Article III Groupie has just four quick items to share with you, which serve to amend and supplement prior posts by providing answers to questions raised therein.
1. In this post, A3G broke the news that The Giant Hedgehog and Professor Gary Becker will be starting a new blog, The Becker-Posner Blog -- a UTR exclusive that was picked up by many prominent bloggers, including Andrew Sullivan. (By the way, be sure to check out The Becker-Posner Blog, which is now open for business.)
A3G also posed this question: "Why is the blog to be called 'The Becker-Posner Blog,' rather than 'The Posner-Becker Blog'?" High-powered intellectual property lawyer Bill Patry, who moderated the Posner-Kozinski debate before the Copyright Society of the USA, provided this answer:
[Y]ou ask why the Becker-Posner blog is not the Posner-Becker blog. The answer is simple: the Giant Hedgehog inisists that all his colloborations have an alphabetical listing. The recent article I published with him (on copyright fair use in the Cal. L. Rev.) was Patry-Posner, as much as I protested. So, whether the blog was Becker-Posner or Becker-Giant Hedgehog, Becker comes first.
Despite the obvious reliability of the source, out of an excess of caution, A3G contacted The Giant Hedgehog himself to verify the correctness of the foregoing explanation. (After all, she wouldn't want to have to issue another correction from Judge Posner!) Judge Posner confirmed its accuracy.
2. Back in this post, A3G wrote:
With respect to the NYU grads, the article [from an NYU Law School publication] mentions Larry D. Thompson, Jr., the son of former Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson (who left the DOJ last year to take a position at the Brookings Institution, and who recently signed up for the Pepsi challenge). The younger Mr. Thompson was supposed to be starting an OT 2004 clerkship with Justice Thomas after serving a year as a Luttigator -- but his name does not appear on the list of OT 2004 Supreme Court clerks. Can someone please tell A3G what's going on?
As always, one of A3G's favorite legal journalists, Tony Mauro -- a.k.a. "the Liz Smith of One First Street" -- has all the answers. A reader directed A3G's attention to Mr. Mauro's analysis of Supreme Court clerk demographic trends in the November 15 issue of the Legal Times, which contains this information:
Justice Clarence Thomas was scheduled to have an African-American law clerk working for him this term -- Larry Thompson Jr., the son of the former deputy attorney general, who is a longtime friend of Thomas -- but his start was put off until next term.
Article III Groupie thanks Mr. Mauro for the scoop. But now the nosy A3G wants to know: Why was Thompson's start postponed until next Term?
If A3G were in the shoes of Larry Thompson, Jr., she would want to start (and finish) her clerkship at the Court sooner rather than later. A vacancy on the Court could open up in the near future, and Thompson père is sometimes mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee. It could be weird or awkward for Thompson Jr. to be clerking at the Court while his father was in the middle of confirmation proceedings (or, if Thompson Sr. were nominated and confirmed quickly, serving as an Associate Justice).
3. After reading this post about the Jeopardy! appearance of Tax Court Judge Mark Holmes, a reader wrote A3G to ask: "What does 'oviphiliana' mean? It's not in any of my dictionaries." A3G simply assumed, from context, that the word refers to sheep paraphernalia. But she was also unable to locate it in any of her dictionaries, so she contacted Judge Holmes to request enligtenment. He responded as follows:
Dear Ms. "G":
We in the article I courts use lots of Latin- and Greek-derived vocabulary -- it may be, as someone once observed, one of our "flaccidity-inducing" characteristics.
"Oviphiliana" is a new word, but a sensible one, and wholly in this tradition. Ovi-, is of course the Latin prefix for sheep; philia- the Greek suffix (here used as an infix (or more properly, I have just learned, a "tmesis," see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive_infixation) for love); and -ana, the suffix for a collection of material, especially one that reflects on a person's character, http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=-ana.
Put them together and you have (as you surmised from context) "a collection of paraphernalia relating to the love that dare not bleat its name."
The Tax Court's First Article III Groupie Groupie,
Mark Holmes
A3G, who greatly enjoys such linguistic trivia, thanks Judge Holmes for this explanation.
4. Finally, in case you were wondering about the origin of the delightful "Internet is for Porn" audio clip contained in this post, A3G would like to share with you the following information, received from UTR reader Joe Gratz (whom she identifies by name with his permission; check out his blog):
The "Internet is for Porn" song is from the 2003 Broadway musical Avenue Q, a satire of post-college life using muppet-like puppets (winner of the Best Musical Tony that year, in fact). Other catchy numbers from the show include "What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?" (go to law school, of course), the teaching song "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist", the closeted toe-tapper "My Girlfriend, Who Lives in Canada", and a big, brassy number called "Schadenfreude". The show's
site is http://www.avenueq.com/.
I thought you and your readers might like to know, since the site with the audio file doesn't really say.
As always, A3G thanks her loyal readers for all of their tidbits and tips.
Way behind in her holiday shopping,
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