angel went from good to... not good.

There are people who think that Battlestar Galactica is so much superior to any other SF show in history that we're currently living in the golden age. But BSG's time on the air has corresponded with, er, Smallville?

Update: Yes, I forgot about Veronica Mars and Lost, neither of which I've seen but both of which seem to count in favor of the BSG era.

No, I didn't forget about Charmed for any of the eras; I only tried to.

Quote of the day: "History is the tool of skeptics."

“History cannot be expected to solve the core analytical puzzles of political or economic theory. But it has its hour when the long-expected solutions of social and political science fail to materialize. History is the tool of skeptics. It helps us to ask better questions. More precisely, it can help us avoid repeating some questions again and again, running in circles unproductively."

Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 156.

Tenure in law schools...

is a blogopheric topic du jour. See, e.g., Brian Tamanaha-- who, by the way, has become a very fine model of scholar-blogging as far as I'm concerned, not least because he's worked out ways to blog about his current areas of research in ways that make me want to read the research. Self-promotion can be a fine thing... which is related to the point I want to make.

Syllogism 1:
1) We must have academic freedom at universities.
2) Academic freedom can only be adequately protected by tenure.
3) Therefore, we must have tenure. QED.

"We must have tenure" then gets entered in as the major premise of lots of other institutional questions. I understand the worries about tenure and the tenure system (boy howdy!) but incline very strongly toward keeping it more or less intact; I'm basically signed up for syllogism 1.

Syllogism 2:
1) We must have tenure.
2) People who can't be fired, can't be motivated to perform their jobs by the threat of firing.
[skipping a few obvious steps:]
3) If tenured academics are to be motivated to do their jobs, it must be by means of future reward, not performance-based punishment.

The standard thing to think at this stage is: money. With suitably large and performance-based raises, most people could be motivated not to shirk, even if they couldn't be fired.

Now we have to segment the pool.

Law professors, business professors, many economists, some number of medical faculty, and various others have earning possibilities as part-time consultants or practitioners that dwarf those annual raises. So it will be tough to motivate them to do research or teaching with money; they have better monetary options to be had by shirking their university work and taking on additional side work.

Most other memebers of a university faculty are more-than-usually difficult to motivate financially... by force of selection. Someone who gave up 5-10 years of prime earning time in order to stay in school for the chance to later take a job that pays less than the job he or she might have gotten years before is someone who doesn't respond "how high?" when a dollar bill says "jump." For a smart kid coming out of a good undergraduate institution, going on to graduate school and then a professorial job in the liberal arts just can't have as high an expected financial value as other things the kid could do. That gap becomes more and more visible throughout grad school, as the kid's old college friends start buying houses for their families while he or she is splitting a student apartment with two roommates. On top of that, the friends have long hours and stressful jobs but don't seem to be getting their souls crushed like so many dissertation-writers do. Those who stick with the process all that time are very stubborn, and very resistant to financial and material rewards. (Comparatively speaking-- resistant, not immune.)

So, one way or the other, paychecks aren't likely to be very effective tools for eliciting desired behavior from professors. They'll do something-- but they won't do very much.

What then?

The answer is: amour propre. Pride. Ego. Or, to dress it up, the desire to have intellectual accomplishments and make academic contributions. Since universities want active researchers, not just competent teachers, the immediate rewards of student interaction won't be enough; universities need to tenure faculty who get gratification from successful research and publication itself.

In order to balance out the impossibility of firing and the partial uselessness of money, it seems to me that universities with tenure have to select for employees who are unusually suffused with amour propre-- people who will be highly motivated to be promoted from associate to full professor, who will be highly motivated by the possibility of a named chair, who want prizes and awards and to be though of as making or transforming fields of inquiry and the recognition and acclaim of their peers. (Law schools, as far as I can tell, have reduced the number of standard professorial ranks from three to two; people are promoted to full when they receive tenure. A step in the wrong direction, on this model.) We don't think of ourselves as acting for these reasons, of course. But the rules and structures are, I think, tacitly based on that model of our behavior.

Questions left to the reader:
1) Tenure procedures are, in part, designed to weed out those whose productivity is temporary and opportunistic, those who will be promoted to tenure and then coast and shirk for the rest of their lives. That means that they should be, in part, designed to select for amour propre, not just for observed productivity. How can one differentiate between the two on the basis of observed behavior in the first seven years?

