Baby Tyler has arrived–congratulations to Denise! Also, welcome back David Giacalone of the former, but now renamed, Ethical Esq! (David has posted some wonderful Haiku poetry.)
In addition, Howard last week posted 20 Questions for Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. (For those who do not know, Judge Posner will likely be the author of an opinion in the appeal of the IBM cash balance plan decision.) Howard notes that a 1998 study of federal appellate judicial opinions issued between 1982 and 1995 found that Judge Posner’s opinions were, “by an ‘unusual’ statistical margin, cited by judges in other circuits more often than opinions written by any other judge.” I particularly enjoyed Judge Posner’s remarks about his most favorite opinions:
I can’t pick out my five favorite opinions; that would require me to have all 2000-odd in my head, or to reread them all, which would be impossible. It’s almost as if you were asking me to choose among my children. But I’ll name a few that I think of fondly, most of which involve art (in however debased a sense) and intellectual property: Mucha, Piarowski, Gracen, Douglass, Nelson, and my absurdly frequent beanie-baby opinions. I would also count among my favorites several of my tort and contract opinions, my dissent in the partial birth abortion case (Hope Clinic), some of my class-action opinions, like Rhone-Poulenc, my recent IP opinions in Apotex (a district court opinion) and Aimster, my privacy opinion in Haynes, and my recent antitrust opinion in the High Fructose case–but I could extend the list quite a bit, to include a number of tax, ERISA, religion, and Indian cases, without going back and reading all 2000+.