Academic

Rhapsody in iridescent blue: A quartet from "The Theater of Insects"

Posted on May 01, 2008
Images from Jo Whaley, The Theater of Insects, © 2007. Top — 47: Doxocopa cherubina and 8: Papilio ulysses. Bottom — 60: Anaea cyanae and 102: Morpho deidamia.From the introductory essay accompanying Jo Whaley's forthcoming book, The Theater of Insects (2008):Like moths attracted to the light of a flame only to perish in that flight, I wonder if we, too, are tied to self-destruction through a drive toward greater technological heights...

The rainbow as refracted truth

Posted on April 30, 2008
By arc or by whole, the rainbow reveals refracted truth. Nearby rain and distant mist have equal power to vaporize visible light into bands of color. A single sheet of water, slicing through sunlight, projects the full spectrum against the sky's inverted bowl...

Scalia on Bush v. Gore: "Get over it"

Posted on April 25, 2008
In his 60 Minutes interview, expected to air on April 27, 2008, Justice Antonin Scalia has this to say about Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000):Get over it. It?s so old by now.Hat tip: ABA Journal Online.

Pyrrhus of Epirus, campaign manager

Posted on April 23, 2008
Obama, Osama, and one hot kitchenAlternate video sourceNew York Times editorial, The Low Road to Victory (April 23, 2008)Ferdinand Bol, Fabritius and Pyrrhus (1656). Read more about Pyrrhus of Epirus.The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it...

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Toxic inaction, in humans and their pets

Posted on April 23, 2008
Mark Schapiro, Toxic InactionGreenpeace U.K. released a study in 2005 that found numerous toxic chemicals in the umbilical-cord blood of European infants. That same year, World Wildlife Fund International tested the blood of three generations of women from 12 European countries...

Literary Warrant [29]

Posted on April 22, 2008
Fred is dancing on a tilting dance floor on the ocean floorIn a sunken ocean linerIn 1934?lighter than air!?Fred Astaire!?In the depths of the Great Depression.From Frederick Seidel, "Dick and Fred," in Ooga-Booga (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)Bill Baue & Jackie Cook, Ceres, Mutual Funds and Climate Change: Opposition to Climate Change Resolutions Begins to Thaw (April 2008)"This report is the fourth by Ceres examining the mutual fund industry?s proxy voting practices on climate change shareholder resolutions...

Immoderate thoughts about the Clinton-Obama debate

Posted on April 20, 2008
Watch it again. Read the transcript. It's impossible to miss what 10 million viewers noticed: ABC News' moderators, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, along with the national news media as a whole, were the real losers of this week's debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:[V]iewers of all political persuasions were affronted by the moderators? failure to ask about the mortgage crisis, health care, the environment, torture, education, China policy, the pending G...

Beauty and truth in physics

Posted on April 17, 2008
Herewith an extension to The quark, the jaguar, and the laws of Jurisdynamics:Murray Gell-Mann: Beauty and truth in physicsWielding laypeople's terms and a sense of humor, Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann drops some knowledge about particle physics, asking questions like, Are elegant equations more likely to be right than inelegant ones? Can the fundamental law, the so-called "theory of everything," really explain everything? His answers will surprise you...

Liberating Red Lion from the Glass Menagerie of Free Speech Jurisprudence

Posted on April 15, 2008
Liberating Red Lion from the Glass Menagerie of Free Speech JurisprudenceFollowing the established protocol for loading old articles onto SSRN, I've posted Liberating Red Lion from the Glass Menagerie of Free Speech Jurisprudence, 1 J. on Telecomms. & High Tech...

Appalachian Spring: A simple gift upon the passing of milestones

Posted on April 14, 2008
Wadih Ghsoubi, Foggy Morn, Red River Gorge, Daniel Boone National Forest (n.d.)Marie Reilly of Red Lion Reports recently passed a blogging milestone. So did Jurisdynamics and MoneyLaw. The occasion warrants a modest celebration, at the very point where Marie's world and mine — whether expressed in legal, geographic, or intellectual terms — intersect...

Pharyngula, we are here

Posted on April 14, 2008
PZ Myers of Pharyngula has asked bloggers everywhere to help build a Google bomb that promotes the National Center for Science Education's website, Expelled Exposed. The project consists of embedding the word Expelled inside a matched pair of <a> and </a> tags...

Dendrobium: Family Orchidaceae's tree of life

Posted on April 11, 2008
I.V. Passmoore, Dendrobium Orchid (n.d.)Dendrobium refers to a large genus of tropical orchids comprising roughly 1200 species. The term dendrobium combines the Greek words ?????? (tree) and ???? (life). These orchids range throughout much of southern and eastern Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand...

Supreme Court fantasy camp: Justice Kennedy's chambers

Posted on April 11, 2008
My dear friend, Marie T. Reilly, has wistfully wished, "I wish there was Supreme Court fantasy camp."Well, we can't quite make that happen. But Jurisdynamics and Ratio Juris can do the next best thing: bring Oyez.org's virtual Supreme Court tour to life...

Simplicity, complexity, and Madame X

Posted on April 10, 2008
[T]he ladies of John Singer Sargent . . . [are] very demure, the ladies of 1905, and then also they express themselves. There are Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes; the Misses Vickers; Lady Agnew; . . . and there is Madame X. —  Lynnette Abel, Sargent's "Madame X," or, Assertion and Retreat in WomanMadame X, currently on display at MoneyLaw for the purpose of illustrating the academic advantages of risk-taking, also illustrates the relationship between simplicity and complexity — one of the pervading intellectual themes of Jurisdynamics:Simplicity and Complexity: Is there a simplicity in all art, a deep naiveté, an immediate self-containedness, accompanied perhaps by fresh directness or startling economy? — and is there that, so rich, it cannot be summed up; something subterranean and intricate counteracting and completing simplicity; the teasing complexity of reality meditated on?

