Posner, Posner, Posner, Posner

One of the common criticisms of this blog is that we spend too much time talking about Wisconsin. If you scroll down and look at the "labels" section on the right, you'll see that we've labeled over 40 posts with the "Wisconsin" tag, even though this is ostensibly a law blog and neither us regularly practices law there (although Mr. Gillette is a member of the Wisconsin bar, I believe, and both of us spent our formative years living there).

This is all preface to pointing out that we have a strange new obsession: Judge Richard Posner. I suppose it makes some sense; after all, we did sort of steal the title of his blog.

So, two notes to keep the obsession going:

Larry Tribe is the smartest man alive

When Justice Souter retired, Larry Tribe, the famous Harvard law professor, wrote a letter to President Obama (his former student) urging him to nominate Elena Kagan.  The letter has now been leaked to Ed Whelan.  It is a very interesting letter.  One aspect that struck me was Tribe's apparent confidence that he could easily judge the relative intelligence of the front-runners. 

• On Sonia Sotomayor, the eventual nominee:  "Bluntly put, she's not as smart as she thinks she is."
• On Judge Diane Wood:  "More powerful intellectually than Sonia Sotomayor or any of the others mentioned as plausible prospects at the moment with the sole exception of Kagan, who is even smarter."

I guess when you're a professor at Harvard law school you get pretty confident in your ability to separate the brilliant from the merely very smart.  But, boy, what an ego!