Sometimes, i just absolutely love my life so much.

[hermionesviolin]

So, last night i didn't get much work done, and it was okay because i really didn't have that much due today and i ventured onto AIM and chatted with lots of people and Sam is back at Hampshire and we ended up having lunch today and she's gonna be on campus a lot, so we should have lunch together a lot, just like i expect to continue having lunch with Allie a lot (and i met this great girl, Meagan Rossi at work and was also reminded again of how much i adore Stacey).

Anyway, after work today i realized just how much work i need to get done for tomorrow and Friday and Monday and started rationing out what work i could skip for the time being, but i saw in Acamedia a lecture tonight: "The Progeny of Marbury vs. Madison" by Judge Noonan of the Ninth Circuit, "address[ing] the reversal in constitutional jurisprudence generated by the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions limiting the scope of congressional power in deference to the power of the states" and of course i had to go to that and i'm very interested to hear how Allie's constitutional law class goes.

I was troubled by Noonan's lecture, and i'll discuss that more in my upcoming Update of Doom, but i saw Pat Skarda there so i stuck around afterward to chat with her. "We keep running into each other at all the good lectures, huh?" she said. "Well, all the lectures anyway," i replied. "We could debate about whether they're good or not."

Lauren Berlant (whom i loved at January's civil liberties conference) is giving a lecture tomorrow, "Remembering Love, Forgetting Everything Else: 'Now, Voyager' " (first of three in a series: "Public Feelings: Love, Compassion, and Indifference in the U.S.") and the movie, Now, Voyager (based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, whom Pat informed me wrote romance novels and a soap opera and also graduated from Smith and provided Sylvia Plath's scholarship) was playing in Seelye shortly after the lecture. I can't make it to the lecture because it's at 4:30 (Wright Hall Auditorium) and i have class until 4:50. I also told Pat Skarda that i had loads of homework and she said "The homework'll always be there," and i ended up watching the movie with her and it was surprisingly good (though i'm troubled by the ending line: "Why ask for the moon when we have the stars?") and she commented at various times and of course it was all about the cigarettes and how Charlotte never finished her cigarette while Jerry always did, and what about the cuervos? Was quite a trip. We chatted for a while later and honestly we should do that more often. Dinner tonight was hysterical. I will be really glad when i am fully settled into the semester so have my work well paced and am able to really spend good time with so many of the quality people i have in my life here -- students and profs. So many people i wanna call or IM or visit during office hours or whathaveyou.

i teeter between tired
and really, really tired
i'm wiped and i'm wired
but i guess that's just as well
cuz i've built my own empire
out of car tires and chicken wire
and now i'm queen of my own compost heap
and i'm getting used to the smell

Comments

[trijinx.livejournal.com]

I wanted to go to that lecture, but my afternoon got kinda hectic.

What exactly was wrong with the lecture? He's doing another one tomorrow, and I was thinking of going. Should I reconsider?

Sorry, but your comment of 4811 characters exceeds the maximum character length of 4300.

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

I am definitely going to his lecture tomorrow. (As i pointed out to JoJo this evening, Smith's theme this year is definitely ethics. I don't actually remember there being an unusual amount of shit last year besides Winter Weekend. At the Atonement forum, Maureen Mahoney mentioned the situation with Iraq and "sexing up dossiers" and such. I am curious as to the discussions which went into planning an ethics-themed year.) But anyway.

even though Corel said it was 3586, LJ said it was 4362, so i'll just chop this in half

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

The lecture wasn't terrible. As i mentioned to Allie below, he tossed out lots of cases which made it a bit difficult for those of us not familiar with these litanies of cases. Trying to follow the quick statements about what each case was, about what law was getting invalidated... some of it just kinda washed over me.

He mentioned that there's nothing in the actual wording of the Constitution giving the Supreme Court the power to decide whether legislation is constitutional or not, that it was just implied in the structures of the powers and systems and so on, but Judge Marshall in Marbury vs. Madison made a judgement on incredibly broad grounds that in fact the Supreme Court could do that.

