Congratulations to Jacob Bobrow,  winner of the 2018 Terra Linda 12U Tennis Invitational, which took place this morning.  Jacob won all three of his matches to take the title.  Thanks to all the other participates for some hard fought tennis in the summer heat!

About time to start paying attention to the World Cup.  Robert just figured out that the US is not in it this time.  They had a very disappointing set of games at the qualifiers. Here’s an interesting video about US men’s soccer needing help.

We visited the Google main campus today. Robert’s good friend Halbert Au-Yeung was kind enough to give us a tour of ground zero.

NY Times Crossword, 20 Across

Daddy:  “Organ that Prometheus regenerated nightly.”

Rory:  “Liver”

Best gift ever.

This is, perhaps, the most ridiculous thing Robert has ever seen.

Actually, this one is funny.

Orioles beat Phillies, 7-2

The Orioles really pitched well tonight, and they took the championship away from the rag-tag underdog Phillies. A team that was in last place at one point during the season took themselves all the way to the championship final. But it was not meant to be.  The sadness ended quickly after the appearance of second-place TROPHIES.  Woo Hoo!

This term the US Supreme Court heard the case of Murphy v. Smith. This is a fun case because it demonstrates how tedious, and one might say small, much of the work of that court really is.  On one day, the Supreme Court decides on fundamental constitutional issues that define the structure of our political system and society, on the next day, in a different case, it parses through the text of an obscure statute trying to figure out what some completely messed up wording written by Congress in the middle of the night was supposed to mean, in order to settle a case in which the parties are fighting over a few thousand dollars. The issues are always important to the parties, but the work of interpreting statutes could often, it seems, be done by a court with less prominence.

In the Murphy case, the court was tasked with making sense of 42 U. S. C. §1997e(d)(2). That federal code section deals with how attorneys fees are paid in lawsuits brought by prisoners. When a prisoner wins a lawsuit against the government, because, for example, he was beaten by a prison guard, he can win a damage award and an award for his attorney’s fees.  Congress decided that despite that award, a prisoner should be required to pay some of his own attorneys fees, and that some of his damage award should be used to pay his attorneys fees.  The statute that Congress wrote uses wording that, when one focuses on it, is totally unclear.

To wit:

“a portion of the [prisoner’s] judgment (not to exceed 25 percent) shall be applied to satisfy the amount of attorney’s fees awarded against the defendant.”

The central question is whether the judge who is deciding upon how much of a plaintiff’s damages award to use for plaintiff’s attorney’s fee is entitled to use his/her discretion in setting that amount, OR, whether, alternatively, s/he must use as much of the damages award as needed to cover the attorneys fees, but never more than 25% of the damages award.

The oral argument is worth a listen because it demonstrates how hard working and serious the justices are, even on minor matters.

Spoiler: Neil Gorsuch wrote in his opinion that the rule is the latter.

The opinion demonstrates how judges go through language with a fine tooth comb, so to speak, in order to determine meaning.  It is also one of those opinions in which the judge strives to add flair to an altogether minor and laborious subject.

The Supreme Court today issued its opinion in Masterpiece Cakeshop. It ruled in favor of the cakeshop owner.  But the court did not really get to the heart of the constitutional matter. May a cakemaker be punished for refusing to make a custom wedding cake for a gay couple if doing so is inconsistent with his firmly held religious beliefs?  We still don’t know. The court ruled merely that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had not treated this particular cakemaker’s religious claims respectfully enough in its proceedings. So, we will need to await a future case, it seems.

Here’s the write up on Scotus Blog.

A “view” from the courtroom: Justice Kennedy’s Master-pièce de résistance