Posts Tagged ‘supreme court’

High Hopes for Heller

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Here’s what I’d like to see, in it’s entirety, coming down from the Supreme Beings in a bit more than six hours:

“The right of the people,” you idiots, “to keep and bear arms” that actually work “shall not” even “be infringed”.

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to the range.

I’ll be happy, though, if they just uphold the Circuit Court’s decision to void the D.C. gun control laws in question, on the grounds that they are so egregiously infringing that they cannont survive any level of scrutiny.

However, if they hold that the government can take personal property in civil forfeiture or eminent domain,  give illegal combatants killing American soldiers on foreign soil full habeus privileges, and declare that even the most brutal of child rapers do not deserve the death penalty, but that ciitizens in our nation’s capitol cannot be trusted with the means to defend themselves, then they will utterly abdicate their legitimacy.

We’ll see in a few hours.

Supreme Court Post Season Round-Ups

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

More of a note to my self than anything:

Supreme Court Review Panels via SCOTUSblog.

In other news, idling the time away waiting for the Heller decision on Thursday, most likely.

I’m Just Going to Say “Cert”

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

My vocabulary is mostly written–I know how to read and write lots of words I can’t pronounce. (For instance, I am not a fan of Tennesee Williams’ play, The Glass Min-uh-juh-REE)  This greatly amuses Friend Pat, almost making up for the fact that in other matters, I’ve Already Heard About It, and I am Always Right. Recently, I’ve developed the habit of Googling “pronunciation wordidontknow” which returns on-line dictionary entries with embedded sound clips of authoritative pronunciation.

When I started reading up on legal affairs, I started seeing a lot of references to the Supreme Court announcing that it would hear a given case, known as “granting certiorari“. In my head, this sounds like “sert-ee-or-ee”–clearly not correct, but typical of the way I pronounce unfamiliar words.

I just got around to doing the Google trick, and discovered that no one knows how to pronounce it: there seems to be considerable controversy. Not even the Justices themselves agree.

Apparently, scholars of classical Latin would pronounce it with a hard “K”: “kair-tee-oh-rahr-eye”. “But you would probably be laughed out of court if you tried it Cicero’s way. Law Latin is only a distant cousin of the classical tongue.”

If I need to impress, I guess I’ll say, “ser-she-ah-RAR-ee“.


Bad Behavior has blocked 206 access attempts in the last 7 days.