monzyummylunch

A Gentleman and a Legal Scholar!

Monz is chillin' while illin' (don't fret, just a little cold) and goes to Subway for the usual. The fixin's don't come easy thanks to Subway's new, stingier employee. "You pick the veggies, we'll tell you how much you get!"

It's a fair criticism of this blog to say that we don't share enough of Monz' more mentally rigrorous, accademic thoughts. Thus, we provide the following transcript of a recent conversation between the Monz and the Legal Editor (LE) concerning a biography of the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun by New York Times Supreme Court coorespondent Linda Greenhouse.

LE: Dude, let me read you something from the New York Time's book review. It's by Jeffery Rosen, who's a bigwig legal writer. [Reader's Note: What the LE failed to mention is that back when Rosen worked at the New Republic, he dated the infamous Ruth Shalit, who the LE had a bit of a thing for, so readers should be on the lookout for any jealousy snark].

"After Justice Blackmun in the early 1960's rebuffed Chief Justice Berger's repeated overtures to join him on a two-man buddy trip through Europe"

Monz: "Ahhhhh."

LE: "the chief justice repsonds in what Ms. Greenhouse calls "the tone of a rejected lover" promising to "subside and lick my wounds." What emerges for the first time in this book is that Justice Blackmun's insecurities and hypersensitivity to slights were as pronounced as Chief Justice Burger's. Notoriously slow in producing opinions, Justice Blackmun feels "somewhat humiliated, not only personally, but publicly" when Chief Justice Burger assigns him fewer majority opinions than all of his colleagues. Justice Blackmun's diary recording the deterioration of his relationship with Chief Justice Burger reads like that of an emotionally needy high school student ("CJ for the first time very cool," he wrote in 1980. Five years later: "CJ picks on me at conference.")

Monz: [chortle!]