Osler's Razor

The picture above depicts my sister, Kathy, receiving a chocolate chip cookie from my brother, Bill. We were re-creating a classic Osler home movie, "The Hand," in which my sister, then 3, sits on the beach. Periodically, a hand enters the frame from the left and hands her a chocolate chip cookie. The film then shows her eating the cookie until "the hand" enters the scene with another cookie. How long was this movie? Oh, about eight cookies.

Real gifts are like that. They enter our lives from a caring hand, and are given freely. Some people, though, really struggle with receiving gifts. They fuss about how much it costs, or how much trouble it was, all of which obscures any actual gratitude.

Giving freely of what we have (to those close to us and to those who are not) is part of the Christian imperative. Repeatedly, Christ stressed this ethic of charity. But what about those who receive? What is their moral duty?

One duty is gratitude. Another may be an honest recognition that what is received was given, not earned. That is not a denigration of the gift, simply a fact.

What is the right way to receive a gift?

Earlier this week, I did a radio interview on the confirmation hearings, which you can listen to here. Derek Smith of NPR in Waco was the reporter, and I have to say... does this guy have a great voice for radio, or what? He's knowledgeable and asks good questions as well, but those things in combination with a great voice is rare. In contrast, I sound like reindeer with a head cold, as usual.

It's time to live life fully. It's summer. Take off the tie. Jump in the pool. Drink something cold. And let's haiku without restrictions. I don't care how many lines you have! It doesn't matter how many syllables! Pick your own topic! It can be about summer, trees, Mr. Magoo, whatever!

Here is mine:

Dream of Robert Frost:
Laughs with me,
Sailing.

Now it is your turn...

Today's hearings on Sonia Sotomayer's appointment to the Supreme Court featured Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) in his first real appearance as a U.S. Senator.

If I were a resident of Minnesota (which, given our weather this week, I wouldn't mind), I would have voted for Franken over Norm Coleman. That said, I kind of can't believe he is actually a senator. That is partly because I can't see him without thinking of Stuart Smalley and then Milano cookies, but also because of the year 2000 incident in which he and I comprised a pretty poor defensive backfield. I seem to remember being beaten out for a pass by a 7th-grader.

Which brings up two related questions:

1) What other SNL actors should be in the Senate?

2) What characters from SNL skits (ie, the Church Lady, Gumby) should be in Congress? What district or state would they represent? And what question would they ask Judge Sotomayer?

It occurs to me that others besides Mrs. CL may need an intern. If you are one of those people who think you might make good use of a non-paid employee, please describe what you might need in an intern in the comment section below.

Lately, Mrs. Celebrity Luvr has been agitating on the Razor for an intern of her own (apparently, Mr. CL has several at any given time). That's Mrs. CL pictured above, with two unidentified individuals. From what I gather, the intern's responsibilities will include some or all of the following:

1) Laundry

2) Accompanying Mrs. CL to the Ridgewood pool, and making sure that she is well provided for in all aspects of her pool experience

3) Shooing the paparazzi

4) Ensuring that celebrity news freely flows to and from the CL household.

Mrs. CL, is there anything I missed?

Over the past three years of blogging daily, I look back and two posts have received far more hits than any of the others. Sadly, those two have nothing to do with Baylor, sentencing, pandas, or haiku. What they are tells us a lot about the internet and how it works.

By far, the post which received the most hits was positively inane: It was this piece in which I ranked breakfast cereals. You may wonder why this rose to the top, and the answer is simple: It was linked on a far more popular site than this one, Brian Leiter's Law School Reports blog. Intriguingly, though, many of the people who first migrated over to check out the cereal listing now return regularly.

Number two was this rant about General Motors. The traffic was driven by the post's appearance on Yahoo's front financial page, for reasons I don't know. Interestingly, after that I had (and still have) many visitors and commenters from GM.com addresses. If you pull up the GM posts, you will see that the GM apologists argued that things were great right up to bankruptcy. In fact, one of the great ironies was that the execs who dragged the company into the dirt argued in the end that if GM went into bankruptcy, the company would be liquidated and the process would take years. Oops. The company is now out of bankruptcy, after 42 days, and many of those executives are now gone. Hopefully, they will spend more time on designing and building cars and less time monitoring what bloggers are saying.

