As many of you know, I’m not a fan of the wide world of sports. But I am a fan of labor unions, and in that capacity, I have noticed that there have been quite a few lockouts over the past couple of years—four in 14 months, to be exact. I assumed that was because of the general shittiness of the sports bosses. It is, but there’s another factor, as Dave Zirin reports here: the shittiness of the sports bosses’ lawyers. A law firm called Proskauer Rose is now representing management in all four major men’s sports leagues, the first time in history one firm has been hired to play such a unified role. In practice, this has meant that […]

This is Part 2 of my series on Justice Scalia, Diva of Disdain.  Part 1 is here; an introduction to the whole is here. • • • • • Like many originalists, Scalia claims that his jurisprudence has nothing to do with his conservatism. “I try mightily to prevent my religious views or my political views or my philosophical views from affecting my interpretation of the laws.” Yet he has also said that he learned from his teachers at Georgetown never to “separate your religious life from your intellectual life. They’re not separate.” Only months before Ronald Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1986, he admitted that his legal views were “inevitably affected by moral and theological perceptions.” […]