Welcome, if you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or subscribe to our email newsletter. Thanks for visiting!

Hey folks. Sorry that the blogging has been really sparse of late - it’s exams season here at Marquette University and my RSS reader has literally 488 posts in the backlog. So rather than original analysis, take these 3 quick hits.

First, in honor of Dr. Christopher Wolfe’s last lecture at Marquette, consider this from Romer v. Evans, Justice Scalia’s dissent, which Dr. Wolfe recently identified as one of his favorite passages in American constitutional law:

When the Court takes sides in the culture wars, it tends to be with the knights rather than the villeins–and more specifically with the Templars, reflecting the views and values of the lawyer class from which the Court’s Members are drawn. How that class feels about homosexuality will be evident to anyone who wishes to interview job applicants at virtually any of the Nation’s law schools. The interviewer may refuse to offer a job because the applicant is a Republican; because he is an adulterer; because he went to the wrong prep school or belongs to the wrong country club; because he eats snails; because he is a womanizer; because she wears real animal fur; or even because he hates the Chicago Cubs.
But if the interviewer should wish not to be an associate or partner of an applicant because he disapproves of the applicant’s homosexuality, then he will have violated the pledge which the Association of American Law Schools requires all its member schools to exact from job interviewers: “assurance of the employer’s willingness” to hire homosexuals. Bylaws of the Association of American Law Schools, Inc. §6-4(b); … This law school view of what “prejudices” must be stamped out may be contrasted with the more plebeian attitudes that apparently still prevail in the United States Congress…

And then another classic of Con Law brought to our attention by Dr. Wolfe, from then-Associate Justice Rehnquist’s dissenting opinion in Carey v. Population Services. Talk about a rhetorical flight:

Those who valiantly but vainly defended the heights of Bunker Hill in 1775 made it possible that men such as James Madison might later sit in the first Congress and draft the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. The post-Civil War Congresses which drafted the Civil War Amendments to the Constitution could not have accomplished their task without the blood of brave men on both sides which was shed at Shiloh, Gettysburg, and Cold Harbor. If those responsible for these Amendments, by feats of valor or efforts of draftsmanship, could have lived to know that their efforts had enshrined in the Constitution the right of commercial vendors of contraceptives to peddle them to unmarried minors through such means as window displays and vending machines located in the men’s room of truck stops, notwithstanding the considered judgment of the New York Legislature to the contrary, it is not difficult to imagine their reaction.

Finally, my way of taking a break from studying has been reading CICERO: The life and times of Rome’s Greatest Politician. It’s my third pass through the book (I’m somewhat of a Cicero fan).

This is Cicero’s comment on Julius Caesar:

When I notice how carefully arranged his hair is and when I watch him adjusting the parting with one finger, I cannot imagine that this man could conceive of such a wicked thing as to destroy the Roman constitution.

This is my comment on Cicero’s comment.

• The Media-imposed Interpretation - May 16th, 2008
• The State of the State Senate - May 14th, 2008
• The Other Problem with Public Financing - May 10th, 2008
• Preview from Sandra Day O'Connor? - May 5th, 2008
• The Gideons Got the Green - May 5th, 2008