2) What are the predicted social-psychological consequences of designing an unusually rigorous sorting mechanism for selecting among very smart people on the basis of their pridefulness; then locking those who pass the process into a metaphorical room together for 40 years? Given that esteem is to a substantial extent zero-sum; that those who seek it rarely think that they have as much as they are due; and that there's a limited amount of it to go around in one's external discipline; what happens when those people turn their status-seeking inward, toward the university or the department? Do the predictions you derived seem to successfully describe the observed group dynamics?

I'm being playful here, not bitter-- I am, after all, a fully signed-up participant in this process, and recognize myself in the model. But we often tell the amour propre story as if it successfully solves the tenure-and-incentives problem without creating any new ones. "The kind of person who takes pride in intellectual accomplishments isn't going to cease to do so." True enough, and that really is why we see so little shirking.

But solving the shirking problem doesn't solve all problems. The solution requires both selecting for that pride at tenure time, and then living with the consequences of small groups of exceptionally prideful people being locked into lifelong status competitions (and being expected to engage in acts of collegial self-governance all the while.) We end up nuts enough to generate a whole genre of literature devoted to the idiosynacrasies of too many large egos in small rooms-- and even a funny subgenre about the murders that result. Our well-documented group psychopathologies are closely related to the characteristics that are needed for our tenure model of employment to be justifiable...

Now in print

(and in my pile of newly-purchased books--)

Iris Marion Young, Global Challenges: War, Self Determination, And Responsibility for Justice.

This isn't the responsibility book Iris was working on; it's a collection of articles published since 2000, including most of her work from that time that was on themes other than feminism or democratic theory. But these pieces appeared in quite disaparate places despite their thematic connections, so I'm very glad to see them all tied together and accessible.

The first three chapters provide the steps she was taking toward a theory of federalism. It was a theory with which I didn't ultimately agree; but I'm hoping to write up a reconstruction and extrapolation of it, along with an engagement with it, at some point, as there are important points to be found in it. In the meantime, I'm glad people will have the chance to read them together.

AAAS

Via Brian Leiter, this year's AAAS inductees. I looked at last year's list, well, last year, and discussed the state of political theory in the AAAS.

This year, no theorists in the poli sci list. (Akhil Amar is on the Law list and Robert Pippin, Philosophy.) So it remains true that Michael Walzer has not been inducted. It also remains true that Harvey Mansfield, Richard Flathman, Peter Euben, Michael Zuckert, William Connolly, and Philip Pettit have not been inducted-- all at least arguably serious omissions, with, as I said last year, the omission of Walzer rising to the level of "an embarrassment for the selection process," notwithstanding the highly meritorious group of theorists who have been inducted over the years.

Given how life usually works, I'm surprised to find how good (which is to say "accurate," not necessarily "numerous") the representation of women political theorists among AAAS inductees is. The living women who obviously should be on the list (Elshtain, Nussbaum, Gutmann, Rosenblum, Mansbridge, Pateman, Pitkin, Benhabib), are. I certainly don't see a Walzer-sized hole in the list among women in the field, though of course there may be someone I'm not thinking of.

But in short: no new news here.

A culture of scrutiny

Timothy Burke has an excellent and nuanced post up on what I've always thought of as the The Prisoner source of resistance to big institutions in general and thestate in particular. "I am not a number! I am a free man!" " I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered." Well, yes you will, in any modern society or polity or economy and in any functioning large bureaucratic institution, though there are more an less polite ways of doing all those things and ways that do more or less to convey the sense of being treated merely as a number. I don't think I'd like people who wholly lacked the Prisoner's reactions, but those reactions aren't especially meaningful rules for action.

The moonshine bootlegger, the Loompanics-reading crazy who keeps his life savings in gold under his bed, and the creator of e-mail encryption systems who can still get agitated at the words "Clipper Chip"-- these are libertarianish culture heroes of a very different flavor from John Galt. They're hard to describe in a register that gives them a coherent underlying theory which can be brought into dialogue with theories about why it would be useful for the state to do X. The National ID crad debate always seems to me to have this tone-- the reistance to such a card doesn't make a ton of sense, and there are various efficiencies that could be gained from having one. But I always sympathize with the opponents, and look askance at the reformist tinkerers who seem unable to hear what the opponents are saying.

(None of the above is quite what Burke's on about, and of course I don't mean to attribute my views to him; just some thoughts provoked by his post.)

