May 29th, 2009
Are you sitting down? Everything you were taught about the Supreme Court and its decisions is bunk. For most of the 19th Century and all of the 20th, our biggest, most far-reaching legal decisions have been decided not by careful examination of facts and references to precedent but by contests of game and sport between the justices. The games varied through the years—cribbage, chess, horseshoes, darts—even a brief, disastrous flirtation with polo. (Now do you understand Plessy v. Ferguson?) But ever since 1923, basketball has been the only game, and as the years rolled by and the decisions came down, the whole things has settled nicely into place. Basketball has shaped the way our society is today, every contour, every legality, every way that one person relates to another in an official, sanctioned sense.

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This is the Tumblr blog of B Michael Payne.