A lot of my work has been at the intersection of faith and sentencing, which may seem to be a strange place-- many people feel that they should not intersect at all. Law in America is wholly secular, certainly, and I both understand and agree with that. I also know that the American government is not founded on the Ten Commandments or any other religious document (I wrote about that here). However, we can't ignore that individuals, as voters and a legislators, make decisions that are grounded in their faith.

Should it matter at that level? It seems that to insist on secular motives even when we act as voters is to require that we compartmentalize our faith from our actions in an unacceptable way. Is it really faith if it does not affect the most important decisions we make? If our faith teaches compassion, should we set that aside and not consider compassion of the candidates when we vote?

What about legislators? And, most difficult of all, what about judges? How much should their own faith affect the choices they make? If we insist that they set aside their faith entirely when they act as judges, won't that mean we will end up only with judges for whom faith is secondary in their lives?

If William and Mary really needs a mascot, and we can't have Col. Ebirt, how about this guy? I like his attitude...

Why read Proust or something by the Brontes at the beach when there are books like "Bratfest at Tiffany's" being produced? Summer reading is just different... it's like the warm weather gives us permission to read total trash, whether it is silly novels or magazines from the checkout counter.

Personally, I have read some books in the summer I am too embarrassed to mention. I've never sunk so low as to buy one of those book covers to keep it secret, but... I have been tempted. Last summer, I even read an "Archie" comic book, which was shockingly relevant to our modern society.

So, let's haiku about summer reading. Here is mine:

"Bratfest at Tiffany's"--
The meaning is different
Up in Wisconsin.

Now, please, you take a turn...

Apparently, North Korea has now engaged in cyber-attacks against the U.S. Given their known links to the panda community, this means that even the Razor may be under threat.

Seriously, though, what (if anything) should the Obama administration do about North Korea? I think a good argument can be made to ignore them publicly while having our intelligence network track what they are doing internationally (to prevent them from selling nuclear arms or technology to terrorists).

I was tipped off by GED3 that my undergrad alma mater, William and Mary, has been searching for a a new mascot. About four years ago, the NCAA denied the school's appeal to keep using their "Angry IPLawGuy" mascot. After that, the school unofficially adopted a green fuzzy thing-- kind of like a friendlier, less competent Oscar the Grouch-- called Ebirt (which is "Tribe" spelled backward). He appears in the video below at about 1:17, failing to read a book just like a real W & M student. I love Ebirt.

However, it looks like they may go with either a tree, an asparagus, or a bird. William and Mary doesn't exactly have a distinguished sports history, so any of those might fit. Legend has it that Lou Holtz left W & M after three years, saying there were "too many Marys and not enough Williams."

What is beautiful? How do we know it? I woke up thinking about that, and I don't have a good comprehensive answer.

Perhaps I need more artist in me...

There are a lot of things I have explained on this blog, but I'm not sure I have ever gotten around to explaining some of the most important things.

I have written here about my work, but not why I choose to do that work. There is, in fact, something that ties it all together. Many of you know that I love the message in Micah 6:8-- "What does the Lord your God require of you, but to love justice and to show mercy and to walk humbly with your God." That passage informs my work in two ways-- first in how to approach it, and second in what it should be.

First, I try to keep humility as a central value in my teaching and writing. In the classroom, I never want to humiliate a student as a teaching tool. At times, especially in practice court, I lost track of this, and I deeply regret it. I may know more about the subject than my students, but they are more important than I am-- their education is about them, not me. In my scholarship, I also try to avoid intellectual arrogance and present my ideas as one among many principled arguments.

Second, much of what I teach and write about has to do with the tension between justice and mercy, if justice is treating like people alike, and mercy is giving some a break or chance for redemption. It is very hard to reconcile those two goals within a sentencing system. What my work seeks is that at least there be elements of both-- that there be both justice and mercy. The areas I have attacked (crack sentencing, juvenile life without parole, the death penalty) are those where I feel there has been no room left for mercy. At the same time, I am not comfortable with those areas where mercy completely overwhelms justice, such as the (very rare) reversal of the conviction of a clearly guilty person because of the Miranda rule.

I am imperfect in how I pursue these two sides of Micah 6:8, but it does provide a unity between my faith and my vocation that lets me continue this work even when others disapprove.