"We have Potato!"

These shoes are weird.

But they're supposed to be good.

UPDATE: We're all buying these shoes now, including me! And we're all having a potato too.

"I wouldn't think that just leaving the car would amount to aiding another person's suicide attempt."

Is it a crime to get out of the car just before the driver plunges off a cliff?

A high school with 41 valedictorians?

Yes!

The push for multiple valedictorians began years ago, prompted by concerns that high school had become too competitive -- so competitive that a few students seeking the title filed lawsuits. As more students enrolled in weighted advanced classes and earned grade-point averages far above 4.0, educators wondered whether it was fair to single out one teenager. There was concern a student would take a less challenging class to guarantee an A or take on an unreasonable workload of weighted classes to boost a GPA.

Interesting multiple causation. First, there's that horror of competition that we were just talking about yesterday. Second, lawyers. (They're everywhere!) Third, the students, unsurprisingly, pursue their self interest. They engage in the age-old search for the easy A. And now they've got the second strategy of taking classes where you can get, essentially, more than an A.

If there were no weighted grades, you'd know that if you had a 4.0, you would be valedictorian (but you'd still share it with everyone else who got a 4.0). Weighted grades create an amorphous system. You don't know how much you need to come in first. Pursuing the actual number one spot in a weighted GPA system has to cause a lot of stress and uncertainty, but it seems like a good idea to keep the easy-A strategy from working too well.

The title of valedictorian is a terrific prize, and it becomes meaningless if every great student wins it. Why replicate the message that is already present in the academic records? Just give the prize to the person with the highest GPA and be done with it. State the rule in advance and follow it. That's certainly the best lawyer repellent.

Is a fashion-and-makeup workshop a ridiculous proposal for community service?

The judge in Boy George's case thought so.

His lawyer [Louis Freeman] said O'Dowd [AKA Boy George] hoped to do something more worthwhile than sweeping streets and sidewalks.

"There's nothing wrong with that if that's part of his punishment, but it will turn into a media circus, and the press will be following him every day," Freeman said.

The judge said he understood the objection to street cleaning: "It's humiliation." However, he said, O'Dowd "got out from under a felony, and he took a (misdemeanor) deal that had an element of humiliation..."

A celebrity shouldn't get special treatment, but the lawyer -- naturally -- is going to argue that to be treated the same is to be treated differently. There's more humiliation. It's a media circus.

So you think you can watch this show?

Kim Cosmopolitan explains the new rules on "So You Think You Can Dance." I didn't watch last season, so I'm not puzzled by the changes, just trying to figure it out for the first time. And I'm trying to decide if I want to watch that much dancing and that many dancers smiling ecstatically after they've danced and couples acting like they love each other much more than they possibly could. The highlight of Wednesday's show was when they made one guy -- Benji -- do some extremely sexual sort of dancing with the sexy partner they assigned to him and then, in the judging session, had him reveal that he'd just come back from his missionary work and was, apparently, dancing in a way that conflicted with his religion in a heroic demonstration of how desperately he wanted to win.

"Innocence is a distraction."

University of Houston lawprof David R. Dow has a NYT op-ed arguing that death penalty opponents ought to shift away from arguments about innocence, which he calls "a distraction":

Of the 50 or so death row inmates I have represented, I have serious doubts about the guilt of three or four — that is, 6 to 8 percent, about what scholars estimate to be the percentage of innocent people on death row.

In 98 percent of the cases, however, in 49 out of 50, there were appalling violations of legal principles: prosecutors struck jurors based on their race; the police hid or manufactured evidence; prosecutors reached secret deals with jailhouse snitches; lab analysts misrepresented forensic results. Most of the cases do not involve bogus claims of innocence, like the one that swirled for 15 years around Roger Coleman, but the government corruption that the federal courts overlook so that the states can go about their business of executing.

The House case will make it hard for abolitionists to shift their focus from the question of innocence, but that is what they ought to do. They ought to focus on the far more pervasive problem: that the machinery of death in America is lawless, and in carrying out death sentences, we violate our legal principles nearly all of the time.

Is Dow right about how "to erode support for capital punishment in America"? It's hard to get ordinary people excited about procedure. The main way of getting people to care is to create anxiety that an innocent man will be executed. Even if, as a matter of fact, nearly everyone convicted is guilty, people do have a very intense feeling about the risk of executing the innocent. I think if Americans believed that every 20th person executed was innocent, they would reject the death penalty.

And we ought to care about the problems of procedure whether we have the death penalty or not. Paradoxically, the death penalty may cause people to care about procedural problems that they wouldn't pay attention to if those who were unfairly convicted were quietly serving their long sentences in prisons.

Visualizing the school that favors boys as much as school really does favor girls.

Responding to a recent David Brooks column (TimesSelect link) that looked at why boys are doing so much worse than girls at school, a professor of medicine named Nelson D. Horseman has a great letter in today's NYT:

Imagine a school where the vast majority of teachers and administrators are men and where competitive sports are compulsory.

