A moot court day.

I agreed to serve as one of the judges in the 2005 Evans Moot Court Competition, so I drove downtown. Here's some graffiti I happened to see:



It seems like the graffiti version of this blog.

I stopped at L'Etoile Café for some coffee and a sandwich and to read the bench memo in preparation:



Here's the coffee and the memo:



Here's the sandwich:


That's "Fountain Prairie Farm Dried Cured Beef," I'll have you know. I know that will help you think about what kind of life I live here in Madison.

I needed to walk across the state Capitol Square to get to the Dane County Courthouse, and I stopped to take a picture of myself and the Capitol in a mirrored window:



The square looked pretty:



The flag was at half-staff -- not for Saul Bellow, for the Pope:



The judges congregated in a shabby jury room. I don't need these refreshments:



I looked around the jury room and thought about all the boring hours good citizens doing their duty have had to spend here. There was some reading material for them: big piles of depressingly old magazines.



There were also two books in the room: a collection of Erma Bombeck's humor columns and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."



There were a lot of very old jigsaw puzzles, including this one, half put together:



I speculate about whether the lawyers would like to know how prospective jurors put together their jigsaw puzzles and decide that the prosecution should want the kind of people who look for the edge pieces and get the frame completed first. Another "judge" asks what other way is there, and other ways are discussed: concentrating on color areas, finding a particular object in the picture, looking at the shapes of the pieces. But the shapes are nearly identical! My grandson looks for the shapes, someone says. Use a peremptory challenge on that one, I think.

The picture on the puzzle is a Norman Rockwell cover for The Saturday Evening Post from 1961:



That issue had an article on what Oklahoma wants from TV. I wonder what it said. I wonder if Oklahoma ever got what it wanted. Perhaps they wanted "The Dick Van Dyke Show," which debuted in 1961.

We went over to courtroom 2F, which was awfully shabby. [ADDED: A new Dane County Courthouse is under construction.]



Among the framed portraits on the wall were two garishly blown-up photographs of female judges:



I think about all the people who must have been depressed and scared and bored out of their skulls in this room. But soon enough, the arguments begin, and the room is ignored. The law students from various schools -- they aren't allowed to say which school -- launch into their arguments and we pepper them with questions and let them show their stuff. They're all great students who've prepared very hard and advanced in the competition.

They've had to learn a lot about the Establishment Clause and the Free Speech Clause of the Constitution, and we debate a lot about a school district's policy barring teachers from teaching "intelligent design" (or anything like it) when they teach evolution.

Tomorrow, the finalists will get to make their arguments in the beautiful room in the Capitol Building that houses the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Until then, I hope all the wonderful law students enjoy their visit to Madison. It's a lovely day, and it's always fun to be here on a Saturday night.

Where did The Anchoress go?

Here. Change your bookmarks and blogrolls!

Playing judge.

Speaking of judges, I've got to go play judge in a moot court competition today. I think I'll leave the computer behind, take the bench memo, and hole up in a nice café near the court house and get myself into the appropriate frame of mind. The problem is about teaching "intelligent design" theory along with evolution in schools. I'll blog about this later.

More railing about judges.

Here's Dana Milbank's article in the Washington Post on the "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference. The quotes from Edwin Vieira -- author of "How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary" -- are way over-the-top. How stupid do you have to be to adopt Stalin's "no man, no problem" when expressing opposition to a Supreme Court Justice?

Phyllis Schafly was also there:

Schlafly called for passage of a quartet of bills in Congress that would remove courts' power to review religious displays, the Pledge of Allegiance, same-sex marriage and the Boy Scouts. Her speech brought a subtle change in the argument against the courts from emphasizing "activist" judges -- it was, after all, inaction by federal judges that doomed Schiavo -- to "supremacist" judges. "The Constitution is not what the Supreme Court says it is," Schlafly asserted.

I hope the cooler minds among the Republicans in Congress see the need to distance themselves from these sorts of attacks.

UPDATE: The Moderate Guy collects a lot of reactions to that use of the Stalin quote.

The homeless nerd and the Starbucks with a heart.

Sweet, sad, funny. I'm waiting for the movie.

Comments.

Did you notice that I turned on the comments function yesterday?

Listening to "like-minded" foreigners.

Here's a letter to the editor published in the NYT today, responding to an article titled "Justice Ginsburg Backs Value of Foreign Law." The letter writer (Kate Gluckman of Cambridge, Massachusetts), not only approves of the courts' citing foreign law in constitutional interpretation, but asserts that the Ginsburg "mirrors" the intent of the Framers. The letter writer claims that resisting citing federal law, as Justice Scalia advises, "only enhances the notion of the Bush administration that as an isolationist nation, we can continue to alienate our allies and undermine the authority of international institutions."

