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When the Supreme Court first started posting audio last year, I was enthused. I created, what I called a FantasyCAST for Snyder v. Phelps, which excerpted sound bites from arguments. I privately mused whether someone would use these sound bites for inappropriate purposes, and make the Court regret releasing the audio.

The Daily Show did just that. Chopping some of the clips from argument in Fox v. FCC, John Stewart inaugurated a new segment, A Love Supreme.

I don’t find the Daily Show particularly funny, and this segment was lame at best, but I like the idea of using SCOTUS audio. More people should listen to it!

H/T Not Militza Machuca

Psychologists consider it an inevitable life stage, a point where people achieve enough maturity and self-awareness to know who they are and what they want out of their remaining years, and have a degree of clarity about which friends deserve full attention and which are a drain. It is time, in other words, to shed people they collected in their youth, when they were still trying on friends for size.

The winnowing process even has a clinical name: socioemotional selectivity theory, a term coined by Laura L. Carstensen, a psychology professor who is the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity in California. Dr. Carstensen’s data show that the number of interactions with acquaintances starts to decline after age 17 (presumably after the socially aggressive world of high school) and then picks up again between 30 and 40 before starting to decline sharply from 40 to 50.

“When time horizons are long, as they typically are in youth, we’re collectors, we’re explorers, we’re interested in all sorts of things that are novel,” Dr. Carstensen said. “You might go to a party that you don’t want to go to, but know you should — and it’s there you meet your future spouse.”

Hrmm.

The Times has a piece how people are using GPS devices to track other people by surreptitiously attaching trackers to cars. If the person who places the GPS has an ownership interest in the car, it would probably be legal.

This bit, though is fascinating:

Jimmie Mesis, a private investigator in New Jersey who, with his wife, Rosemarie, publishes PI Magazine and also sells devices through a company called PIgear, recalled a couple whose 17-year-old daughter had a drug problem and would disappear for hours at a time. Worried that she might overdose, they placed a tracker on her car. When they saw that she was visiting the same house repeatedly, they informed the police, who raided the drug den.

Why would the police need a warrant when private parties are already doing all the surveillance!

This is a very thorough and detailed guide. I already have a few ideas.

I have dedicated all of my law review articles to dead people I admire.

1. The Constitutionality of Social Cost, 34 Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 1 (2011) SSRN Ronald Coase
2. Original Citizenship, 159 University of Pennsylvania Law Review PENNUMBRA 95 (2010), SSRN James Wilson
3. Crowdsourcing A Prediction Market for the Supreme Court, 10 Northwestern Journal of Technology & Intellectual Property ___ (2012)  SSRN F.A. Hayek and Larry Ribstein (dearly departed)
4. Pierson v. Post and The Natural Law, 51 American Journal of Legal History 95 (2011). SSRN John Locke
5. Keeping Pandora’s Box Sealed, 8 Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy (2010) (With Ilya Shapiro). SSRN The 39th Congress
6. Equal Protection from Eminent Domain, 56 Loyola Law Review 697 (2010). SSRN George Mason
7. Youngstown’s Fourth Tier. Is There A Zone of Insight Beyond the Zone of Twilight?, 40 Memphis Law Review 541 (2010) (With Elizabeth Bahr). SSRN George Washington
8. The Tell-Tale Privileges or Immunities Clause, 2010 Cato Supreme Court Review 163 (2010) (With Alan Gura and Ilya Shapiro). SSRN John Bingham
   
9. This Lemon Comes as a Lemon. The Lemon Test and the Pursuit of a Statute’s Secular Purpose, 20 George Mason University Civil Rights Law Review  351 (2010). SSRN Thomas Jefferson
10. Omniveillance, Google, Privacy in Public, and the Right to Your Digital Identity: A Tort for Recording and Disseminating an Individual’s Image Over the Internet, 49 Santa Clara Law Review 313 (2009). SSRN James Madison

And who will I dedicate this article to?

The Supreme Court’s New Battlefield, 90 Texas Law Review ___  (2012). Drumroll…. Frederick Douglass! This is probably the last thing I will write (for a while at least) about Reconstruction, so this seemed like a good opportunity. After all, I double-tipped Bingham, thanking him personally, and as a member of the august 39th Congress.