Imagine that students get rewarded for being overtly aggressive in school and that there is a zero tolerance policy for being passive.

Imagine getting extra credit for resisting authority, and having points deducted for being compliant with arbitrary rules and meaningless deadlines.

Well, I would have loved a school like that when I was a kid, but the point is, on the average, that would favor boys and hurt girls.

"A zero tolerance policy for being passive" -- that's my favorite part of Horseman's visualization. It's what law school once was, before we backed off. Change one letter in "Horseman" and you get "Houseman."

I can't resist ending this post by saying one of my favorite teachers was a poetry professor -- a male! -- who especially loved to quote the line:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

The National Popular Vote proposal.

Working around the Electoral College -- which is impervious to constitutional amendment -- through state-by-state legislation. I think it's unconstitutional and doubt that its supporters foresee the strange effects it would have. What would presidential campaigns be like if candidates were basically trying to win through the Electoral College, but also had to worry that some big state that they had no shot at winning might mobilize a high turnout and tip the popular vote?

"He once liked all-night poker games and now plays bridge online under the handle 'Chalengr.'"

If I had $50 billion dollars and wanted to play bridge a lot, I be a patron of the bridge players. I'd build a little village for them off in some corner of my property.

"It has been a tough 10 days for those who see current events through the prisms of Vietnam and Watergate."

So writes Michael Barone in the Wall Street Journal. The piece is mostly about the strange obsession with seeing Karl Rove indicted:

Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America--and for millions of freedom-loving people in the world. They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences. Is there any hope that it might turn out to be the last?

How uniform does a uniform need to be?

We were talking about Civil War uniforms today -- a digression in a discussion of the Geneva Conventions and the requirement that a lawful combatant wear a uniform. How uniform do uniforms need to be to be uniforms, I asked, realizing that I know very little about uniforms. I was surprised to read recently that in the Civil War, some Wisconsin soldiers had gray uniforms, because they ran out of blue cloth.

Well, did you know about the Zouave-style uniforms in the Civil War?



No! That astounded me. It seems so unmilitary to go for a fashion craze.

Happy together.

Here's a nice picture of the Justices looking happy together:



Well, Breyer seems to be doing a Larry David imitation. But everybody else.

The event was a tribute to the late Chief Justice Rehnquist. Revelations:

Rehnquist, who often wore Hush Puppies with business suits, was the only person [his former clerk John] Roberts said he'd ever seen get down on his stomach to line up a shot in croquet.

A trivia buff, tennis player and friendly gambler, Rehnquist loved history and geography and liked to bet on how much snow would fall....

Maureen Mahoney, one of the most frequent practitioners before the high court, said Rehnquist was not the sexist conservative that some groups painted him after President Reagan nominated him to be chief justice....

Mahoney recalled that Rehnquist told an interviewer how his wife, Nan, reacted when she learned of his nomination to be chief justice. "She replied, 'Put the dishes in the dishwasher.'"

Nice.

"The gloomy present situation" in Iraq.

You're not one of those people whose heart lifts at bad news from Iraq, are you? But cheer up, this quote is from al Qaeda's perspective.

"We try to save people from dying from dehydration."

Or: "This is simply aiding and abetting criminal activity." Which is it?

"Is there no policy of protecting the home owner a little bit and the sanctity of the home from this immediate entry?"

Worried Justice O'Connor at oral argument in Hudson v. Michigan last Janauary. The case was reargued after Alito replaced O'Connor, and now, with Alito's vote, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the state, permitting the use of evidence where the police failed to follow the "knock-and-announce" rule established in Fourth Amendment law.

Justice Scalia wrote the opinion:

When the knock-and-announce rule does apply, it is not easy to determine precisely what officers must do. How many seconds’ wait are too few?...

Happily, these issues do not confront us here. From the trial level onward, Michigan has conceded that the entry was a knock-and-announce violation. The issue here is remedy....

Suppression of evidence... has always been our last resort, not our first impulse. The exclusionary rule generates “substantial social costs,” ... which sometimes include setting the guilty free and the dangerous at large...

What the knock-and-announce rule has never protected, however, is one’s interest in preventing the government from seeing or taking evidence described in a warrant. Since the interests that were violated in this case have nothing to do with the seizure of the evidence, the exclusionary rule is inapplicable.

Justice Kennedy's vote was needed for the majority, and he wrote a separate opinion, denying that "violations of the [knock-and-announce] requirement are trivial or beyond the law’s concern" and that "the continued operation of the exclusionary rule, as settled and defined by our precedents, is not in doubt."

That's not how the dissenters saw it. Justice Breyer worried about letting the "police know that they can ignore the Constitution’s requirements without risking suppression of evidence discovered after an unreasonable entry." For a spirited defense of the exclusionary rule, read the whole thing.

UPDATE: The press is doing a bad job of reporting this case! I keep hearing and reading assertions that the Court said the police didn't commit a violation, when the government conceded that they did! This case was about what remedy was available for the violation.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Nina Totenberg gets it right.