Tuesday, December 11, 2007

I'll buy you a beer

Amusing post courtesy of Prof. Berman over at Sentencing Law and Policy:

A district judge who is true to his word

Long-time readers with great long-term memories may recall an entertaining opinion written in the weeks after Booker by US District Judge Richard Kopf. In US v. Wanning, No. 4:03CR3001-1 (D. Neb. Feb. 3, 2005) (discussed here), Judge Kopf rejected Judge Pratt's view that the guidelines are just to be one of many factors considered by sentencing judges after Booker. When expressing his view in Wanning, Judge Kopf added this footnote:

I like and have great respect for Judge Pratt. Nothing I say in this memorandum is intended as a personal criticism of him. I simply (but strongly) disagree with his legal reasoning on this subject. While I take the liberty of using Judge Pratt's decision as an example of a methodology that I think is incorrect, I certainly do not intend to single him out. Indeed, and to be fair, many of my colleagues (Judges Bataillon and Strom, for example) side with Judge Pratt. If I turn out to be wrong, I will buy them all a beer.

Id. at slip op. at 2 n.2 (empahsis added)

In the wake of Judge Pratt's ruling in Gall being affirmed today by the Supreme Court, I received this e-mail from Judge Kopf (which he graciously allowed me to post here):

Doug,

I wrote Bob Pratt today, with copies to Joe Bataillon and Lyle Strom, indicating that I owe them all a beer. It now occurs to me that I owe you one as well. Until I pay you, feel free to publish this mea culpa as my guarantee that beer is on the way to Columbus.

Take care.

Rich Kopf
United States District Judge

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Thoughts on Beauty and the Geek

I don't know how many of you watch Beauty and the Geek (or, for that matter, how many of you still read this). But it's caused me to return to a recurring subject of thought -- why can't geeks get dates. Many, or even most, geeks are nice guys. I'd love to have a geek on the jury for a domestic violence trial, for example. It seems easy to ascribe it to their lack of social skills, but there seems to be something more.

I think it has something to do with the inherent ambiguity of relationships. There are many questions that do not admit of easy answers -- is this a date? are we dating yet? is this a relationship? To some extent, asking your partner can help and is even healthy. But one of the defining tendencies of the geek is the desire to define and categorize just about everything. And so the geek tends to want to pigeonhole the relationship to a degree of precision it is incapable of being pigeonholed.

A related difficulty the geek has is a desire to move the relationship along too fast. Some of this is undoubtedly because of past trouble the geek has had with relationships. It's hard for the geek to get into relationships, so when he gets into a relationship, he naturally wants it to be as serious as possible. But I think it goes deeper than that. The geek tends to naturally be a serious person, so it's normal for this to extend to his relationships.

It is possible that this may only apply to male geeks; I know that the second point does not apply to one of the female geeks I know. But I welcome comments on this.