Hello.  Welcome to my personal website.  You seem nice.  Please be my friend.

January 10, 2012:   Okay, The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution Through Ten of its Most Curious Provisions has been out for about two months now.  The book is about ten really interesting clauses in the Constitution that nobody really knows too much about, even though some of them are extremely important and many of them are fascinating, bizarre, and even hilarious.   You can buy it here from a variety of great places,

For the next couple of months or so, I'll devote this front page of the website to items about the book--reviews, links to interviews, etc.

--Odd Clauses featured on BookTalk, the blog of the American Constitution Society (with my commentary on the Recess Appointments Clause).

-A pretty nice review from Reuters/Breaking Views.

--A great review from Shelf Awareness ("surprisingly goofy and quite funny")

--A not very good review from the Boston Globe.

--A video I made of my 7 year old son reading the Boston Globe's not very good review.

--Radio interview on "Word of Mouth" from New Hampshire public radio

--My interview on Midwest Opinions out of Nebraska

--Audio from my discussion with Jim Lehrer about the book on WNYC.

--A podcast about the book from the LegalTalk Network.

--I talk with Steve Almond on WGBH about the book

--I talk about the public debt clause of Article IV, and a bit about the book, on The Jim Lehrer show on WNYC

--Andrea Seabrook mentions the Odd Clauses and lets me make a joke in an All Things Considered segment on Obama's signing of a bill with an autopen

I've also got a blog that goes with the book called Odd Clauses Watch.  It has news, links, analysis, humor and more regarding many of the weird clauses of the U.S. Constitution--not just ones I discuss in the book but others as well.  Recent posts, for example, discuss whether it is constitutional for Scott Brown to remain as an officer in the National Guard while he serves in the Senate as well as whether the Fourteenth Amendment authorizes the President to unilaterally increase the debt limit so as to possibly avoid defaulting on our debts and sending the world into an endless spiraling financial apocalypse (answer: no). Most recently, the blog is focusing on whether President Obama will use his recess appointment power to install Richard Cordray as the head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The kickoff event for Odd Clauses was held at the Brookline Booksmith bookstore on Thursday November 10, 2011 at 7 pm.  I think it went pretty well, but you can judge for yourself when CSPAN's BookTV broadcasts it, beginning on Sunday, January 22, at 3 pm and then 8:15 pm.

A bit of really nice big news for me is that I have a publisher for my collection of short stories, humor pieces, paintings, and other various errata.  More details to come, but it looks like The Adventures of Ed Tuttle, Associate Justice, and other stories will be out sometime in 2012 and will feature an awesome cover by master designer Dave Croy.

Of course, Holy Hullabaloos is also still available

     Anyway, thank you for visiting.  By clicking on the links to the left, you can read some of my published stories, take a look at a few of my paintings, see a list of my published scholarly articles, find out where I'll be speaking and reading, view some videos I've made, learn about my pretty much Nobel Prize winning study of Supreme Court oral argument humor, and get a nice snack, among other things.