I suppose I don't need to worry about the long title cluttering up the sidebar.
Snf.
I, too, have forgotten things I once knew. I suspect it's universal.
Actually, I've always found that once I learned something, I could relearn it substantially faster than I learned it the first time even if I thought it was completely out of my mind by the time I tried to relearn it.
I suspect I've forgotten things I once knew, but I'm not sure.
The thing about the paper was that the punch line was surprising; my labor law professor was genuinely rocked back a bit to find that absolutely nothing that's been litigated about the provision over the sixty-odd years it's been in effect was what Congress was thinking about at all.
It doesn't, in the end, matter -- the words of the law are the words of the law, whatever Congress meant to pass. But this is a really epic case of legislative drafting with wildly unintended consequences.
If you really know a thing, you never forget it. I've only forgotten things I half knew.
I'm a little unclear on what exactly it is that you forgot, since you seem to remember the "punch-line" perfectly well. The details of the legislative history? Would you really expect to have remembered that?
Or... is it not the forgetting that seems odd, but the complete loss of the work product itself?
(I once lost a large research paper to floppy disk failure a few years after writing it, and agree it's an odd feeling.)
I feel like I know something important, something really big, but I can't quite remember what it is . . . It's so frustrating . . . Maybe I've got it written down somewhere . . . By the way, did we eat lunch yet?
A former boss's husband once accidentally deleted the only electronic copy of her dissertation. There was a hard-copy and he had to re-type it.
7 last concedes WAY too much to Scalia bullshit. Of course legislative history should be a guide to figuring out the meaning of a statute, though it can't IMO trump unambiguous statutory language.
Also: when it comes to typos, you've really got a low bar for "horrifying".
13: True. I once was supposed to type "public schools" but one small slip of my fingers and it read "lick the balls of a diseased badger then disappear from the face of the earth."
What's actually throwing me is that I can't quite get back what the live issue was that started me on the research (although thinking about it has brought back enough, including some case names, that it wouldn't actually take too long to reconstruct.) It was something about the payment of salaries by the employer to union officials for lost time: that is, if you're on the assembly line half-time and a shop steward the other half, can the contract say that the employer pays you a full-time salary nonetheless? IIRC, the caselaw is unambiguously no -- § 302 forbids it -- but there was some question as to the exact line of what is forbidden that I can't get back.
Come to think, it's probably losing the work product, which was many months of work, rather than anything else. That, and just the shock of "Wow, I used to be an expert on this and I'm really not anymore."
11: I actually did that to myself halfway through writing this thing. While maddening, I think the retyping process got me unstuck on some issues and was a very helpful editing step. But I'm a consistently blocked and insane writer.
12: You're not wrong, but this is a situation where the actual wording passed, while not unambiguous, really can't be interpreted in a way that's close to what Congress meant to do.
Fair enough, but maybe your research would also have indicated reasons why the statute also can't be interpreted to ban card check since that is so far distant from legislative itent. Your research could have saved the American labor movement, but you fucked up.
Actually just kidding. We all know that your research would not possibly have moved the ideologues responsible for this decision.
18.2: After Shelby, I feel they are capable of just about anything in judicial pursuit of their agenda.
It really was shocking to me that there could be an arguably worse-supported decision during my lifetime than Bush v. Gore.
And 20, 21 are reason #276 why narratives about Obama's incompetence are generally poorly thought out rambles of negative value.
Nothing useful to say here, but thanks for the post. Both the heads-up about this SC case and the general point that badly drafted laws have screwy consequences are worthy-- no wait that's the wrong word, is there any legislation that includes "cromulent" yet? "embiggen" has become an injoke word that's actually used in some javascript utilities.
On forgetting, I think this is just a feature of middle age and changing contexts. I used to be a pretty good physicist. Now I can rarely derive basic results without looking at reference material.
