Legal Commentary

As many of you know from updates that have appeared in previous years, my FSU colleague Professor Steve Gey has ALS and it's an utterly grim situation. Making the best of the situation, Steve, a distinguished scholar in constitutional law, has been writing law review articles quite literally with his toes. Meanwhile, former students, current students, friends and colleagues are training for yet another triathlon in which they participate with the goal of raising money for a cure to ALS.

This year, the fourth since Steve was diagnosed, the folks behind the Tri-4-Gey are asking people to donate in Steve's name to Florida State's "Steve Gey Endowment for Excellence." Here's how you can do it.

To donate:

(1) Go to https://foundation.fsu.edu/community/SSLPage.aspx?pid=815&srcid=838 

(2) Select "Steve Gey Endowment for Excellence" from the "Designation" drop down box

(3) Fill out the requested information 

(4) If you know anyone participating this year, then under the section titled "Tribute Information," select "in honor of" and put the team member's name that you are supporting in the "Name" box so that we can keep track of each team member's fundraising efforts. 

After the jump, I've posted a paragraph from a recent update by Steve that shows his indomitable spirit.

Despite these unhappy circumstances, my days are still relatively full. I spend my time doing what any rational person would do with his last days on earth: writing law review articles. I've got three articles coming out very soon, another that is currently under submission, and a fifth that is about three-quarters done. Who says tenure makes you lazy? When I am not writing law review articles with my toes, I read, watch movies, and listen to music. Mostly lighthearted stuff. For example, the item currently gracing my Kindle is a novel entitled "God is Dead." The basic plot is that God comes to Earth embodied in a wounded Dinka woman in Darfur. But although God plans to apologize for his role in permitting things such as Darfur to happen, he is gunned down, which triggers the events in the rest of the book. Like I say -- lighthearted. As for movies, I heartily recommend any example of the Romanian New Wave, or any of the recent movies made by directors in the countries that used to comprise the former Yugoslavia. They are almost uniformly wonderful, if a tad bleak. (Look, I'm dying here, so what did you expect -- a recommendation of "The House Bunny"?) As for music, today it has ranged from The Clash?s "Should I Stay or Should I Go" (get it?) to the gloriously quirky Glenn Gould rendition of The Goldberg Variations. I recommend the 1981 recording of the latter, by the way. (One of my many fears of this whole locked-in thing pertains to music selection. I live in mortal fear of asking for John Coltrane?s "Blue Train" and having one of my handlers load something along the lines of the Ramones? "I Want to Be Sedated.")