I Fought the Law

A Law Geek Me?

The Anthony Kennedy Bobbleheads I mentioned earlier are now out and about. As I write this the eBay auction is at $152.50 with about ten and a half hours left. I've decided that I'm not the kind of person who'll spend upwards of $150 for a silly Supreme Court toy. But the scary thing is, I was seriously considering it.

I think what finally turned me away was the prospect of having this conversation in my office for the rest of my life:

Office visitor: Who's this bobblehead supposed to be?
Me: Justice Kennedy.
OV: Where did you get it?
Me: eBay.
OV: How much did you pay for it?
Me: $213. Plus shipping.
OV: [Looks away uncomfortably.]

I have also decided that I hate The Green Bag for their stupid bobblehead practice. They've set it up so that the only people who have a prayer of receiving a Supreme Court bobblehead in the usual way are subscribers. Not all of their subscribers, mind you, but a randomly selected subset of subscribers.

Here begins my marginally relevant rant about law journals. We have these wonderful things called online research services. They live on the Internet and provide instantaneous access to all the law journal articles you'd ever want to read. You can even do searches to make sure that only articles you're interested in come up. Unless you're a law library, a court, or an extremely affectatious law firm, there's no point in actually purchasing a subscription to a law journal. Subscriptions are expensive, they take up space, they turn into breeding grounds for harmful microorganisms as they decay, and the chance that you're going to want to read every article in a particular volume -- everything from the latest esoteric piece about international intellectual property laws to "LOL Harry Potter" -- is vanishingly small.

So, the fact that The Green Bag engages in the supreme dickery of forcing would-be bobblehead owners to engage in the archaic practice of subscribing to a law journal in order to be on the bobblehead list, and then doesn't even guarantee the bobbleheads to all of its subscribers, is simply unforgivable. And I'd even venture to guess that a not-insubstantial subset of The Green Bag's bobblehead recipients aren't interested in Supreme Court bobbleheads, so these rogue subscribers are just being handed a golden opportunity to engage in some good old-fashioned eBay rape.

The Green Bag claims to produce Supreme Court bobbleheads "for the joy of it." But to me they bring nothing but rage.

Posted by hb at November 20, 2006 09:20 PM