I forget stuff that I'm supposedly an expert on and have to remind myself of the critical bits by reading things I wrote back when I had mastery of the topic. It takes me only a little time to get back into the swing of things, but the rereading step is really critical. I have about the shittiest memory a person can have and still function well enough to fool people into thinking I know what I'm doing.
And speaking of Bush v. Gore, the Virginia AG race (R with 17 vote lead last I looked) has gone through all kinds of swings during one of which the Bush v. Gore "precedent" was explicitly cited. It has to do with the way provisional ballots are treated--and (surprise!) it is all over the map with acceptance rates ranging from 11% to 85% in different areas. But in the specific instance Fairfax County (I think biggest vote and strongly D) had a system where you could have someone (usually a Dem or Rep official) support your ballot while in other places the voter had to appear before the election board in person. Fairfax is not being allowed to do so for and I saw Bush v. Gore uniform procedures cited. (It should be noted that person does not necessarily need to show up to have their vote counted if there is sufficient material available.) Anyway, Fairfax extended the provisional counting until tomorrow to allow people time to come in, so final results will not be available until tomorrow.
BTW, the famous Wasserman thinks it will be Herring by 100-200 votes at the end--but that assumes a problematic voting machine in Richmond is allowed in.
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Charles Pierce on a great Sunday Show moment:
But first, there was the greatest collision of syllables in the history of television, as George Stephanopoulous talked about crazy-assed mayor Rob Ford with a Canadian pundit named George Stroumboulopoulos. This resulted in the occasional on-screen chyron that appeared to have been borrowed from the Jurassic exhibit at the Museum Of Natural History.
Sorry, had to share.
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17: Just curious, how far do you take that principle? As far as obvious drafting errors ?
No, not at all. Things like missing "not"s, failed cross-references like the one you identify, and so on, I don't have any trouble with fixing based on legislative intent. But when you get seriously substantively bad drafting, at some point you really are stuck with what the legislature said rather than what they meant.
26: So far, my favorite fragment of the Rob Ford story - which was somehow more fun when it was "about" crack and not intoxicated rages - is that he didn't just use the famed phrase "drunken stupor", he made that out to be an everyday occurrence by saying "one of my drunken stupors".
24: This is utterly familiar. I have a stellar memory for names, especially in context, but when studying history I faltered constantly when trying to remember arguments from analytical sources and, worse, when trying to speak about binary facts - as soon as I once forgot, in conversation, the answer to a question like "Were there many Orthodox clergy in Russian Alaska?", I kept forgetting it thereafter. I only remembered that I had forgotten and that made the exact yes or no more forgettable.
Isn't 7.last the entire point of the platinum coin argument which is rejected as too silly?
Further to 25. "Missing" machine counted in Richmond, Herring now up by 117 before Fairfax provisionals. Rs evoking LBJ, but turns out whatever extra canvassing they did was at GOP request.
Its kind of impressive just how shitty the Taft-Hartly Act was, apparently on multiple levels.
I mean, really, if the end result was to fuck over labor, who is to say that wasn't really the authors intent? Its certainly consistent with the overall spirit of the Act.
Right, maybe Congress should pass the "Here's A Bunch of Ways We Can Think of to Fuck Over XYZ Group, but We Tried to Word it Broadly Enough that a Sympathetic Future Supreme Court Will Rule in Favor of Whatever Crazy Theory the Gobshites of that Time Come Up With in a Lawsuit Plus Don't Forget the Tax Reduction Bill."
I've found #3 to be true also, and I'm convinced it's one of the main values of studying stuff young. But my experience mostly applies for stuff I can look up and review from a textbook; I'm not sure how much it applies to original research, where a significant part of the time was tracking down and understanding the sources in the first place.
The fact that neutrality agreements are up before the SC is so potentially apocalyptic that I cannot even begin to think about it. Card-check neutrality is one of the only thing labor's got going for it. A bad decision could trigger rear-guard organizing over thousands of members. My knees knock.