Sherman Minton

Posted on April 10, 2008
My Louisville colleague, Kurt Metzmeier, has continued his blog's series on Supreme Court Justices buried in and near Louisville. Installments 1 and 2 — focusing, respectively, on Justices John McKinley and Louis D. Brandeis — are now accompanied by Justice Sherman Minton: A Bridge Between Eras...

A Louisiana decision on flood damage

Posted on April 09, 2008
In Sher v. Lafayette Ins. Co., 2007-C-2441 & 2007-C-2443 (La. April 8, 2008), the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that an insurance company was not liable for water damage caused by the failure of levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Homeowner Joseph Sher's policy excluded "flood" damage...

Leda and the Swan

Posted on April 07, 2008
William Butler YeatsLeda and the Swan (1924)A sudden blow: the great wings beating stillAbove the staggering girl, her thighs caressedBy the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.How can those terrified vague fingers pushThe feathered glory from her loosening thighs?And how can body, laid in that white rush,But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?A shudder in the loins engenders thereThe broken wall, the burning roof and towerAnd Agamemnon dead...

Biolaw: Law at the Frontiers of Biology

Posted on April 04, 2008
Interface and Pain, watercolors by Sharon BurgmayerHerewith the video proceedings of the Kansas Law Review's symposium, Biolaw: Law at the Frontiers of Biology (November 9, 2007), to be published in volume 55, issue 4 of the Review.Read the rest of this post ...

Pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart

Posted on April 04, 2008
Marie Reilly of Red Lion Reports reminds us that April 4, 2008, is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and of an extraordinary oration by Robert F. Kennedy in response to that national tragedy.Kennedy's words speak eloquently for themselves, and — courtesy of American Rhetoric — I have reproduced them below through video, audio, and text...

Biolaw: Cracking the Code

Posted on April 01, 2008
Biolaw: Cracking the CodeThe neologism biolaw describes all areas of law informed by the life sciences. Health law, bioethics, environmental law, natural resources law, agricultural law, food and drug law, biotechnology, law and neuroscience, law and behavioral psychology, and evolutionary analysis of law all share a common scientific core...

Literary Warrant [28]

Posted on March 25, 2008
President George W. Bush, The White House, Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), CEQ Fact Sheet: Conserving Our Oceans Through Stewardship, Volunteerism, and Education (March 24, 2008)"The President And Mrs. Bush Are Committed To Continuing To Protect Our Natural Resources Through Wise Stewardship And Sensible Management...

The quark, the jaguar, and the laws of Jurisdynamics

Posted on March 23, 2008
[H]istory shows clearly that humanity is moved forward not by people who stop every little while to gauge the ultimate success or failure of their [own] ventures, but by those who think deeply about what is right and then put all their energy into doing it...

Easter moonrise

Posted on March 22, 2008
The moon rises over Ahu Akivi on Easter Island.Easter 2008 falls on March 23. According to western Christianity's rules for calculating the date of Easter, this movable feast will not arrive as early in the calendar for another 152 years (2160). Easter will not fall on the earliest possible date of March 22 until 2285...

Holy Thursday / Semana Santa

Posted on March 20, 2008
William Blake, Holy Thursday, Songs of Innocence (1789)?Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,The children walking two and two, in red and blue and green,Grey-headed beadles walk'd before, with wands as white as snow,Till into the high dome of Paul?s they like Thames' waters flow...

Literary Warrant [27]

Posted on March 18, 2008
beSpacific, EPA Issues Strengthened National Standards for Ground-Level Ozone (March 12, 2008)"On March 12, 2008, EPA significantly strengthened its national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for ground-level ozone, the primary component of smog. These changes will improve both public health protection and the protection of sensitive trees and plants...

Patrick Henry Hughes

Posted on March 17, 2008
As described at The Cardinal Lawyer, the story of Patrick Henry Hughes is breathtaking and inspirational:Part 1Part 2

Birdsong gives voice and motion to the mysteries of speech

Posted on March 16, 2008
A new study of vocalization in birds sheds possible light on the relationship between voice and movement in humans and other mammals:Movement-Associated Areas in the Avian BrainGesa Feenders et al., Molecular Mapping of Movement-Associated Areas in the Avian Brain: A Motor Theory for Vocal Learning Origin, PLoS ONE [Public Library of Science] 3(3): e1768...

Musical and true

Posted on March 16, 2008
And apropos of birdsong, the human voice too can be musical and true:She let her mind wander back over her stay at Grand Isle; and she tried to discover wherein this summer had been different from any and every other summer of her life. She could only realize that she herself — her present self — was in some way different from the other self...

Complexity, IPR Rights and Innovation Ecologies: Distributive Considerations

Posted on March 16, 2008
Part 2- Distributive ConsiderationsAs touched on in the previous post, an important implication of the nexus between appellate patent law, commercialization-based S&T policies privileging closed IPR rights and the notion of an increasingly global innovation ecology is the manner in which newer conceptual theories and analytical frameworks such as systems theories may be used to explicate and, perhaps, stimulate true ?breakthrough? innovation...

Patrick S. O'Donnell is now blogging at Ratio Juris

Posted on March 15, 2008
I am pleased to announce that Patrick S. O'Donnell, one of the smartest readers and commentators in the legal blogosphere, is now blogging at Ratio Juris. Patrick's first contribution includes links to two of his remarkably thorough reading lists, one on bioethics and the other on environmental and ecological worldviews, and a description of his storehouse of bibliographies...

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