Photo credit: eric molina. Used pursuant to Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. The image has not been altered. (There is a possibility that only Scott Greenfield and close followers of Simple Justice will understand the true significance of this photo.)

In my post, The evisceration of Dahlia Lithwick, I referred to Ms.Lithwick as being “very bright.” Among a lot of other things, I also added: ” Lithwick can be a tiresome scold. Taking her down several pegs is a good thing if you care about intellectual rigor and the national legal commentariat.” I “pimped” Scott Greenfield’s incisive critique off Lithwick’s comparison of the Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence to other Constitutional values that she evidently holds more dear.

Rick Hansen Hasen, a law professor and blogger, responded with a post entitled, “Judge Kopf Calls Dahlia Lithwick a ‘Tiresome Scold.‘” Professor Hansen’s Hasen’s first sentence reads this way “Keeping it classy, as usual. (More here.).” Subsequently,  Michelle Olsen ‏@AppellateDaily chimed in, writing, among other things, “To show my cards, I find honest criticism (à la @ScottGreenfield) helpful, rooting for ‘evisceration’ of a ‘scold,” weird.'” In response, Professor Hansen Hasen wrote, “Not just weird, but sexist” and in a second tweet, “But we should expect this from judge who writes about ‘ample chests’ of lawyers arguing before him.”

I confess to taking guilty pleasure in annoying law professors who have never made their living trying cases and who dictate manners to others when a fellow “highbrow” is grilled. Now, I both admit and realize that “guilty pleasure” is the “distillation of all the worst qualities of the middlebrow.” But, unlike Professor Hansen Hasen, I have never thought of myself otherwise.

RGK

*Corrected at 4:55 PM on October 27, 2014 to correctly spell Professor Hasen’s name.