The Anna Nicole Smith case.

One of the perils of lawprof blogging is that when the Supreme Court issues a decision in your field, posting about it seems compulsory. And this one even has a big hulking celebrity who would ordinarily be fun to write about for almost no reason at all. But I don't wanna to write about the Anna Nicole Smith case.

It's a unanimous opinion about a fine point of a doctrine about which I've never made any class read a single case in over 20 years of teaching Federal Jurisdiction. Suffice it to say: The jurisdiction of the federal courts is defined by statutes. Old case law contains a judge-made exception for probate cases. In the face of a statute that contains no exception and old case law making an exception, what are you going to do? Read the exception narrowly.

When Scalia met Ludacris.

Who knows what all the two men talked about after the White House Correspondents Dinner? All the reporter could wrest out of Ludacris was "Um, we didn't really talk about much." Scalia offered little additional detail: "I just said hello," and "He has a deep voice, doesn't he?"

Is there a left-right division about whether lawprof blogs should stick to law or range over multiple topics?

Eric Muller wonders:

[The] highly successful "mixed" lawprof bloggers all blog from, and to a readership primarily on, the political right....

The couple of genuinely "mixed" lawprof bloggers to the left of center – I'm thinking, I guess, mostly of myself and Michael Froomkin, and I'd probably throw in Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Profs as well -- don't hold a candle to their readership or their influence.

What do I make of that? To be honest, I don't really know. I certainly don't think the legal academy is skewed towards a Republican/conservative viewpoint; it isn't.

The preeminence of right-of-center "mixed" lawprof bloggers may, however, reflect an overall blogospheric tilt to the right; look at the TTLB ecosystem's ten "Higher Beings" and you'll see that seven are blogs from the right, whereas only two are blogs from the left.

Or maybe it reflects something else entirely. I'd be curious to know what you think.

In any case, Larry[ Solum's] thesis – that lawprof bloggers who blog about law as well as lots of other stuff will confuse their readership and drive them away, and that their blogs will therefore fade away – appears to be incorrect, or at least incomplete. Something surely explains why certain "mixed" lawprof blogs are among the most successful blogs in the blogosphere, even among lawprofs and other consumers of legal scholarship, and something surely explains why right-of-center ones do a whole lot better than left-of-center ones.

Obvious and inflammatory theory #1: Lefties are more easily confused.

Obvious and inflammatory theory #2: The flexible, wide-ranging intellect leans right.

Anyway... I think readers like mixed topic blogs more. Remember when Stephen Bainbridge took a vote about whether to put his material about corporate law on a separate blog? The readers strongly rejected the idea.

"Unfortunately, whenever there is talk of social corruption, fingers are pointed at women."

Said Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

"Certain prejudices against women have nothing to do with Islam," he said Friday, several days after lifting the ban [on women's attending sporting events]. The speech seemed to present him for the first time as a supporter of expanded rights for women. "Unfortunately, whenever there is talk of social corruption, fingers are pointed at women. Shouldn't men be blamed for the problems, too?"

That's quite a concession, that men might actually share some of the blame for social problems.

Why the feminist turn for Ahmadinejad? According to the article, it's a play for votes, albeit a risky one.

Notes on television.

Last night, I really wanted to settle in and watch two hours of quality television: "The Sopranos" and "Big Love." I watched the first 20 minutes of "The Sopranos," then turned it off to read until "Big Love" came on. I watched 10 minutes of that, then turned it off and read until I fell asleep. I was tired and not up to the task of watching quality television. So much going on, and you've got to absorb it at the pace they impose on you. Reading is much easier and much more self-indulgent and luxurious. You can drift into your own thoughts at will and return to you old place or skip ahead or back.

But if you're looking for a place to talk about "The Sopranos" and "Big Love," go right ahead and use the comments. Don't worry about spoiling it for me. I prefer the shows spoiled. It removes the distraction of paying attention to the plot points and to see what's really happening, to concentrate on the details. I often watch these shows twice, and the second viewing is always better. That's how you know it's worth watching once.

