My browser is full of tabs, and my Commodore 64 is going to run out of RAM soon, so I need to disgorge. My apologies for queue jumping. It isn’t my intent, but the weather here in Sunburn, Georgia is fine, and I haven’t been gotten by the virus yet.
Let me give something light. I don’t do that often, since I try to offer what others don’t, so Above the Law has a collection of holiday cards sent out by law firms. Some are quite amusing. The intellectual property firm has Santa inventing a new mask for Rudolph, and then filing a patent.
Stepping up in seriousness, we can go to something that will feed your brain for a long, long time, one way or another. New York Times has a retrospective on the importance of The Game of Life, a simple mathematical model/computer program that I played on my IBM PC Jr. in 1984 and was obsessed with.
The game was simple: Place any configuration of cells on a grid, then watch what transpires according to three rules that dictate how the system plays out.
Birth rule: An empty, or “dead,” cell with precisely three “live” neighbors (full cells) becomes live.
Death rule: A live cell with zero or one neighbors dies of isolation; a live cell with four or more neighbors dies of overcrowding.
Survival rule: A live cell with two or three neighbors remains alive.
With each iteration, some cells live, some die and “Life-forms” evolve, one generation to the next.
Start by placing a couple of cells, and then let it go. Worlds within. . . ok, just one. However, the ramifications were insane.
The Game of Life motivated the use of cellular automata in the rich field of complexity science, with simulations modeling everything from ants to traffic, clouds to galaxies. More trivially, the game attracted a cult of “Lifenthusiasts,” programmers who spent a lot of time hacking Life — that is, constructing patterns in hopes of spotting new Life-forms.
To mark the 50th anniversary, the ConwayLife.com community — which hosts the LifeWiki, with more than 2,000 articles — created an Exploratorium, a large, explorable stamp-collection pattern.
The basic rules showed . . . all sorts of things. The game inspired programmers, philosophers, artists, and not just in Ye Olden Days.
I defy anyone to start playing it and then just walk away without some further thoughts.
Moving up one more level in seriousness, there is Empty Wheel’s take on New York Post and the Murdoch empire’s antagonism toward Judge Emmett Sullivan.
Once upon a time, Trump loyalists were thrilled that Judge Emmet Sullivan had gotten Mike Flynn’s case after Rudolph Contreras recused. They were sure that a judge who had fearlessly taken on prosecutorial abuse in the past would find prosecutorial abuse in the sweetheart False Statements charge that General Flynn got in lieu of a Foreign Agent charge.
The Foxen were all on board with Sullivan. Sullivan would be their hero. Sullivan would slaughter the witch hunt. The Foxen and those Ms. Wheeler calls “the frothy right” entirely misread (or refused to read) Sullivan’s comments from the bench. When Sullivan had questions, they all got a tingle running down their legs.
Then Sullivan got questions on those issues answered and raised more pressing questions — such as what charges Flynn avoided with his plea deal.
That’s when Sullivan “cut through” the buffalo chips and asked if DOJ couldn’t have charged Flynn with treason. Suddenly, Sullivan was the worst man alive and perhaps a crypto-Angry Democrat.
And now Marcy Wheeler notes that the worms are turning back again:
But now the boss has weighed in. In an editorial begging Trump to accept his loss and work to save the Senate today, the NY Post describes Sidney Powell as a crazy person and Flynn’s call for martial law “tantamount to treason.”
Sidney Powell is a crazy person. Michael Flynn suggesting martial law is tantamount to treason. It is shameful.
To be clear, Flynn’s call for martial law wasn’t treason, just as secretly working for Turkey while serving as Trump’s top national security advisor wasn’t either.
But both Judge Sullivan and Rupert Murdoch appear to agree: Mike Flynn sold out this country.
Finally, for something very serious, but very detailed and probably more for me than a wide audience, Just Security has “Purpose, Not Specificity, Limits the Pardon Power” by Frank O. Bowman III.
Bowman is writing his article in response to Aaron Rappaport, who argued that the power to pardon got limited in English law after the 1688-9 Act of Settlement and that this had been incorporated into the US Constitutional understanding. Bowman writes to rebut. Because I study 1660 — 1780, this is my jam, historically. I don’t expect others to be as interested.
The “issue,” on the other hand, is of importance to everyone.
Rather, he claims that the Framers intended the President’s pardon power to be co-extensive with that of the British Crown, and that, at the time of the framing, there existed a clear rule requiring specificity in royal pardons which the Framers incorporated into the American constitution sub silentio.
I disagree, both because there was no such clear rule in eighteenth century British pardon practice, and because American presidents have issued non-specific pardons for over two hundred years with the express approval of the federal courts.
I recommend reading the article. Bowman is right on the English history. In particular, he appeals to Blackstone, and that is the last word for the understanding American lawyers would have had in 1780. While English kings decreased generalized pardons and involved Parliament in them, that is part of an overall change in the monarchy rather than the doctrine of the pardon in the law.
Therefore, if someone wants to be an “originalist” and Ouija the framers, the best will be to insist on text. If one is going away from text, then the whole project of English history from the Stuarts to the Hannoverians was a project of royal containment, but often without changes to the principles of the law.
There is no evidence of which I am aware that in the decades of the 1700s before the American constitutional founding the law governing royal pardon power experienced any significant alteration, whether as to individuals or groups. The best evidence that the pardon power continued to lodge firmly and exclusively in the person of the King is found in the very commentators upon whom Professor Rappaport relies. In the fourth volume of his Commentaries, published in 1769, Blackstone cites the 1535 act consolidating the pardon power in the Crown, and then declares that, “the king hath the whole and sole power [of pardoning], united and knit to the imperial crown of this realm.” In his very next paragraph Blackstone expatiated at length on the advantages of this royal monopoly, particularly relative to democracies.
Bowman’s own position — that pardons are limited by their intent — is a secondary consideration. He is primarily writing to engage and rebut Rappaport.
Rappaport had tried to say that group, non-specific pardons were military pardons for the most part, and therefore they were Commander in Chief functions. That, to me, seemed crazy at the time, and Bowman says,
Certainly, there is no support for this suggestion in any American court decision. Indeed, in multiple opinions, the Supreme Court affirmed the validity of President Andrew Johnson’s post-Civil War general pardons, but neither in these opinions nor later did the Court refer to the commander-in-chief authority. Instead, the Court has consistently justified the breadth of the President’s pardon power by reference to the open-ended language of Article II and the Framers’ understanding of the scope of the English royal pardon power.
I find what Bowman says persuasive, but I’m just a scholar:
First, the sovereign, whether conceived as the individual monarch or the compound “King in Parliament,” had the power to pardon effectively all criminal offenses. Second, when construing any pardon, general or individual, the determinative issue was the sovereign’s purpose, that is, whether the words of the pardon expressed with reasonable clarity an intention on the part of the sovereign to pardon the crime for which clemency was sought. Those principles were, I think, adopted by the Framers, and later by judges, into American practice.
For those who haven’t fallen (back) asleep from this, a reward: VIDEO! I found it at Naked Capitalism. Bobcats on the St. Louis River filmed by drone camera.