Elizabeth (the delinquent, ecumenical) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hermionesviolin) wrote2003-09-17 11:34 pm
hermionesviolin) wrote2003-09-17 11:34 pm
Sometimes, i just absolutely love my life so much.
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
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
even though Corel said it was 3586, LJ said it was 4362, so i'll just chop this in half
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).