I updated the links page, even though it's probably pretty rarely visited. A layout more like other blogs, wherein more is on the main page might make more sense, but I'm not likely to get around to a redesign for a while.

I bring attention to it partly to point out some webcomics you certainly should be reading, but mostly to discuss my geeky fascination with one site in particular. I've mentioned before my love of FiveThirtyEight; I was initially drawn there, as were many, by the predictions of its fairly sophisticated poll-based model of the presidential election. (Despite having a degree in math, I was only mildly interested in the statistics behind the model, and not at all interested in the actual mathematics behind it. (This is, of course, not much of a surprise to those of you who know me.)) But a lot of why I continue to read the site is for the discussion/analysis of politics and insight into procedure of both politics and polling. This interest in politics and procedure has been taken to a bit of an extreme with my relatively recent discovery of SCOTUSblog. It's not as unusual an interest as I thought (it's not a great metric, but based on combined Google Reader subscription rates, it seems to have about 40% the readership of FiveThirtyEight), but it certainly takes a level of geekiness to read a blog about the goings-on of the Supreme Court.

It really started innocently enough. I was interested mostly in keeping up with just the decisions, out of an interest in individual civil rights and, to a lesser extent, the other aspects of constitutional law. It seems like only a few cases are deemed worthy of widespread media attention, and I wanted not only information on more cases, but also a better understanding than the short segment on the news can provide. SCOTUSblog seemed like overkill when I first came across it, but I've since found it to be rather engaging. It's not surprising when something like Ricci v. DeStefano attracts my interest, since it is pretty clearly related to an important question about discrimination. But it's probably a bit weird that I also find U.S. ex rel. Eisenstein v. City of New York to be fascinating; the question immediately at hand is whether one has 30 days or 60 days to file a notice of appeal when suing on behalf of the government. (There's a bit of humor in this too: Eisenstein is suing the city of New York on behalf of the United States, and the U.S. has filed an amicus brief supporting New York. Of course, based on what I've read so far, this sort of thing isn't really all that uncommon.) I suppose a lot of what makes these issues enjoyable to read about is the arguments before the court; the subtlety of some of them is simply amazing. It makes you a bit more willing to accept that on a lot of issues, reasonable people can disagree. Not that I won't think that the other guys are pretty clearly wrong.

Incidentally, SCOTUSblog pointed me to a brief analysis of Justice Ginsburg's footnotes, which seems somewhat relevant given this entry's need to replace some parentheticals some footnotes.