Ah, yes. Activity fair day. A day of unbridled potential for glory and disaster.

I’m betting on disaster, myself.

Any 1Ls reading this around front: Congrats! You’ve made me feel better about the overly complicated system I’ve run with. My kingdom for a lingerer, though.

–C.J.

For those who have taken Legal History with me, you’ll know that when it comes to Supreme Court watching, I have become enamored with a method of tea-leaf reading known as Kennedy’s Law.

Kennedy’s Law first came to my attention via Bench Memos’ Matthrew Franck. Kennedy’s Law, as it has evolved in my own understanding, holds that in any given 5-4 Supreme Court decision in which Justice Anthony Kennedy joins with the “liberal” wing of the Court, there is a 95% probability that the Court got the law wrong. (While I loathe the use of political terminology when referring to jurisprudence, it’s an acceptable vice here given its descriptive handiness.) As a corollary, if Kennedy himself wrote the majority opinion, there is an equal probability that the opinion will be an indecipherable morass jurisprudentially.

And Kennedy’s Law is like Brannigan’s Law. A pity for all of those who must actually read what he produces.

–C.J.

Well, I suppose congratulations are in order for the newly-minted Associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, recently confirmed by the Senate 68-31.  Such was ordained, after all, given the Democratic majority and the fact the lies act testimony she gave to the Judiciary Committee. I’m sure such a wise Latina will make a perfectly fine justice and that her wisdom is merely lost on her bitter and clingy white man detractors. (And I promise I won’t mix and match metaphors anymore. Doesn’t end well for anyone, least of all those who can follow them.)

As Justice Souter leaves the stage, I’ll simply make a note of the other finalist on President George H.W. Bush’s shortlist to fill the vacancy opened by Justice Brennan’s retirement in 1990: The 5th Circuit’s Judge Edith Jones. A woman who wrote in McCorvey v. Hill,

It takes no expert prognosticator to know that research on women’s mental and physical health following abortion will yield an eventual medical consensus, and neonatal science will push the frontiers of fetal ‘viability’ ever closer to the date of conception. One may fervently hope that the Court will someday acknowledge such developments and re-evaluate Roe and Casey accordingly. That the [Fifth Circuit]‘s constitutional decision making leaves our nation in a position of willful blindness to evolving knowledge [in the medical field] should trouble any dispassionate observer not only about the abortion decisions, but about a number of other areas in which the court unhesitatingly steps into the realm of social policy under the guise of constitutional adjudication.

McCorvey v. Hill, 385 F.3d 846, 852-853 (5th Cir. 2004) (J. Jones, concurring).

She’d certainly have made Casey more interesting had she been on the Supreme Court’s bench instead of Souter. (And probably more readable, though that’s another matter.)

Maybe those who forever curse Warren Rudman have a point.

–C.J.

Introducing oneself to the world ain’t exactly the easiest thing you’ll ever do. Especially in the cloistered confines of a hothouse like the law school. A failed Saturday Night Live riff is as good any way to begin the process, I suppose. Better than Monty Python, at any rate. (I’ll save that for another day.)

At any rate!

Welcome to the blogging home of the Washburn chapter of the Federalist Society, an organization dedicated to encouraging debate and discourse about the Constitution and its founding principles. We tend to be a merry bunch, for the most part, adhering to various strains of originalist or textualist jurisprudence, though there’re more than a few natural law philosophers, law and economics gurus, and appliers of the Austrian School to legal problems. (At least in the national organization. Around here, we’re more the practical sort. Though more intellectuals would be most welcome! It’s lonely wearing that hat.)

We’re working on putting together a banner year for the chapter and the school. At least I hope it’s a banner year. I’ll feel rather sheepish if it isn’t. And hopefully this blawg will produce some interesting discussion. As, at the very least, it shall be a wonderful outlet for all of my thoughts on jurisprudence and public policy pertinent to that which the Society holds dear.

And, dearest readers, I have far, far too many. But that is for another day.

Or at least another post.

–C.J.