HEY, IF KAVANAUGH DOESN’T MAKE IT, maybe the Democrats would be willing to settle for me.

Okay, that’s a photoshop that Allah did back when the blogosphere was young. (I call that pose “Blue Steel.”) Though for a while it appeared on my Wikipedia page with no indication it was a spoof, which says a lot about Wikipedia.

But actually, I was telling my students yesterday that I don’t think I’d like being on the Supreme Court. I’m currently on a faculty committee, drafting something about tenure standards and not liking it much. But that’s basically what the Court does. It’s not an oracle, or a bevy of Platonic Guardians. It’s a committee that drafts things, and those things mean nothing unless a majority of picky lawyers signs off.

The committee nature (and this insight came to me back in law school via Charles Black) is why the opinions are often bad or muddy. As he said, nothing good was ever written by committee except the King James Bible, and its excellence is practically proof that it was divinely inspired. It also means, I think, that if you’re not crazy about committee work, you won’t like being on the Court.

And as a professor, I get to pick what I work on, while members of the Court have to wait for cases to come to them. Sure, there’s power, but if I wanted that, why would I be a professor to begin with?

Anyhow, I wouldn’t mind a recess appointment — spend a season on the Court, get called “Justice” for life, maybe write a book, without the lifetime commitment — but to me the job’s not super appealing.