Davies on Ranking the Olympians Before U.S. News @GB2d

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School, has published Ranking the Olympians Before U.S. News: When Vanity Fair and The Bookman Told Their Readers Who Really Mattered at 21 Green Bag 2d 241 (2018). Here is the abstract.

When were the first law-related rankings published? Answering that question would be like determining when the first baseball game was played. You would have to start by settling fundamental and disputable definitional issues: What is a publication (or what is baseball)? What counts as a ranking (or a game)? And so on. Experts, even those who are most eminently knowledgeable and admirably reasonable, sometimes disagree about such things. Then, if you were to miraculously manage to settle all such matters of meaning, you would have to look everywhere that such a ranking might have been published (or such a game recorded). That is too much. Better to work incrementally – to report ever-earlier sightings as you find them and hope that definitional consensuses grow as unexplored territories shrink. That is the spirit in which I offer this report on two sets of rankings published in the early 20th century.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Full U.S. Breakfast

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University School of Law, and The Green Bag, has published Breakfast with the Justices: Networking in the Nineteenth Century at The Green Bag Almanac & Reader 109 (2014). Here is the abstract.

On Thursday, September 15, 1887, the Philadelphia bar hosted a lavish “Breakfast to the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States” in that city’s American Academy of Music building. It was the first of a series of events — parades, ceremonies, speeches, and so on — celebrating the centennial of the Constitution of the United States. Some, like the “Breakfast to the Justices,” were by invitation only. Others were open to the public and attracted large crowds — the biggest were probably the “Civic and Industrial Procession” on September 15 and the “Memorial Day Ceremonies in Independence Square” on September 17. All those big events, both the private and the public, surely were exciting at the time and merit further study today. But the focus of this little essay is elsewhere — on a pair of small but instructive (and perhaps also amusing) aspects of the inner workings of the “Breakfast to the Justices.”

Download the text from SSRN at the link. 

Green Bag Trading Cards: Scalia's Up

The Green Bag has released its latest Supreme Court Sluggers trading card: Antonin Scalia. He's a catcher (earlier releases featured Chief Justice John Roberts, pitcher, Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, also a catcher, and Arthur Goldberg). More on the Supreme Court trading cards project here.

Want Green Bag swag, like the cards or the bobbleheads created by Green Bag editor Ross Davies and his cohorts? In brief, you have to subscribe to the journal or otherwise make your case to the masthead mavens.