This was new and interesting, as was his argument that Dred Scott was a fictitious case.

He talked about how Marshall's ruling could have been challenged, but it didn't really do much, so those opposed to it didn't really have any ground on which to challenge it. He said it was used 26 times in the 19th century but in the 20th century it has been used 150 times (i think the 150 figure he kept repeating was for the 20th century -- it was his figure for approximately how many times it has been invoked against federal statutes anyway; it has been used to overturn 1150 state statutes). He argued that the vast majority of those cases could have been decided using the powers already invested in the court by Article 3 of the constitution. In fact, the only exception to that was the flag-burning case, which led to an interesting discussion about whether the knowledge that the Supreme Court can rule legislation unconstitutional makes some legislation more likely to pass (you can pass legislation to please your constituents, then say "oh, look, overruled, not my fault") or less likely to pass (knowing something is likely to get overruled you don't pass it to begin with).

(last part)

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

One problem i had with the lecture was his talk about how this power was invoked throughout the 20th (as well as the 19th) century to overturn good progressive legislation like civil rights and workers rights and anti-discrimination. This kind of talk (evil government, evil conservative judges, whatever) always makes me suspicious. I thought about the conservative ideals of small government. I thought about how a lot of "good liberal" legislation is not that simple and there are complex factors and maybe it's ultimately a good law but there are lots of reasons for it to not be a law. I thought about the ideal of states' rights. This leads to my other big problem with his talk.

Okay, Acamedia said the talk would include discussion of how the Marbury decision "limit[ed]the scope of congressional power in deference to the power of the states." Throughout the talk i wasn't sure just what his position on states rights was. He talked about decisions decreeing that you can't sue the state (as in an individual state, like Vermont) for something and how that was a bad thing and a lot of the talk around civil rights etc. legislation seemed to be of that mentality that the federal government should be able to dictate morality (though of course liberals would never phrase it that way), that even if states want to do bad things, the federal government should be able to step in and say "No, you're being mean to people, stop." (His problem was that the Supreme Court deemed lots of no-meanie federal laws unconstitutional.) But then at the end of his talk he talked about various documents claim that states have "sovereignty" and "dignity" but that the Court having the powers it does and using them as it does, they don't actually have sovereignty and dignity. I was very confused by the whole states rights issue, particularly since Acamedia (and how knows how closely the Acamedia submitter and Noonan himself collaborated on that blurb) implied it was a major topic of his lecture while his talk seemed to be more "The Supreme Court has been given too much power and used it for lots of bad results."

Jumping off of that final point, people asked about how unconstitutional laws should be kept in check, and he didn't ever really give a good answer and seemed to basically just trust Congress to keep themselves in check, which is particularly foolish given that one of his major themes was how the Supreme Court has not kept themselves in check.

Re: (last part)

[trijinx.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

You know, I never even knew that there was a character limit on comments. Go fig.

[lilithchilde.livejournal.com]

Oh, god. I was at that lecture (it was mandatory for my class), but I barely heard three words. I just couldn't pay attention!

Um. Emily came with me? *sheepish*

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

I was guessing it was the lecture you had mentioned earlier today and i looked for you but didn't see you.

In your defense it was sometimes difficult to follow his line of reasoning because he was tossing out so many cases and (as i'll discuss in my response to Meredith) sometimes he seemed to be arguing two contrary positions.

[athene.livejournal.com]

hey,

i'd love to stop by and see you sometime today or tomorrow. maybe lunchtime? let me know.

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

I just turned my computer on, so obviously today's a no go. I don't have any plans tomorrow except class from 9-9:50 and of course tea at 4. Lunchtime sounds lovely. (I hear our shit cook got moved to Chapin, so the food here's much better than it was last year.) I miss you. (And maybe you can meet Marnie.)