Legal Commentary

Somehow or other this guest-blogging stint didn?t quite come together the way I anticipated back when I signed up.  You know how it goes ? May seemed far off.  Plus, what is there to do in May anyway?  Just writing and grading some exams.  There?ll be plenty of time to blog, I thought to myself.  So it goes.

I had hoped to devote a few posts to Justice Souter (remember him?).  Justice Souter is someone who I?ve always felt a certain admiration for on a personal level, and he strikes me as the Supreme Court Justice I?d most enjoy getting to know.  A lot of it has to do with the fact that he appears to have the strong sense of place that often follows from having been raised in a small town.  (In the place where I grew up, though, a town the size of Weare, NH would be the big town ? the place we?d go to on weekend nights to see if anything exciting would happen.  It never did.)  But I also like the fact that he seems almost completely unimpressed by pomp and circumstance and being the center of attention.  That, to me, is the mark of Good People.*

*  Perhaps not coincidentally, it also strikes me as the appropriate worldview for a judge.  And in one of his rare public appearances, Justice Souter provided a vision of judging that rings true to my ears.  In ?The Nine? Jeffrey Toobin quotes a portion of a speech that Justice Souter gave at Gerald Gunther?s funeral.  He referenced ?every judge?s common obligations: suspicion of easy cases, skepticism about clear-edged categories, modesty in the face of precedent, candor in pitting one worthy principle against another, and the nerve to do it in concrete circumstances on an open page.?  

While I was at it, I was going to attempt to link Justice Souter?s connection to a place to the sorts of ideas that one finds in recent books like Michael Pollan?s The Omnivore?s Dilemma, Barbara Kingsolver?s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon?s Plenty and in the work of folks like Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, James Howard Kunstler, and these folks.  (Not all of which I endorse, but all of which is worth checking out.  One of the most interesting aspects of these ideas is that they do not fit neatly into currently predominant political boxes.)  Maybe next time. 

I?ll leave you with a summer reading recommendation.  If you?re the sort of person who?s read and enjoyed Pollan, Kingsolver and/or Smith & Mackinnon, you might also enjoy Michael Perry?s Coop.  Like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Plenty, Coop is the story of a year devoted to growing more of one?s own food, and a realistic depiction of the difficulties of doing so while trying to balance the rest of one?s life.  But it?s a lot more than that.  Mike Perry captures modern life in small Midwestern towns better than any writer I?ve encountered.  (More than that, Mike captures being inside my own head better than any writer I've encountered, possibly including myself.)  It?s tremendous reading not only for those of us who are from such places, but also for those who wonder what might be going on down there as they fly over flyover country.