From Strauss, Rakoff, Farina, Gellhorn and Byse's "Administrative Law"

"Notice-and-comment rulemaking is to public participation as Japanese Kabuki theater is to human passions--a highly stylized process for displaying in a formal way the essence of something which in real life takes place in other venues."

Unfinished Business-a legal biography

He knew the screed was incomplete. He was its author...even before he was the man that history remembers. This was the 1780's and the heart of man had not yet been laid bare. Neither was there a language of the law, drawn in the bloody script of human nature. Nay, men were still apes before the lord, and the King's court was naught but a pack of parrots and smelly mules. He had written the screed by his own hand. His arguments were not perfect. He could fret not about the minor lacuna when his first major work was nearly finished. The sun was rising and time was short. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw he would finish. He looked into the trembling eyes of the woman who was once his lover as he clutched his plume and spoke with certainty, "Nay Woman! Be gone with you! I have unfinished business with our King in waiting. There are still "T"s to cross and "i"s to dot!"

SECRET ADVENTURES!!!

...whereupon he adduced that he had no standing before the committee, and the room was spinning like mad. He kept fumbling through his pockets for the notes he’d drawn out years ago, but his fingers were cold and numb. As he focused upon the whirring fan, which seemed strangely still as the room gyrated wildly, he felt an impact upon his forehead. “There’s a bullet in my brain, Finally!” he thought. However, his lips relaxed and drooped as he realized that the warm liquid flowing over his face was urine, and not his own blood. He opened his eyes to see the head magistrate holding a bloated infant high above his head…a surgically altered half-dead infant in a black robe, who was pissing green liquid at his forehead. His mind went blank when he realized his head was also on fire…(to be continued)

So, this is what it's like...

"Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours."
--Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Unfunny Graduate Students/Sham Syllabus

one sham syllabus:

Realizing Swedenborg: A Feminist Perspective

Swedenborg has argued that the angelic is masculine. From moistened genitals to heavenly sentinels, this class will explore the ongoing discourse of divinity as fertile moisture. Traversing our way through the Levant of the Swedenborgian angelic to the Sudan of the Dogonic blood sacrifice of Ogotemmêli, we shall reinvigorate the discourse of the feminine. The methodology shall be analytic: Quinean schematizations shall be used to establish the omega-completeness of feminist epistemology. As time permits, we will examine the possibility of formalizing menstruation and lactation cycles into a binary Turing womb. Clitoral mutilation shows itself as an instantiation of the functionalist deployment of Ockham’s Razor, dutifully slicing away the superfluous qualic mound of effeminate moisture.

Chomsky has proven that when deprived of its clitoris, the Turing womb reduces to a Chinese Room wherein meaning evaporates, leaving only the scabby desert of ossified masculine functionalist vacuity. Our task shall be to develop a feminist formalism that rearticulates the coherence of vaginal hermeneutics, like one’s wife tightly screwed into her special sanitary napkin, who then becomes like a child, a painful sort of fat European maggot which, dissolving in the heat, is a permanent diarrhea. A diarrhea of Swedenborgian proportions.

From My Spam Folder...

I miss you kitty. RIP.

The Gospel of Richard of Lubbock, Part the First

The fact of the matter—as a matter of fact—is always another story. And each story is a proliferating weed. Thus, hindsight is inevitably and necessarily wrong. Or rather, there is no hindsight. No looking back. Even if with all your heart, you have shut your eyes to peak away from the future, your memory remains a figment of it. This is the ridiculous and fertile germ that infects this grandly apocryphal Gospel of St. Richard of Lubbock.

These lines and the scenes they describe are naught but the bronchial paths of Wisdom’s Lung. “We are not to find wisdom, rather we are inhaled by it.” So said Richard, as he sipped his soup.

Richard Renders Judgment Against the Ministers of the Tiny Gospel:

Men trained to be happy—most wearing hats and looking old—lined the streets of Texas. Everywhere saying nothing, but handing out “the Word.” Many were very thirsty—some of them actually melting. These men stood with crooked arms sprawled and hands holding tiny tomes, infesting the sidewalks like clammy and smiling brambles. Each poor soul who passed through this sweating gauntlet was stuck with some kind of Bible…some kind of very tiny Bible. Its cover was the color of an overripe lime (just the kind of green fruit you might expect from this kind of foliage), and Gold print indicated that each contained The New Testament, as well as Psalms and Proverbs (each book measured exactly 1.75”x.25”x .15”). Richard who has recited this account for all to hear then proclaimed, “given the size of these books one cannot believe that they contain Psalms and Proverbs, rather than just Psalm and Proverb! The New Testament is not printed in these bibles…unless it is a new New Testament that expresses its wisdom with far fewer and shorter words than the original!”…(to be continued)

Unfunny Laws

This will be the first entry in a continuing blog segment called, "Unfunny Laws." The law is not funny. The next time someone makes light of the law, imagine your beloved mother sitting naked in a forest with poop on her head, growling at the moon. As the angry night clamors on, imagine a wolf cub screeching as his starving father sinks his Satanic Teeth into young cubby flesh. Lightning strikes a sleeping sparrow down from the tree, as a beaver nearby falls on its side for no reason at all. As the sun rises, we return to your mother pulling herself out of the mud. Can you see the moss and broken twigs hanging from her ass crack? She dimly perceives the futility of her life as she tries to gnaw hardened black bark from a dying tree. We move closer to this reality each time the dignity of the law is mocked. The Law is not funny. The law is totally Unfunny.

Today's unfunny law comes from section 8 of Chicago's Municipal Code:


8-4-020 Inciting riots, etc.

It is unlawful to create a clear and present danger of a riot or assault, battery, or other unlawful trespass against any person or group of persons because of his or their race, religion, color, national origin, or ancestry, or to create a clear and present danger of arson, vandalism, defacement, or other unlawful trespass against property because of the race, religion, color, national origin, or ancestry of the owner, possessor, or authorized user or users of said property, or, in the case of a cemetery, of the decedent buried therein.

The term "person" as used in this section shall include one or more individuals, copartnerships, corporations, firms, organizations, associations, leagues, or other bodies.

Any person violating the provisions of this section shall be fined not less than $25.00 nor more than $200.00 or imprisoned for not less than 10 days or more than six months, or both, for each offense. (Prior code § 193-1.1)