"How can you teach English to young children with a veil over your face?"

Firing a teacher for her religious garb. Do we believe the justification?

Aishah Azmi, 24, was asked to take it off in class after pupils said they found English lessons hard to understand because they could not see her lips move....

"The children themselves were complaining. It is about what's best for the children."

In most households, there is no marriage.

I don't think this means that "To Be Married Means to Be Outnumbered," as the NYT headline puts it.

The American Community Survey, released recently by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation’s 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples — with and without children — just shy of a majority and down from more than 52 percent five years earlier.

Are most individual adults married? If singles live alone, they create more households per capita. And the percentage is affected by all the widows who outlive their husbands and all the young people who delay getting married. Individuals in both those groups are still the marrying kind.

But how much should we worry about the trend? Would it be awful if too many people decided that being single is the better way to live? Personally, I like that other people embrace marriage. It gives a nice solidity to society. Is it bad of me not to help with that enterprise?

"He is my only child still living and I think of him as a gift from God."

"He is also the best memory I have left of my wife." Yohane Banda was too poor to take care of the child he says he loves and gave the child up to the "good lady," Madonna, who swept into Malawi to adopt a boy. If Madonna wanted to help, she could have simply given the man some money. Something tells me that in the end she will, but only after she tripped all over her own embarrassing desire to ooze with beneficence and maternal love. It's not so easy. Now, you look awful. The only way to extricate yourself is to leave the boy and a pile of money with Banda and fund some very substantial project to help a big group of children in Malawi.

I'm on the pavement, thinking about the government.

Question most often asked of a blogger.

In my long experience. Can you guess what it is?

Comics.

The "Masters of American Comics" exhibition is in NY now (split into two shows, in two museums). Michael Kimmelman reviews it:

[T]he show shouldn’t be missed. It spotlights artists like Chris Ware and Gary Panter, amazing state-of-the-art talents and endearing in the tradition of all those shy, gifted kids who drew endlessly in their rooms when other kids wouldn’t play with them, dreaming about someday telling the world, “I told you so."

It was at the Milwaukee Art Museum (in one piece) last spring. Here's my old post about it.

Ground Zero/the Amish schoolhouse.

Here's a sane observation in a letter to the NYT editor by Susan J. Behrens of Brooklyn:

A week after the violence, the Amish have cleared the site of the building and planted various grasses and clover to return the site to pastureland.

What a contrast to another site of violence, ground zero, where the bickering and gawking continue five years later.

Perhaps it’s as simple as the vast difference in the value of the two sites financially, but the Amish seem to have the right values about moving on.

IN THE COMMENTS: Is snark called for? If so, Jeff has it:

I'm sure we'll see another letter to the Times, postmarked Park Slope or the Upper West Side, stating that no healing can begin until the Amish understand the root causes of the murderers grudge against young schoolgirls!

Perhaps the field will need the addition of a Ford or Soros funded International Center for Learning showcasing the achievements of child murderers that have been shamefully hidden by the theocratic Amish culture.

"It was a private world. We dreamed it up. It flowered out of our imaginations."

Richard Hell has an op-ed in the NYT:

It makes me think of that Elvis Presley quotation: “When I was a child, ladies and gentlemen, I was a dreamer. I read comic books, and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies, and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I ever dreamed has come true a hundred times.” We dreamed CBGB’s into existence.

Aw, the sweet, sentimental punk kids -- all grown old, and now their clubhouse has gone. Or... that is...

CBGB’s is going to be dismantled and reconstructed as an exhibit in Las Vegas, like Elvis. I like that. A lot. I really hope it happens as intended.

It's funny -- and another thing that makes my generation seem so old -- that he likes that CBGB's is going to Las Vegas. We all made fun of Elvis for relocating there back in the 70s. It's okay, Hell tells us, to be old and sentimental and nostalgic.

"They were not a broadcasting concern to begin with. ... They went into business to affect elections."

Gloats Rush Limbaugh, as Air America files for bankruptcy. The implication is that his show is "a broadcasting concern," but you've got to wonder: How is his show less about affecting elections than "Air America"?

I like the idea that listeners can tell what the radio guy is up to. We're sensitive to the voice. We can tell when what the speaker wants is to tell you to get in line politically. (I feel the same way about blogging.)

I'm not a big listener of either Limbaugh or Al Franken, but, driving in my car, I've spent some time with both of them.

I think Limbaugh clearly and constantly is trying to get you to agree with his opinions, but he's got a joy in the moment that captures the listener. You know, I am the same age as Limbaugh -- we were actually born on the same day -- and I get the distinct sense that he was influenced by the two great, great radio guys that I listened to every day back in the 60s: Jean Shepherd and Cousin Brucie. These were not political broadcasters as all, just extremely entertaining radio voices.

Al Franken, being a comedian, ought to bring entertainment value to his radio show, but I never got the feeling that he was into the moment, that he had a sense of what it means to be a voice on the radio. He always sounds exasperated, like he's dragged himself to the studio and it's a tough job but somebody's got to do it. Why, oh, why, don't people get it yet? How many times do I have to tell you...