Recycling the leftovers from the "Person of the Year" analysis.

Time Magazine has another one of its lists: 100 People Who Shape Our World. It always seems as though they're just begging us to bitch about the three or four people who least belong on the list. I'm not going to Technorati this list and see all the bloggers who are exclaiming about Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington.

Re Drudge: "With 10 million readers daily, Drudge, 39, has paved a generous path for the blogs; without his example, semipro scribes might not have unearthed 'Rathergate.'" Does that sound like irksome, backward Time-ese writing? Actually, Ana Marie Cox wrote that.

The writer of the post on Arianna eschewed Time-ese:

No doubt because of my (persuasive) prowess and Arianna's intellectual openness, she switched, becoming a lefty. With her indefatigable persistence, resourcefulness and good humor, Arianna, 55, has gone from ambitious project to ambitious project with varying degrees of success, finding herself the proprietor of the widely read, hugely influential liberal blog Huffington Post. None of this would have happened were it not for me. And it seems oddly ironic that it is Arianna, not I, who has been named one of TIME's 100 most annoying (sorry, influential) people. Arianna should be writing about me.

Me, Al Franken.

Bloggership Linkership.

Ian Best has a comprehensive collection of links about last Friday's "Bloggership" conference. Let's follow some of them.

I see Harvard lawprof Charles Nesson is making a bid for a spot in my banner by calling me "The glint on the edge of Solomon's Sword." That refers to something I wrote a long time ago, which I don't have a link for, but if you've got Lexis, search the law review file for his name and mine.

Daniel Solove did a nice bloggerly job of condensing everyone's talk into a one-liner.

Howard Bashman has this to say:

At a conference chock-full of law professor bloggers, you might expect that among the presenters the ratio of law geeks to non-law geeks would be quite high. In that respect, I found it interesting to observe first-hand that the coolness (or lack of coolness) of a given law professor's blog did not reliably indicate the coolness (or lack of coolness) of the blog's author. Not surprisingly, however, with Ann she was every bit as cool as her blog....

I wonder who the sentence before the sentence about me refers to. Who's the uncool lawprof with the cool blog and who's the cool lawprof with the uncool blog?

Timothy Armstrong sure took detailed notes. Thanks for reminding me of what I said. I was sort of wondering!

Roger Alford has a list of predictions for the future of law professors, e.g., "Law professors currently target their scholarship to appeal to student editors at major law journals (while also targeting their peers). In future decades, law professors will target their peers directly without intermediaries." Yeah, "disintermediation" -- I learned that word from Larry Solum.

But enough about the Bloggership conference. It's Monday, I'm back in Madison, and it's time to reengage with life here. Oddly, I've got to give a presentation about blogging today, at the "Socio-Legal Studies BrownBag." My colleague Gordon Smith, who was at the conference, is co-presenting, so it might feel a lot like the conference, but I'm thinking it won't be. A different crowd attends a "Socio-Legal Studies BrownBag" in Madison, Wisconsin then attends a conference on blogging and legal scholarship at Harvard. Expect me to reflect on the differences later today. And I've got to attend a Faculty Senate meeting today too. (I'm the Law School's alternate senator.) But what I really need to do is write some exams.

Digression prompted by the word "BrownBag": At the hotel the other day, I was watching some old "Monty Python" episode, and there was a sketch in which Graham Chapman played a man who would put a bag on his head whenever anyone said "mattress." It was typical Python nonsense, but Chapman had a way of putting the bag on his head that was far funnier than anything anyone else did. It was rather mysterious, that comic genius. How amusingly could you put a paper bag on your head? But I will not be putting a bag on my head at the "Socio-Legal Studies BrownBag," even though "Socio-Legal Studies BrownBag" sounds so serioso it makes me want to put a bag on my head.