"Our Boggling Constitution"

Greetings from my home office/sickbed, where I am recovering from total shoulder replacement surgery, a process that involves roughly equal measures of physical therapy, painkillers, and mediocre movies (let me write, for the first and last time in my life, the words "The Mirror Has Two Faces"). 

Dan noted in a post a few days ago that one of the Green Bag's offshoots had selected a Prawfs post by Rick Hills as a piece of exemplary legal writing on the Internet.  I'd like to add that the Green Bag Almanac & Reader has also published its list of 2011 nominees for exemplary legal writing.  Accidentally, it named as one of its nominees a piece called "Our Boggling Constitution," a humor piece written by "Anonymous" and published in Constitutional Commentary last year.  I wrote that piece, and thought I'd take the occasion of the nomination to own up to it and to post it on SSRN.  (It turns out to be quite difficult to post things anonymously on SSRN, and I've always wanted the piece to have more readers, so that's another reason why I've taken credit and/or blame for it now.)  

Although it's true that the piece takes in vain the name of just about everyone in the constitutional law division of the legal academy, and seems to allot a disproportionate number of jokes to the Yale Law School, a lovely place which desperately needs my services, the primary reason I published the piece as "Anonymous" is that I wrote it as a bit of a break from my then-ongoing work on my law and religion book, The Agnostic Age (which continues to make a lovely Christmas/Hanukkah gift), and didn't want it to be too much of a distraction.  But I must say I had tremendous fun writing it, and I hope a few of you out there enjoy it, especially if your last name happens to be Amar.  For law students, it might make for a vaguely pleasant reading break during exam season.  Bon appetit.