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Linda Greenhouse on the political Supreme Court.

To get back to the justices: recognizing that ordinary people are capable of complex thinking, why not give the justices credit for the same ability? Naturally they care about outcomes. How could they not? But they have to care about a lot else as well. In every decision they confront, they have to find a way to reconcile the present with the past, understanding that what they do today shapes the future. In other words, they are capable of holding many thoughts simultaneously.

At least, looking ahead to what could be a momentous 2012, I hope so.

So this Op-Ed is screaming to the conservative justices–see prove me right, I know you aren’t politicians in robes, do the right thing, uphold the mandate. Greenhouse has, on more occassions than I could even count, has called the Justices on the Roberts Court (gasp!) politicians in robes. This seems so insincere. Not sure what I else I should expect from Greenhouse. Her current column is called Opinionator, in which she gives opinions. That’s what she did for decades as the reporters. Not reporting, but giving opinions.

Well, the FTC filed a brief in support of their party in the Louisiana Monks case, but for once the state agrees with IJ that the Louisiana Law harms consumers.

The Louisiana Embalming and Funeral Directors Act, La. Rev. Stat. Ann. §§ 37:831 et seq. (“LEFDA”), subjects persons engaged solely in the manufacture and sale of caskets within the state of Louisiana to the full panoply of licensing requirements for funeral directors and funeral establishments. In striking down the LEFDA as unconstitutional, the district court concluded that “the sole reason for these laws is the economic protection of the funeral industry. ” USCA5 at 901. Taking no position on the constitutional due process and equal protection issues, the Commission files this amicus brief to refute any suggestion that LEFDA’s licensing requirements further the purposes of the Funeral Rule. On the contrary, he [sic] restraints on competition imposed by the LEFDA are at odds with the policy goals of both the Funeral Rule and the FTC Act.

Scott Bullock is pleased:

Scott Bullock with the Arlington, Va.-based Institute for Justice, which represents the monks in the case, said the FTC position buttresses the position of the Abbey. The FTC brief says clearly that the Louisiana law “is not in the interest of consumers,” he said.

What happens when the so-called “99%” are imposing significant social costs on the real 99% of society?

Megan McArdle opines:

And it highlights an inherent tension that Julian Sanchez wrote aboutwell in November: these protests are not simply about the protesters v. “the 1%”.  The protesters also impose costs, possibly significant costs, on the surrounding communities.  And the protesters themselves seem to refuse to acknowledge this–that they are not simply a representative of “the 99%”, but also often at odds with a significant portion of that larger population.

Now, I’m sure that the members of OccupyDC would contest the need for extra policing.  But the active protests certainly do–sometime before Thanksgiving, I spent about twenty minutes trapped behind a handful of people who had decided to march down K Street at rush hour.  They absolutely did need the large police escort that they had in order to keep angry drivers (not me) from running them over.  And even the passive part of the protest had, last time I was down there, become a magnet for homeless people, with the attendant worries about petty crime and acting out by the mentally ill.

It seems to me that a movement claiming to represent the 99% should consciously take these costs into account–particularly over the longer term.  A one day crime spike is not a big deal. A  three month increase is a pretty sizable cost, particularly in a city that already has a very high crime rate.

Arnold Kling writes about the economics of professor’s selecting textbooks.

One of the key things I keep in mind when selecting a book is cost. I try to keep it as cheap as possible. In fact, I want to do some kind of custom course packet that is available on Kindle or PDF to keep costs even lower.

Steve Vladek writes about an interesting question that is still open in the wake of the Detainee cases:

There’s been a fair amount of media and blog attention to the proposed new rules governing (and substantially widening) the government’s access to communications between military commission defendants and their counsel. The draft order (courtesy of the Miami Herald) ishere; the AP story is here; the ABA’s letter of protest to Secretary Panetta is here.

Separate from the policy side of this story, there’s a critical legal issue here that hasn’t yet been resolved: The AP story reports that one of the objections lodged by counsel for the defendants is that the new rules violate the defendants’ constitutional right to counsel. Of course, that assumes that the Guantanamo detainees, as non-citizens detained outside the territorial United States, have a Sixth Amendment (or perhaps a Fifth Amendment) right to counsel.