I talk about gay mar­riage a lot because I believe that it has inter­est­ing fea­tures and con­se­quences beyond those com­monly sub­ject to dis­cus­sion. For exam­ple, in my Law Review arti­cle, “Same-​​​​Sex Mar­riage and the Fed­eral Spousal Priv­i­leges,” I argue that vari­a­tions in state laws deal­ing with gay mar­riage cre­ate a sit­u­a­tion where fed­eral courts may be faced with a novel choice-​​​​of-​​​​law ques­tion: To which state’s laws should a fed­eral crim­i­nal court look to deter­mine the valid­ity of a mar­riage for pur­poses of apply­ing the spousal tes­ti­mo­nial and com­mu­ni­ca­tions priv­i­leges to same-​​​​sex mar­riages under Fed­eral Rule of Evi­dence 501. (That arti­cle was fin­ished in April, 2009, and has [ . . . ]

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Com­ments are expressly solicited. In the course of going about liv­ing his life, a man notices that he has a dis­pro­por­tion­ate pref­er­ence for red­heads as roman­tic inter­ests. Not being a lazy man, he engages in some lengthy intro­spec­tion and arrives at the fol­low­ing accu­rate con­clu­sions: His pref­er­ence for red­heads makes him more likely to inves­ti­gate the pos­si­bil­ity of romance with red­heads than with non-​​​​redheads. Red hair is not a fac­tor bear­ing any weight on his deci­sion to engage in, con­tinue, or end a romance. His romances with red­heads are no more or less healthy and ratio­nal than his romances with non-​​​​redheads. He hon­estly does not [ . . . ]

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I was going to com­ment on a recent edi­to­r­ial (Kay S. Hymowitz, Free­dom Fetishists, Com­ment. Sept. 2007, at 50, avail­able at http://​www​.com​men​tary​magazine​.com/​c​m​/​m​a​i​n​/​v​i​e​w​A​r​t​i​c​l​e​.​h​tml ?id=10925) that paints Ayn Rand and her phi­los­o­phy of Objec­tivism in an unpleas­ant color and with a crude brush. I spent sev­eral hours mulling over what I wanted to say about it. But in the end, I decided I really had very lit­tle to say that hadn’t already been said. That lit­tle boils down to this: Intel­lec­tual slop­pi­ness begets intel­lec­tual slop­pi­ness. Hymowitz should have done some real research, instead of rely­ing on a few promi­nent Lib­er­tar­i­ans’ warped inter­pre­ta­tions of Rand’s phi­los­o­phy, before pur­port­ing to speak with [ . . . ]

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As you already know, hav­ing thor­oughly read and under­stood the About and Poli­cies pages, I am a law stu­dent. I attend a pub­lic law school in a key Mid­west­ern swing state. This infor­ma­tion is spe­cific enough to nar­row the field to a hand­ful of schools, but not so spe­cific that my pro­fes­sors or fel­low stu­dents might dis­cover my iden­tity. Such a dis­cov­ery would likely result in an unpleas­ant sit­u­a­tion, as I fully intend to engage in crit­i­cal com­men­tary on var­i­ous aspects of my legal edu­ca­tion. To wit ~ Law school began for me last year with a one-​​​​week, “inten­sive,” intro­duc­tory course titled “Intro­duc­tion to Law and Legal Sys­tems.” Oh, thought [ . . . ]

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