Jets v. Buffalo

Trent Edwards is looking pretty great. Go Cardinal (alumni)!

Finbarr Fest '08

Tomorrow, September 25, is St. Finbarr's day. Finbarr was an Irish saint, and his day is also the anniversary of the founding of U2 and the breaking of ground on Fenway park. It is incidentally the day Congress passed the bill of rights. Clearly, as law students in Boston, we have a moral obligation to observe this oft-forgotten holiday.

Meet at the Hark at lunchtime. Bring beer.

Can Bill Simmons Save Friday Night Lights?

He's already trying. I hope it works.

Sunday Morning Lights

The Blue Thunder Squids: XXX-treme Edition are 2-0 after this morning's win. And the internets are teaching me advanged new techniques to customize this year's jerseys. Posterboard and Krylon may not cut it this year.

And Then You Win

Here's my hometown mayor, Jerry Sanders, explaining why he decided to break an election promise to veto any legislation in support of gay marriage:

This seems a much bigger deal to me than Gavin Newsom's grandstanding a few years ago. San Diego is a little island of Red America in our People's Republic, and eventual acceptance there by an elected Republican is an incredibly promising sign. It's just this kind of private victory of conscience that lets the good guys win in the end.

So: yay progress!

The Manhattan Project

Great article in the SF Chronicle:

The best Manhattans slide easily down the throat. They linger on the palate, dance on the tongue and tickle the tonsils for a good long while. Manhattans, when made by a master of the craft, can produce euphoria in discriminating souls, and they've been known to tempt angels to return to physical manifestation, just for one more sip.

Martinis, on the other hand, get you drunk quickly.

Anachronism

Anybody can do talk like a pirate day. Real pros are already gearing up for Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day on December 8.

The Intentionality of Coalitions

They're discussing Jon Chait's new book, The Big Con, over at the TPM Cafe book club. Ross Douthat has the first response:

The most attention-catching aspect of Chait's thesis - his argument, restated in his first post, that the best way to understand the contemporary conservative movement is by treating it as a conspiracy to practice class warfare on behalf of the rich - strikes me as little better than name-calling, and undercuts the more subtle political analysis that he practices elsewhere in the book. I don't want to step on anything Megan McArdle might say in her contributions to this discussion, but I think her old post on why, in most cases, people actually believe what they say they believe and should be engaged on those terms applies in spades here.

If Douthat's description of Chait's argument is correct, though, his objections miss the point. If a political movement is functionally equivalent to a conspiracy to practice some covert goal, it makes sense to treat it as such even if no individual members of the coalition are actually conspiring. From the way I read Chait's argument, it's not necessary that there be an actual conspiracy. Chait's evidence of "bad faith" is that any time there is a conflict between upward income redistribution and some other conservative policy goal, tax cuts for the rich win. If that's the case, the movement is functioning like a conspiracy, even if nobody is actually lying.

The idea is hard to wrap your mind around - just ask John Searle. But it's perfectly possible when decision-making power isn't vested in a single individual. Then, the honest reasons that individual people give for their preferences don't explain the behavior of the group. Imagine a coalition comprised of the following elements:

• A group of prominent opinion leaders arguing that, on balance, raising speeding limits is a good idea in some circumstances.
  
• A group of crazy/ignorant but still honest people arguing that raising speed limits always reduces the number of accidents.
  
• A group of wealthy sports-car owners who don't write op-eds, but feel that they have a moral right to drive as fast as they can, and only vote for and give money to candidates who support that right.
  
• A group of potential politicians representing the range of possible policy preferences. They are utterly incorruptible and will not change their a priori policy stances in exchange for votes or campaign cash, but they don't feel bad about being deliberately vague on the campaign trail to broaden their coalitions.
  

Under the right (not terribly rare) circumstances, this coalition will be functionally equivalent to a massive conspiracy with the explicit goal of always raising speed limits every time, and deliberately lying about the reasons why, even if all the individual actors always tell the truth.

The question in an individual case is whether it matters if the participants are liars, or if the argument gets its moral/logical force from somewhere else. Here Chait's case gets complicated, because I think his primary thesis is that the party functions as a conspiracy whether or not most participants are honest, but that he also wants to call out certain individuals as liars in a kind of rhetorical going-for-two. This can make his main case appear to rest on bad faith on the other side, even if it doesn't necessarily.

"Nothing feels as solid as a living branch; stone by comparison is brittle."

This (former?) English prof in New York writes a really neat blog, Steamboats Are Ruining Everything.

President Bush Confronts the Zombiefascist Menace

And won't take no guff from no reporters about it, neither.

Incidentally, does anyone know why Blogger won't let me embed YouTube videos?

Test Prep

LSAT Practice, from McSweeney's:

A concerned father drops three boys (Peter, Dom, and Björn), three girls (Henrietta, Elaine, and Meghan), and his daughter (Lorelei) off at the local mall's theater. He wants to know which one of the boys will be making out with his daughter during the movie. He knows that each of the eighth-graders will make out at least once but not more than twice before the movie ends. He also knows that the following conditions must apply:

* Elaine will not make out with Björn until she's with Peter (because they're in an open relationship and she's testing the waters).