Quotes of the night

"And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change." Lucien

"I wanted a tale of graceful ends. I wanted a play about a king who drowns his books and breaks his stuff and leaves his kingdom. About a magician who becomes a man. About a man who turns his back to magic. Because...I will never leave my island. I am.... in my fashion... an island. I am not a man. And I do not change." Dream

Math is hard.

New York Times online headline, as of 10:33 am:

"Sales of Previously Owned Homes Plunge to 1989 Level"

The actual underlying fact to which the headline-writer is referring:

"The National Association of Realtors said yesterday that sales of existing homes, which account for the vast majority of all home sales, fell 8.4 percent in March. That was the steepest monthly decline since January 1989." [emphasis added]

"Steepest monthly decline since 1989" and a decline "to 1989 levels" are concepts so unrelated that, even after years of quantitative howlers, I'm genuinely surprised at the mistake.

Somebody's got to pick the ten-dollar bill up off the sidewalk

Via Brad DeLong, this five-year old piece from Justin Fox that contains the following:

The dirty little secret of the behavioralists is that, for all their work on investor irrationality and market anomalies, they still believe that markets work pretty well and that trying to outguess the collective wisdom of millions of investors is usually futile.... But efficient-markets theory has a dirty little secret, too, which is that for the market to remain efficient, there have to be lots of rational investors who believe enough in the market's inefficiency to spend their careers trying to beat it....

It seems to me that this is true much more broadly than in financial markets. It's long since been recognized that entrepreneurship is, from the individual perspective, something like ahybrid between buying a lottery ticket and doing exceptionally generous charity work-- because few successful innovators are able to capture any large share of the social value of their innovation, so they bear the downside risk of the bankruptcy that is the fate of such a huge number of entrepreneurs without the full upside potential. The ones who seem to win the lottery by really generating a huge and important new idea rapidly see their profits for that idea whittled away by imitators. (Is this in Schumpeter? Or was this not fully put togther until Knight? I forget.) But we need the steady flow of cockeyed optimists to successfully identify potential innovations; and it's only the flow of them that suppresses the profits of each.

Opening a restaurant is the classic case-- the expected return of this behavior is large and negative, and if one day someone in your family comes home and announces a plan to do it, you should hold their head under running water until they sober up. The expected value of their income would be higher if they went and bagged groceries. But a) this is true because competition in the restaurant business is so intense, which is to say because there are so many other foolish people as well, and b) it's very good for the rest of us that there are these foolish people. Good for me, anyways; my restaurant-rich neighborhood always has places closing, but also always has new places opening...

Has anyone performed the standard behavioral economics experiments on defined subsets of persons such as entrepreneurs or day traders? Do the standard results (e.g. loss aversion) hold?

Infection

Via Hit & Run, a Wash Times review of Landsburg's More Sex is Safer Sex:

The "More Sex" thesis: If prudes occasionally slept with strangers, it would slow the spread of STDs.
Here's how it works. One such prude walks into a bar, and he's uninfected. If he takes home an uninfected woman, great -- he distracted her from a potential disease carrier. If he gets herpes, that's also great, because he's sexually conservative and won't pass the infection along very often. Better him than someone with less self control.
Either way, society benefits when the chaste open up slightly. "Slightly" is key, because too much "openness" spreads more disease than it diverts. After studying AIDS in England, Harvard's Michael Kremer put the cutoff at 2.25 partners per year.

Via my household expert in the mathematics of STDs, I've learned the following: Inefctivity per sexual encounter matters tremendously. (I have no idea whether Landsburg notes this; the review doesn't.) HIV is much, much less infective than herpes. Herpes spreads incredibly quickly by heterosexual intercourse; HIV doesn't. On average it takes a lot more than a one-night-stand to heterosexually contract HIV. If 2.25 partners per year is really the right equilibrium figure for HIV, then the figure for herpes would be a lot less-- maybe two orders of magnitude less.

I'll try to lay hands on the book itself and follow up. But at the very least, no monogamous readers should read this and decide to go have a one-night stand on the theory that they're slowing the spread of herpes...

Advise and consent

Fabio Rojas resumes his series of posts of advice for grad students with one on choosing an advisor.

Piled Higher and Deeper cautions against doing too much of the kind of homework Fabio recommends. I'd err on the side of too much not too little homework, here; I think this is a rare case in which PhD gets things noticeably wrong (though in the service of a funny and true point about advisee-advisor life). As soon as a grad student sees an advisor's CV, which is a pretty routine occurence, he or she would fall into the "google-stalking" category-- that can't be right.

