RESTORING STARE DECISIS IS ACTIVIST:

Emancipating the Constitution From Non-Originalist Precedent: In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Chevron, originalists must address the problem of bad precedent. (John O. Mcginnis & Mike Rappaport, 7/11/24, Law & Liberty)

The biggest challenge to the rise of originalism is precedent. Although originalism is enjoying more support in the judiciary and in the academy than it has in a century, hundreds of non-originalist Supreme Court precedents still shape our legal world. That means originalists face a clear dilemma: If they allow these precedents to dominate, constitutional doctrine will remain non-originalist […] Conversely, if originalists systematically overturn non-originalist precedent, they risk disrupting established rules and causing legal instability.

It is not surprising that the justices are just beginning to grapple with this fundamental issue.

Maintaining the violence that was done to the Constitution is the worst alternative.

AMEN, SISTER:

“It’s Time to Play Ball, British Style”: A hot dog, a Pimm’s cup and two national anthems: The cultural dissonance of watching America’s pastime in London. (IMOGEN WEST-KNIGHTS, JULY 9, 2024, The Dial)

I have seen one baseball game before, two years ago at Yankee stadium in New York. The sport itself felt incidental to me: It seemed that you could treat the game as a location in which to drink a beer more than anything else. The primary impression I took away was one of overwhelming Americanness. What could a baseball game in London possibly feel like, so far from its native home? What is the appeal of this most American pastime to Brits? I went to the Phillies Mets game to find out.

THE DIRTY SECRET IS THAT THINGS ARE GREAT:

Itchen for fishing: Good fishing, books and beer remind us that not everything is awful (Patrick Galbraith, 7/11/24, The Critic)

What you’ve got to understand, he explained, as he sat at his desk — a desk which comes from the original Lutyens-designed Country Life office — is that most of the media in this country tells you why you’re wrong or why somebody else is. What Country Life does, he explained, is it makes people feel good about themselves. It sounds simple but Country Life is one of the only magazines in Britain that sees its profits jump year on year. As the world becomes more miserable, people seek it out more and more.

I like the dogs and the chalk streams and the literature and the food

I think, though, there’s something else going on too. We live in a period when everybody wants to talk Britain down. “Tell me”, a well-known novelist’s husband said to me recently at a book festival we were both speaking at, “about how awful it is to be a young person in Britain.” The thing is, I replied, I quite like it. I like the dogs and the chalk streams and the literature and the food. I like English cheese, pubs, and London in winter.

We walked back along the bank, each of us with our fish, then we sat in the pub in Twyford and had a beer. “What I think it is”, I said to Mark, is that Country Life provides an antidote to this bleak and self-fulfilling narrative that everything here is awful.

we yearn to be the heroes of our own narratives, which is made difficult be how affluent and peaceful modern life is. So we cosplay a drama that does not exist.