* Henrietta will not make out with Peter or Dom (because she only dates older guys).

* If Lorelei makes out with both Henrietta and Elaine, then Peter and Björn will make out. (They made a bet.)

* Meghan will always make out last (because she's ugly).

* Dom will always be paired with Meghan (because he's desperate).

What I Wish I Had Know About Law School At The Start Of My 1L Year

A new year is starting for a new crop of 1Ls, and the internet is bursting with advice for them. I admit I consumed this stuff voraciously, stuffing my cheeks with tips, tricks, and how-tos. But I really had no idea what any of it meant in context, and in place of all the earnest advice, what would have really helped me was a brief bird's-eye view of how law school works. So here it is.

As treated in law school, the legal process is a function that maps fact patterns to verdicts. The way that law works is that stuff happens, making a kind of a short story. The court hears this story (through the lawyers) and then returns a decision. You win, you lose. If you imagine stories as little notes spread across a tabletop, the "law" is a line drawn on that surface separating stories with one outcome (the contract is valid, the defendant is guilty, whatever) from the others. The whole project of law school is figuring out where that line is.

What complicates things is that written laws generally just say "the line should be hereabouts," because it's impossible to think up and account for every possible story ahead of time. And on top of that people have all sorts of reasons for saying the line is somewhere when it isn't really. So then only way to know where it actually lies is to check individual points. So instead of traditional textbooks that just tell you the Rules of Physics, law schools use casebooks. A casebook is just a big book of cases, each one an important data point in figuring out where the line is. Law schools could just tell you where the lines are, because that's what professors spend all day thinking and writing about, but the idea is that out in the real world you won't have professors to tell you the answers, and you'll have to figure out where the line is by yourself, by examining cases. So they figure you should learn to do that now. Don't worry, it only takes a few weeks.

Every case in the casebook is a data point to help you figure out where the line is. Importantly, every case has been put in there on purpose to illustrate some part of how the line curves. The trick to law school is extracting the one important thing that a case stands for from all the excess information.

For example, you are almost certain to read a case (in Contracts) about a botched skin graft that causes the patient to grow hair on the palm of his hand. Professors love the wild details, and they may help you remember, but they're irrelevant. The Hairy Hand case (I don't even remember the real name today) stands for the proposition: "If you break a contract, you owe the other side the money equal to the difference between the value of what you promised them and the value of what you gave them." This is the usual way to assess damages in contracts suits, as opposed to other potential measures like "You have to give them the full value of what was promised, ignoring the value of what you already gave them" or "You don't have to give them anything! Ha ha!" The case is full of wild turns about shady plastic surgeons and how you put a dollar value on having a hairy hand or a healthy one, but you don't really need to know all that. All you need to know is how to do the math.

When it's exam time, you apply that line-finding skill. Your average law school exam is what they call an issue-spotter. All that means is the professor writes a handful of short stories, and then asks you what arguments a court might have to decide, and which side of the line they're on. The best way to figure out exactly how to do well is to get old exams, take them under test conditions, and compare your results to the model answers. But that's no different from any other test.

Now a lot of the time the line is blurry, or there's not enough information to draw it precisely, because this shit is hard. We're mapping to legal outcomes from every possible range of human interaction. That's a lot of space to cover. But if you know the two closest points, even if they fall on opposite sides of the line, you'll do alright. Because it is hard and the people implementing it are only human, there's a lot of individual discretion at the margin.

That's the big picture. Everything else you can figure out plenty fast.

Why Are So Many Nerds Libertarian?

Slashdot put up a thread, and the very first comment modded up to 5 for "insightful" has the answer. Not the answer the author intends, which is a rehash of the non-aggression principle, but in the paragraphs immediately preceding:

I'm sure like many others here, I got very good marks at public school, but was also often in trouble and sent to the principal's office for mouthing off in class, etc. Why? Because while I would accept that the teachers were more learned (or in some cases, less ignorant), I never thought for a moment that they were more intelligent. They demanded respect from me, but never offered the same in return (there were precious few exceptions, and for their counsel, I will always be greatful).

So what messages did I receive in those public school classrooms? "You're no better than anyone else", "Take your place and shut up", "Slow down and learn at the same rate as everybody else; you're not special". All the while, within myself, I was thinking "But I can go faster than everyone else", "I can see a better way to do this", and "I am special".

And I can speak from experience here when I tell you that it's very easy to keep thinking you're special and the rules shouldn't (or even don't really) apply to you when you haven't yet developed the social skills to take other people's interests and perspectives into account. Because, you know, you're a nerd.

None of which is a knock-down critique of the power of markets or anything, and just a piece of the larger story about why ideologies may be popular independent of the merits. But there you are.

UCLA 45, Stanford 17

I'm already tired of hearing how people are excited for football season. I don't get to be excited about football season anymore. Seriously, "Nano-progress?"

Ken Rolls His Ankle

Perhaps the greatest joy came shortly thereafter, when my good samaritan neighbor asked if I wanted him to call me an ambulance to make sure there was no break or ligament damage. "No thanks," I answered. "I have no health insurance!"

Because I am invincible, I have never suffered a major injury, but that sure sounds like it sucks.