Conference: "Children, Family and the State"

May 18-20, 2007, at the Centre de Recherche en Ethique a l'Universite de Montreal [CREUM]. Participants include Crooked Timber's Harry Brighouse; David Benatar; Amy Mullin; David Archard; Rob Reich; Eva Kittay; Sally Haslanger; Scott Forbes; Elizabeth Brake; Samantha Brennan; Sarah Stroud; Steve Lecce; James Dwyer; Daniel Weinstock; Anne Alstott; Andrew Williams; Colin Macleod; Jody Heymann; Martha Friendly; Nico Trocmé; Shauna Van Praagh.

A week ago today...

A blizzard serious enough to shut down flights from Montreal all the way down to Philadelphia, seriously interfering with travel in for the conference.

Today: 68 degrees, sunny, gorgeous, and pefect. I'm just sayin'.

Belated

I saw hardly anything that amused me this April Fool's Day. Via Leiter, I've just seen something that retroactively makes my April 1.

In Disturbing New Study, Economists Find That History is Inefficient.

It is an age-old saying: “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.” But this assumption is under fire in a new study by economists, released today. Eric L. Talley, a UC Berkeley economist and Principal Investigator for the study, described it this way: “using sophisticated methodological techniques, we have found that those who remember history are as likely to repeat it as those who do not. Although the results are surprising, they are resoundingly clear: history is inefficient.” The authors recommend that resources currently devoted to the study of history be redirected.[...]"I've often worried that studying history was pointless,” remarked legal historian John Fabian Witt, Columbia, “and the Talley study pretty much proves it. I've decided to switch to economics.”

States' rights and what's right

Since I've written a bit about Confederate symbols and a lot about federalism, I kept meaning to write a post about Giuliani's "it's for the states to decide" dodge on flying the Confederate flag, but planning for the Hume-Smith conference yesterday took all my time. In the meantime, Mark Kleiman has said exactly what needs to be said (via Matt Yglesias). A procedural point isn't an answer to a substantive question about what the desirable outcome of the process would be.

How things change

Last year, at the White House Press Correspondents Association dinner: a blistering Steven Colbert.

This year: Rich Little will do his Andy Rooney impression.

Egad.

My former teacher, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Emeritus, and founder of the Princeton School of public law Walter Murphy was placed on a TSA watch list for scrutiny in flying. While the reasons for this are of course secret, an airline employee stated that attendance at peace marches often suffices, and that Murphy's speaking against the Bush Administration's policies could well have been the reason.

On the one hand, I certainly have doubts-- the airline employee may well not know what he or she was talking about (frontline airport staff are pretty unlikely to be in on the TSA's secrets); I find the idea of Bush administration officials paying close attention to scholarly writings and lectures in constitutional theory somewhat dubious; and, well, what professor of constitutional law hasn't criticized the administration at this point?, yet I haven't heard that the whole discipline is on the list.

On the other hand, we're left with no way to know, and no ability to get any competing story to the airline employee's... and the employee felt confident enough in having seen enough selectee-list cases to offer the generalization, which probably has some evidentiary value. And Murphy himself seems sufficiently persuaded to want the story to be known-- and I have very considerable faith in Professor Murphy's judgment and sense of things. Most disturbing.

See Murphy via Mark Graber, Jack Balkin (whose post matches my view on the whole), and Orin Kerr.

Update: The Wired blog seems to offer good reason for skepticism-- which is still fully compatible with everything Balkin said...

Hume and Smith on Justice, Sympathy, and Commerce

(Reposted to bring it to the top of the page)

http://profs-polisci.mcgill.ca/levy/Hume_Smith/

The Montreal Political Theory Workshop
“Hume and Smith on Justice, Sympathy, and Commerce”
April 13, 2007
McGill University
Gold Room, Faculty Club, 3450 McTavish St., Montréal
8:30 am: Coffee available

9 am: Welcoming remarks
Jacob Levy, Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory, McGill University

Richard Virr, Acting Head and Curator of Manuscripts, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, McGill Libraries


9:15 -10:20 am: “Frenzy, Gloom, and the Spirit of Liberty : Paradoxes of Political Agency in Hume”
Sharon Krause, Associate Professor of Political Science, Brown University


10:30-11:35 am: “Humean Toleration: Policy, Paradox, and Law of Nature”
Andrew Sabl, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Political Science, UCLA


