FIRST MONDAY LIMERICK CONTEST

Readers of the old version of this site will recall that we were big fans of the now-cancelled CBS television series "First Monday." Taking our cue from Justice Hoskins's penchant for limerick poetry, and in honor of the show's realistic and even-handed treatment of Supreme Court practice, we ran a contest just before our hiatus for best Supreme Court limerick. This entry, although on the mean-spirited side, is the best of the submissions:

There once was a Justice named Breyer,
Who was either a fool or a liar.
He re-wrote the laws
To the leftists' applause.
I pray he will quickly retire.


Please continue to e-mail us your limericks, and we'll post the best ones on the site.

MAD HATTER (originally posted 5/21/01)

Justice Scalia properly rejected the majority's "discrimination" rationale in United States v. Hatter, No. 99-1978, the judicial pay-raise case under the Compensation Clause that the Court handed down today. But how is this aspect of Justice Scalia's opinion to be squared with his joining of the majority's mootness holding in Part V? The key paragraph in that section of Justice Breyer's opinion rests upon the following hypothetical: He asks what would would happen if a pay cut affecting some judges were offset by a later pay raise affecting all judges. He says that this "would leave the first group permanently" behind the rest of the judges. So what? Congress could clearly, consistent with the Compensation Clauser, raise the salaries of some, buyt not all, federal judges, leaving the other judges' salaries flat. That would similarly "leave the first group permanently" behind. This has nothing whatever to do with whether anybody's "Compensation" has been "diminished."

THE TRIBE HAS SPOKEN (originally posted 5/01)

If only the Constitution had a good index, he could see that "abortion" doesn't occur anywhere in it . . . .

From the Boston Globe:

"Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law School: Although I'm a well-informed and highly educated reader, I experience enormous frustration, especially on Sundays, in locating things within the Globe. Today, I wanted to know where I could find information about which movies are playing where. In the classified Index on page A-2, I looked under Arts (no entry), under Films (no entry), and under Movies (no entry). The index proved useless. I was about to give up when I happened upon the movie listings in Arts Etc., Section M. If I had this problem despite my background and general literacy, I imagine many others experience the same problem."