NEWMAN WAS RIGHT: THE MAIL NEVER STOPS. Returning to my office, the mailbox was full past bursting (er, well, to overflow, anyway). Various promotional materials for conferences I would never attend, which are happening next week — mailed, presumably, just so I’ll know that they happened. A bar-examiner request for a recommendation on a student. A bunch of books: Arianna Huffington’s Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America (autographed!), Walter Olson’s The Rule of Lawyers: How the New Litigation Elite Threatens America’s Rule of Law (autographed, too!) (I wonder how the “litigation elite” and the forces of “corporate greed and political corruption” decide which parts of America each will ruin — oh, wait, that’s called the “two party system,” isn’t it?); Tom Donelson’s Economics 101 and a report from the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights on how civil liberties have ceased to exist since September 11. Oh, and the latest edition of “Constitutional Law in a Nutshell” from West — a student study aid, but they send them to professors for some reason. Also two checks from appreciative Insta-readers who wanted to donate but who eschew PayPal and Amazon — hey, thanks! And several memoranda from the law school administration. . . uh, thanks for those, too. . . . And a Christmas card from a former student who is now a partner at Coudert Brothers, a big international law firm.

The semester’s just starting, and my desk is already getting cluttered. Oh, wait — that’s a good thing!