"Are the reasons you believe that people should not be telling Breyer to retire substantive as much as practical? In other words, is your fear solely that telling him to retire will make him want to do the opposite so as not to appear political, or do you also think that there are good reasons that he should not retire immediately?"

Sometimes one just slams right up against the horrific shallowness of legal scholarship, and you can only hope to have kept enough of your wits about you to feel a slight pain. And so I twinge as I read Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker. That's his question above, all multilayered but still paper-thin. Tiresomely, he called up a law professor — Noah Feldman — to produce a transcript, thereby creating a text that must look substantial to some readers.