Old pictures.

Dan Hoffman uses a picture of me to illustrate a post about the relationship between lawprofs and law students. That's me, back in the days when I was a law student, when big magenta glasses were an "Annie Hall"-inspired craze, and when I thought I was pretty good at cutting my own hair. Now my student-lawprof relationships can be affected by seeing what a serious/deranged law student I was.

And as long as we're doing old pictures, here's one I like of me -- and my older sister -- from back in 1953, when professional photographers took crisp black and white shots and then painted them for permanent color:



And, yes, of course, I would wear the larger-sized dress when I got older.

Least balanced panel ever?

What are the chances that someone who leans toward supporting the death penalty would even consider attending this?

Drive/fly.

Man, I could have driven home from St. Louis in the time it took me to fly, and I could have done it without spending any time fretting about whether I'd have to stay overnight in Chicago. I've got to stop connecting at O'Hare. Wind makes everything back up. My 6:25 flight didn't leave until after 9, and I was glad to hear -- at the end of that flight -- that my connecting flight was delayed until 10:35. But I still had to run through the airport -- not something that's good for a person my age, in those shoes -- and, fortunately, I made it, but then that flight was further delayed. It was after 1 a.m. by the time I got home. I'm not mad at any airline people. They all did everything right. We just need more direct flights... and less Chicago.

What the band did.

Stephen Bainbridge asked what the UW Marching Band did to rile the administration here. Gordon Smith answers. It really is quite bad, not the kind of vigorous but offensive speech we've been fretting about lately in the context of the "Think. Respect." program.

"Every single individual on earth has both the potential and the right to live a decent life."

"Across cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development," said the Nobel Committee, announcing its Peace Prize.

Lawprof "blog juice."

Apparently,"juice" is now measured. Paul Caron assembles ranking of lawprof juiciness. Please note that I'm very juicy!

What if Roe v. Wade were overturned?

I'm here in St. Louis at the St. Louis University School of Law, where I'm a panelist responding to a lecture given by lawprof Richard Fallon on the subject of what things would be like if Roe v. Wade were overturned. He's speaking now, so let me keep you informed.

Fallon says he's never taken a position on whether Roe should be overturned, and his point here is to examine the various legal problems that would arise if it were overturned. He identifies four fallacies about overruling Roe:

1. There's a belief that overruling Roe would wipe the slate clean. In fact, there are old statutes on the books of the various states outlawing abortion. Would these statutes spring back into effect? Could these statutes be enforced retroactively?

2. There's a belief that overruling Roe would necessarily return the question to the states, but there's "almost no doubt" that Congress has the power under the Commerce Clause to pass laws that trump whatever the states might want to do.

3. There's a belief that overruling Roe would extract courts from the abortion controversy -- "get out of the abortion umpiring business," as Justice Scalia once put it. But really, the courts will just have to deal with a new set of abortion-related questions. What if a state outlawed abortion even where it was needed to save a woman's life? Don't women have some right to defend themselves at the constitutional level, quite aside from whether there's a broader right to abortion? And then there would be all sorts of questions about the scope of that right that would haunt the courts endlessly. And what if some states tried to restrict their citizens as they sought to travel to other states to obtain abortions? Complicated legal questions would arise here too.

4. There's a belief that Roe v Wade could be overruled without having much effect on the rest of constitutional law. What would be the ground for overruling the case? Even if the Court took a "modest" approach to the overruling and merely found no fundamental right to abortion, it would represent a triumph of "popular constitutionalism," and this might inspire new political efforts to exert pressure on the Court to change things to respond to political pressure.

Now, the commenters. Panel 1 is up. I'm on Panel 2, after lunch. Susan Appleton of Washington University Law School is speaking now. Also on this panel: Stephen Gardbaum (UCLA School of Law), Michael Greve (American Enterprise Institute), and Mark Rosen (Chicago-Kent College of Law).

FINALLY FINISHING THIS POST: Panel 2 was Anthony J. Bellia, Jr. (Notre Dame Law School), Alan Howard (Saint Louis University School of Law), and me. I said I thought that to collect all the possible post-Roe legal troubles is, implicitly, to make an argument against overruling Roe. Overruling Roe would create a new set of problems, and it is natural (and conservative) to prefer to the known problems to the unknown, but I think those who like Roe have a motive to underestimate the problems we have now and to exaggerate what the new problems would be. I support preserving Roe myself, but I don't think those who support overruling it should or will be pushed back with hypertechnical legalistic puzzles that essentially say: this is all too complex for you to fathom, so you really aren't competent to have an opinion here.

At the end of the first panel, a woman asked: If there really are all these problems without Roe, why didn't we see them before Roe? Afterwards, I said to one of the other law professors, that was a great question, do you know who that woman was? Answer: Phyllis Schafly's daughter.