This presents a quandary. Maybe even a quandary and half.   Eugene Volokh has announced the blawgospherical coup of getting former federal judge, now Utah lawprof, Paul Cassell, to join in one of the academic, libertarian longest-running conspiracies on the internet.  Uh oh.  (If I knew he was in play, I would have invited him to blog here.  Nuts).

I’m still trying to process all the problems this is going to cause me.  First, what do I call him?  Is he judge, or lawprof, or just plain old Paul?  It’s my practice to call former judges “judge” as a matter of respect.  But that gives him too much of leg up when I’m constrained to post about why he’s  unbearably wrong about something.  While I can always use some sort of emphasis in oral argument to make the word “judge” sound like an epithet, it just doesn’t work in writing.  What to do?

But this guy wears too many hats.  And to add insult to injury, he’s wearing them in Utah, of all places, where thoughtfulness goes to die. 

Even if I put aside Paul Cassell’s bizarre perspective on the role of victims in the criminal justice process (did I mention that he’s unbearably wrong about that?), this is the same fellow who, as a federal judge in 2004, gave us  Croxford, the precursor to Booker, ruling that the sentencing guidelines were merely advisory.  Doesn’t he get some credit for that? 

And yet, he’s going to blog at the Volokh Conspiracy, the mother-ship of libertarian conservatism (not to mention a blawg with one of the biggest, and yet most pretentious, readerships around).  Speak ill of the Volokh Conspiracy and watch as thousands of words are pointlessly slaughtered. 

So will I feel constrained to defend Paul Cassell or put him in the middle of the cross-fire?  Is he friend or foe?  And I still don’t know what to call him.

Nonetheless, I welcome the Honorable Law Professor Paul Cassell to the blawgosphere, who will certainly bring insight and thoughtfulness, and no small dose of controversial views, to Volokh.  I guess I’m just going to have to deal with it in my typical, courteous and gracious manner.  After all, as everyone knows, I try so very hard to avoid anything controversial or potentially offensive here at Simple Justice.