11:45am-12:50pm: “Adam Smith's Critique of International Trading Companies: Theorizing 'Globalization' in the Age of Enlightenment”
Sankar Muthu, Assistant Professor of Politics, Princeton University


2:00-3:05 pm: “Hume and Smith on Sympathy: A Comparison, Contrast, and Reconstruction”
Samuel Fleischacker, Professor of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago


3:15-4:45 pm: Commentaries and Discussion

Chair: Daniel Weinstock, Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political Philosophy, Université de Montréal

George Grantham, Professor of Economics, McGill University

James Moore, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Concordia University

Registration is not required, but those who e-mail Jeffrey Bercuson, jeffrey.bercuson@mail.mcgill.ca, can be counted for coffee and refreshments, and will be given access to the papers.

Sponsored by: The Montreal Political Theory Workshop; The Earhart Foundation; The McGill University David Hume Collection

The paralysis of choice...

in the modern airport bookstore, with a 2-hour flight delay.

I'm too tired, and frustrated with travel, to work. Too tired to read the French book in my pocket which is the only fiction I brought with me. Read last week's Economist on the morning leg and don't feel lik ebuying this week's now.

In the old days: buy some trashy piece of Clancy, get $8 enjoyment out of it between the delay, the flight, and the flight home.

But-- have you noticed-- the quality of fiction in moderately-good airport bookstores is much, much higher than it used to be.

In addition, I've got the constraints set by my various fetishes about books. I can't just look for $8 worth of entertainment. I've got to be willing to make a lifetime commitment-- the book will need shelf space, and will need to be packed and unpacked and reshelved who knows how many times.

Can't buy a book I already have, even if the next book on my to-read list happens to be for sale and it's the book I most want to start reading.

Can't buy a book I might already have, and since I haven't finished my LibraryThing database, can't check to verify from here. This eliminates a lot of books I think look interesting, since I've thought they looked interesting before, remember having done so, but can't remember whether I bought them or not.

Can't buy a book my wife has or might have.

Don't want to buy something that's too big or heavy-- pocket-sized in my overcoat is ideal, since I'm already lugging laptop, two dissertations, book to review, book to comment on, and the French book.

I pick up pulp fantasy books-- a Terry Brooks, a Terry Goodkind, and an R.A. Salvatore, none of whom I've ever read. The Terry Pratchett (what the hell is it with Terrys?) seems promising, but if I ever start Discworld, I want to start it, not just pick up book #73. The Brooks and Goodkind are disspiritingly familiar; I flip through them and feel like random pages from the middle are pages I might have read before. I'm emotionally committed to finishing out Robert Jordan; there will be a new George R.R. Martin someday reasonably soon; don't want to start a new series, when the existing series already feel like a drain on my fiction-reading time. I'd almost have bought a Salvatore Forgotten Realms novel, but I don't want the brick of a book that packages the whole Dark Elf trilogy. And in any case I find I want my brain to be a litle more exercised.

I turn to the non-genre fiction. First look at three different Ian McEwan novels (how many has he written??), put them all back when I realize that I don't want to feel brutalized this weekend, as I always do at the end of a McEwan novel. Ishiguro strikes me the same way; I'm not prepared to be emotionally exhausted. I want something that's emotionally comparable to the old "airport novel" even though I want soemthing that's intellectually more interesting.

Weird non-transitive reasoning. I put down Kundera novels of which I've read bad reviews, though they're undoubtedly of vastly greater literary merit than the Salvatore I might have bought. The book of Chabon short stories feels too slight when I'm in the mood for a novel, even though-- to reiterate-- a moment ago I was thinking about buying licensed D&D fiction.

The constraints based on books I already own start cutting deeper; why should I make a lifetime investment in a book that I've previously deliberately foregone in favor of a better book that's waiting for me on the shelves back home, or even one that I'm confident will be a lesser book? But the books which I'm sure don't violate those constraints-- I don't own Snow, would liek to give it a try, don't think that it's an inferior verion of anything I've got waiting at home-- all seem to violate the size-and-weight constraints.