Perhaps by listening to the opinions of the "like-minded foreigners" that Justice Scalia views as a threat, we can avoid future foreign policy that has been executed on motives that now prove wrong, as the government's most authoritative analysis of the Iraqi threat was deemed to be.

A court interpreting the Constitution ought to take into account the extraneous concern about improving foreign affairs? Or is the letter writer just saying that politicians ought to take international opinion more seriously? Because that's not what Justice Scalia has been talking about. He's focused on deciding court cases. There really is a difference between court cases and government policy -- and I don't think Justice Ginsburg would say otherwise. Not everything is about Iraq.

And about that phrase "listening to the opinions of the 'like-minded foreigners'" -- it really is a conundrum! First, you decide who thinks like you, then, you listen to them. How is that done? Don't you need to listen to them to know if they think like you? If so, all you're doing is restating, in an obfuscatory way, what you already think. That has been one of Justice Scalia's basic points.

Camilla and Charles.

I see from my referral records that someone just visited here after Googling "camilla parker bowles 'horse face.'" Look, this post of mine comes up fourth for that search. I guess that means Camilla's face is not made fun of as much as I'd thought.

Turning on the TV yesterday morning meant sudden immersion in a funeral. Today, it plunges us into a wedding.

Poor Charles, spending a lifetime dedicated to one woman, yet doomed to look for that whole life like the biggest cheater in the world. The Prince of Paradox. So, a shred of pity for the man. Now, get off my TV.

I did enjoy all the ladies' hats. There was something cool to photograph, and the cable news channels homed in on it nicely.

"This is sheer lunacy!"

Nina brings us the reaction, from a Polish chatroom, to an appeal to Poles to turn out the lights for five minutes to honor the Pope. Hilarious!

Shimmering shining shriek/scream.

I watched the last part of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" which was playing on cable last night. I noticed this exchange, between Gilbert (Johnny Depp) and his morbidly obese mother:

Momma: You're my knight in shimmering armor. Did you know that?

Gilbert: I think you mean shining.

Momma: No shimmering. You shimmer, and you glow.

Later, I watched the DVD of "After Hours" (a longtime favorite movie of mine). This exchange -- always good -- resonated poignantly with the "Gilbert Grape" quote:

Paul [looking at Kiki's papier maché sculpture]: It reminds me of that Edvard Munch painting. What is it? "The Shriek"?

Kiki: "The Scream."

Googling for a picture for "The Scream," to illustrate this post about how things go together, I hit a Reuters story from one hour ago, saying they've just today arrested a man for the theft of "The Scream." (The painting was stolen last August.) I love that feeling of things seeming to converge. I know it's only an illusion.

I also love the way in which the two movie quotes are dissimilar. The "After Hours" quote has the central character getting something a little wrong, and the character who does the correcting flatly and contemptuously sets him right. The mistake is part of a pattern of everything going wrong, part of being swallowed up in humiliation. The "Gilbert Grape" quote has the central figure in the family, the mother, getting an expression a little wrong, and when her son gently corrects her, she reaffirms her version and turns it into a renewed expression of love for the boy. The mistake becomes a new creation, something beautiful.

Spring! Friday! Madison!

A campus classic: the outdoor seminar:



I really don't know how they can concentrate or even hear, but they look quite lovely:



Lots of yummy hot dishes, sushi, smoothies, and fresh-squeezed juice at the food carts:



And the traditional Madison fruit stand is still here, right outside the University Bookstore, where you remember it:



There's lots of sun, so don't forget to expose lots of skin -- scalp included. Keep a patch of hair on top and dye it green. It will look like you're wearing a turf hat!

"The idea of having a big celebration of something that's so tiny — we're playing with the obvious absurdity of it."

It's really tiny and it's really old. 4.4 billion years old. Here, on display, in Madison: a bit of zircon!

Wonkette wept.

Jim Lindgren tells the tale.

Your café doesn't have WiFi?

Neither did photoblogger Rick Lee's café, so he just installed it for them. More café pictures too, including one that shows his laptop screen visibly displaying Instapundit.

Eat cheese or die!

I mean: Eat stravechhio or don't watch "Star Trek."

"Incoherent text."

Great story (via Instapundit):

The French government has destroyed 162,000 copies of the EU constitution because the phrase "incoherent text" was printed on a page by mistake.

Reminds me of the great old "More Mush From the Wimp" -- which is fun to think about with Jimmy Carter back in the news. An editor's too-true comment makes the final edition.