A fellow bar taker today pointed out that during his post-study TV watching, he found himself laughing like a giddy child a jokes he probably wouldn’t normally enjoy quite so ebulliently. I notice myself doing the same thing, so I warn that my sense of humor may be totally off at this point. In addition, this video is about the law, so who the hell knows if it’s even the least bit entertaining.

Oh, by the way, that had some NSFW language. Sorry about that.

Whatever your position on the recent Guantanamo ruling, I think we can all agree that Senator Graham’s position is based on faulty logic:

“The American people are going to wake up tomorrow and be shocked to hear that a member of Al Qaeda has the same constitutional rights as an American citizen,” said Graham.

“[Even] the Nazis never had that right.”

Even the Nazis? My god, the well-liked and respected Nazis? I can’t believe we would treat somebody better than we treated the Nazis. I just assumed we would treat every foreigner worse than the Nazis…

By the way, I assume he’s obliquely referring to Ex parte Quirin.

Because Troeltsch got me thinking about Scalia’s writing style, here’s a favorite bit from his dissent in PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin:

It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States…to decide What Is Golf. I am sure that the Framers of the Constitution, aware of the 1457 edict of King James II of Scotland prohibiting golf because it interfered with the practice of archery, fully expected that sooner or later the paths of golf and government, the law and the links, would once again cross, and that the judges of this august Court would some day have to wrestle with that age-old jurisprudential question, for which their years of study in the law have so well prepared them: Is someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer? The answer, we learn, is yes. The Court ultimately concludes, and it will henceforth be the Law of the Land, that walking is not a “fundamental” aspect of golf.

The Supreme Court this morning decided that detainees, captured abroad and held at Gitmo, have habeus corpus rights and those rights were not adequately served by the tribunal system Congress set up for them (full decision). Scalia is pissed!

America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Sa-laam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil, killing 2,749 at the Twin Towers in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., and 40 in Pennsylvania. It has threatened further attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know that the threat is a serious one. Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, 13 of our countrymen in arms were killed.

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court’s blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today.

I like the idea that we’re currently responding as if the threat were a serious one is itself evidence that the threat is a serious one.

Guess which Supreme Court justice likes Egg McMuffins…

Justice Scalia is literally blocking my ability to leave the library through any reasonable means. What an odd irritation.

In order to attend the Supreme Court on an average day you have to line up outside before 7:00am. At 7:30am they hand out 75 tickets that do not guarantee entry, but are merely used to “establish a numerical order” (as if math and the universe hadn’t already established one?). At 9:30am, they let in between 25 and 75 people.

I arrived at 6:40am; I was number 27.

By 9:00am the line was several hundred people long; most were obviously not going to get in. A woman approached my area of the line, asked if we were from DC and then explained that she had driven 9 hours to see the case. She had arrived at 4:00am (though, inexplicably, wasn’t in line at 4am), but was now too far back to get inside. She looked at us in silence, hoping we would feel sorry enough for her to simply offer her a spot in line. When, unsurprisingly, nobody volunteered, she slyly indicated several rolled bills and offered us $60 for one of the numerical order tickets.

Everyone declined — standing in the early morning cold for three hours was worth more than $60.

click to big-ify

But, the question for today is, is it legal to scalp numerical order tickets to the Supreme Court? The court would likely be able to deny entry to a scalped ticket holder, since “no substitution [is] permitted,” but would the act of scalping itself be criminal? Anyone know anything about DC/federal scalping law?

That woman offered me $60. If I had strolled down the line taking bids, how high could I have driven the price? If it had been an abortion or gun rights case, I probably could have pulled down a thousand dollars… sadly today was merely schizophrenia and bankruptcy.

^*Ticket images (front and back) lifted from MatthewBradley under CC.

If all has gone according to plan, I should currently be standing in line to get into the Supreme Court.  Today’s two oral arguments are:

07-208             INDIANA V. EDWARDS
May a criminal defendant who, despite being legally competent, is schizophrenic, delusional, and mentally decompensatory in the course of a simple conversation, be denied the right to represent himself at trial when the trial court reasonably concludes that permitting self-representation would deny the defendant a fair trial?

07-312             FL DEPT. OF REVENUE V. PICCADILLY CAFETERIAS
Whether section 1146(a) of the Bankruptcy Code, which exempts from stamp or similar taxes any asset transfer “under a plan confirmed under section 1129 of the Code,” applies to transfers of assets occurring prior to the actual confirmation of such a plan?

I might not stick around for the second one, it sounds dense.  It depends on how sleepy I am after the presumptively exciting discussion of schizophrenia.  I’m quite curious to find out how someone could be legally competent and yet be delusional during simple conversation.

Who wants to give me odds on seeing Thomas ask a question?  He’s got to be due soon, right?  He’s like the Cal Ripken of not asking questions.  If he does, should I stand and applaud?

The Washington Post reports that the Supreme Court made an interesting and unexpected move today:

And in Preston v. Ferrer, justices ruled 9 to 1 against Alex Ferrer, a former Florida trial court judge who appears as “Judge Alex” on a Fox television program. The case involved a fee dispute with attorney Arnold Preston, who said he had a claim on some of Ferrer’s earnings.

That’s right, 9 to 1.  For the first time in judicial history, the Supreme Court decided that 9 Justices just wasn’t enough and pulled in a mysterious 10th Justice.  Who was it?  The Post doesn’t tell us but it could have been anyone.   I’m thinking Hypnobama, he just hates TV judges… you’re next Judge Judy.
Via Metroblogging.

Antonin Scalia discusses whether he, as a Supreme Court Justice and without a warrant, could legally bust into a neighbor’s house and search for marijuana if he had probable cause to do so.

One Supreme Court Justice doesn’t like his job, guess which one.

Via WSJ Law Blog.

Yesterday was the first Monday in October, marking it as Opening Day of Supreme Court season. This is an occasionally unhealthy period.