This is all relatively silly, because I'll undoubtedly sleep through the flight. But somehow I can't bring myself not to be looking for the perfect book to fit my mood and constraints; there's still an hour and a half until takeoff, and in principle I want to read my way through that time...

update

60 hours later, the same dilemma-- this time with an unexpected twelve-hour delay in SFO. David Lodge? Seems perfect, but all the have is Author, Author, and that seems like a book one would appreciate a lot more with a lot of(or even some) familiarity with Henry James. Murakami? A big commitment-- if I like the novel it will might consume a week I really can't spare right now, and in any event Murakami joined McEwan and Ishiguro in my great-novels-that-were-emotionally-inappropriate-for-a-Belize-vacation hat trick in December. (One novel, Never Let Me Go, of the struggle to extract emotional normalcy out of the bizarre and disturbing, and two novels, Saturday and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, about the eruption of the bizarre and disturbing and violent into ordinary life.) Though I walk around the bookstore with Norwegian Wood in my hand for a while; I'm close. This store has the first Discworld novel; I give it fifteen pages to grab my interest or my funnybone, and it does neither. I wonder why, given how highly-recommended it is by people whose tastes resemble mine. Spin seems promising. So does Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job. Had the Susannah Clarke collection of short stories set in the world of Strange & Norrell been in paperback I would have snappd it up, but instead it was in a lovely hardcover that I didn't want to add to the weight on my shoulder. Kundera's Ignorance, which wasn't in the other store, gets a serious look, and is added to Norwegian Wood in my hand.

And then, somehow, I spend enough time in the bookstore that I get through the wave of exhaustion and annoyance at American Airlines that had been preventing me from working. I put the books down, leave the bookstore, note its closing hour in case I change my mind later, and head out for a place to open my laptop...

Unless I'm misreading...

this post, no less than Orin Kerr, one of the smartest law-bloggers around and, from what I know, a very impressive legal scholar, former clerk for Anthony Kennedy, and specialist in criminal-constitutional law, says he'd never heard of the Indian Civil Rights Act until last week.

Actually, I'm pretty sure I'm not misreading.

In People v. Ramirez, handed down on Wednesday, tribal officers at a casino on an Indian reservation searched a car without probable cause and found drugs inside. The owner of the car was prosecuted in state court and moved to suppress the drugs. The California court's conclusion: the Indian Civil Rights Act does include a suppression remedy for violations.[...] I'd never heard of this Act until reading the Ramirez decision, so I'm certainly open to learning more.

Now, ICRA isn't a minor or obscure statute, so I find this quite remarkable. ICRA rather than the Fourth Amendment governs the searches and seizures conducted by some 300 governments covering about two and a half percent of the American landmass; Orin's a leading scholar of search-and-seizure law. I don't mean this as a slight of Orin, for whom I have great respect. It just confirms my ongoing sense that Indian law is badely, badly undertaught in American law schools.

The link between global warming...

and Quebec's future dominance in a crucial natural resource industry.

Tonight, we dine in heck

A few readers have asked what I thought of 300, which I only had a chance today. A few things:

It was really, thoroughly, exactly what I expected. On the one hand, that's praise-- I had high expectations, partly on the basis of one of the best trailers I've seen in years. On the other hand, it's a little disappointing. Sin City was this astonishing, amazing, novel thing-- it would never have occured to me that a movie could look like that before. Now, well, I do know that a movie could look like that. And 300, unlike Sin City, is a story in which the beats just are what they are, have to be what they have to be-- all archetypes and stereotypes and the basic founding myth of the west and so on and so on. It's not a movie for surprises in the first place, and the fact that the stunning aesthetic itself was itself not so stunning meant that there was something boring even about the excitement.

Add to that the fact that, while I've never read 300, I've been seeing Frank Miller pictures (and Miller-Varley pictures) on the page for some 20 years now. When a waterfall of Persian soldiers fall over the cliff in slow motion, it's hard to think anything other than: "I've seen this frame dozens of times with the Hand; I even think I've seen this panel on Daredevil covers four or five times." I know Sin City had lots of standard Miller visual tropes as well, but somehow they didn't distract me the same way.

The mixture of accents was a bit goofy. The lighting was pretty visually impressive, and the most visually novel part.

Like I said, I had high expectations, and they were met. But they were met so perfectly (even without having read the comic) that it was, paradoxically,a bit of a letdown.

Here & Away

It's that time of year. Selected coming activities:

Next weekend, APA Pacific, San Francisco

April 13, Hume and Smith conference, Montreal

April 27, Works in Progress Workshop, University of Chicago Law School

May 3, Political Science Graduate Students' Conference, McGill

May 4-5, workshop on Deliberative Politics and Institutional Design in Multicultural Democracies, Queen's University

And not a bit of work that can be duplicated among them...