Monday Medley

What we read while watching Bin Laden watch himself…

• Bin Laden still dominated the news this week: The New York Times detailed the search for the terrorist, the New Yorker wondered if the killing was legal, and New York provides an alternate history (see what we did there?).

• Awesome long read from David Grann in the New Yorker about a Guatemalan murder mystery. Slate explores what makes Grann so good.

• If you didn’t realize that there were Mongolian slaves in South Carolina or that the Red Shirts were defenders of personal freedom, then you (like 50 Cent) obviously don’t know your history.

• What does confirmation bias tell us about the function of reason?

• Will a Congressional clerkship one day be as sought after as a federal court clerkship?

• Jerry Seinfeld delves into his own archives of stand-up bits. Speaking of comedians, we don’t follow everyone on this list (I mean, it has Kathy Griffin), but it’s a good start for best comics on Twitter.

• Does Boy Meets World hold up over time? Do we even need to ask this question?

• Is CBS trying to ruin March Madness?

• Slate called the now-bankrupt Sbarro “America’s least essential restaurant.” In other “food” news, Diet Coke passed Pepsi as the #2 soda in the country.

This Day in Revisionist History

This is a Wednesday column, so why is it running on Thursday? Well, while on assignment in the Middle East, Jake was captured by Afghanis. They have since released him after he quickly volunteered a few national secrets (don’t worry–not our national secrets…stupid terrorists.) But enough already. Let’s leave the revising of events to the column itself:

December 1

“Oh, come on…is that an actual rule?”

–Delaware Congressman Louis McLane, after learning that because none of the candidates had won a majority of electoral votes, the 1824 presidential election would be decided by the House of Representatives.

The 12^th amendment has never been very popular, and its only saving grace has been the persistence of the two-party system in the United States. But know that on this day in 1824, due to the dissolution of a unified Federalist party, there was only one party, which had distributed its electoral support among four candidates. Although Andrew Jackson received the highest number of votes, he did not receive a majority, which required what today we would call a run-off, in which the top three candidates would vie for votes in a House of Representatives election.

Twombly, Iqbal, Congress, and The End of Plausibility Pleading

Being in law school makes law-related news (particularly, that of the non-constitutional variety) more relevant and, therefore, more interesting to me than it previously did.  Nonetheless, I have had the sense not to post on law-related topics that have little relevance to most of our readers. But a loyal NPI friend recently shared a piece of legal news with me that is quite a big deal.

To understand the significance of this news, some background information is necessary:

In Bell Atlantic Corp v. Twombly (2007), the Supreme Court established a new, more stringent standard for upholding a plaintiff’s pleading claim when faced with a defendant’s motion to dismiss that claim. Put in plain English, when a plaintiff initiates a civil suit, they have to make a claim to explain what they are suing for. There are rules in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP)* one of which guides what needs to be stated in a plaintiff’s initial claim, namely that the claim must be “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.” “Short and plain” is purposely in there to indicate that a simple allegation is enough; there just should be enough so the defendant is notified of why he is being accused by the plaintiff. That’s why this is often referred to as “notice pleading”. This simplified pleading system was partially a reaction against “code pleading”, which required fairly significant factual detail for each element of a claim being made. This was heavily criticized because plaintiff often did not have all of the resources and information to have sufficient facts when first making an allegation.