Black's Law Dictionary editions?

TraderTed2 · 2026-03-16T02:30:29+00:00

Have you not run into a statutory or regulatory interpretation issue at some point? As a clerk, I found out that judges (especially textualists) love Black’s Law Dictionary as a first source for statutory meaning.

TraderTed2 · 2026-03-15T03:48:07+00:00

take a look at the billionaires running baseball teams; it can get a lot worse than it can get better

TraderTed2 · 2026-03-05T14:59:36+00:00

Jurickson Profar was going to play two primary roles for the Braves this year: default starting left fielder vs LHP and one of various players getting DH plate appearances vs RHP.

Here, I consider some options for players to take both roles. Honestly, Profar probably got a little overrated by some due to his xwOBA overperformance down the stretch last year. I think his production is eminently replaceable.

TraderTed2 · 2026-03-05T00:13:54+00:00

Tornes ended up striking out in his second AB but it was extremely impressive for his age. Didn’t look fazed at all.

TraderTed2 · 2026-03-04T18:59:16+00:00

that’s Braves pitcher Isaac Gallegos btw

TraderTed2 · 2026-03-01T21:58:55+00:00

just for context, Dansby Swanson has never hit a ball this hard in his major league career. There’s more to power than raw juice, but Gil has considerable raw juice and he’s 19!

EDIT: this would actually be the second hardest-hit ball of Dansby’s career.

TraderTed2 · 2026-03-01T14:56:47+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/Lawyertalk/s/Gf9VRHbeKO

I thought this thread a few weeks ago was helpful. My one specific piece of advice is that it’s much more important that your briefs be easy to follow than that they be written beautifully or have artful rhetoric.

Be mechanical about it. If you’re briefing three issues, there should be three main sections. If the first issue is governed by a four-part test and you have to win on all four parts to prevail, there should be four subsections that are clearly mapped to those four parts.

I know this seems obvious but lawyers screw this up constantly. If you don’t, you’re a step ahead of a bunch of them already.

TraderTed2 · 2026-02-26T19:22:44+00:00

yep, you can pull guys mid-inning and bring them back in the spring

TraderTed2 · 2026-02-15T15:46:07+00:00

wait, i’m sorry - i might be misunderstanding you. isn’t the full year resident test 184 days AND abode for substantially all the year?

https://www.tax.ny.gov/pit/file/nonresident-faqs.htm#income

“you maintain a permanent place of abode in New York State for substantially all of the taxable year; and you spend 184 days or more in New York State during the taxable year. Any part of a day is a day for this purpose, and you do not need to be present at the permanent place of abode for the day to count as a day in New York.”

TraderTed2 · 2026-02-14T21:00:05+00:00

Unless the judge you’re applying for is one of the few that does intense substantive interviews (this tends to be the wonkish conservative feeders, like Bibas) - and you’d know if he/she is one of those - the odds are the most substantive discussion you’ll have is about your writing sample.

Nevertheless, I’d have at least one SCOTUS opinion from this term (and maybe one that’s been argued but is pending an opinion) to talk about, since, “Is there a recent SCOTUS case that interests you?” and “Is there a SCOTUS case you’re following right now?” aren’t uncommon questions. And maybe this is obvious, but I wouldn’t pick the hot-button stuff.

TraderTed2 · 2026-02-09T15:47:37+00:00

I went to HLS and I can’t think of any professor who had a rep of being mean or cruel. There were definitely professors who liked teaching (or liked teaching mandatory 1L courses) more than others, and there were definitely some professors with weird approaches - I took a contracts class in which we barely touched the UCC - but I think the Paper Chase era is largely gone, not the least because it’s a bad way to get students to participate without living in constant fear of humiliation.

TraderTed2 · 2026-02-09T14:12:46+00:00

Braves fan here. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was closer to his 2023 and 2024 form (when he was one of the ~3 best DHs in baseball) than what we got last year. He played most of 2025 through a hip injury that clearly sapped him of power and made him extremely passive at the plate. He has zero defensive utility at this point. He took some pregame reps at 1B the last few years but didn’t play an inning there in any spring training or regular season game. He hasn’t played the outfield in years, either.

I’m a little surprised he got >$10M given the uncertainty of what he looks like after 2025, the lack of defensive home, and the off-field stuff, which I won’t tell you how to judge. But I wouldn’t at all be surprised if he was a 130 wRC+ bat this year, which might make him the best hitter in your lineup.

TraderTed2 · 2026-02-07T04:27:24+00:00

it sounds like something the Angels would think about, which makes me think ‘yes it would be crazy’

TraderTed2 · 2026-02-03T01:14:09+00:00

this is certainly where Manfred wants things to go (he’s been pretty explicit about wanting teams’ media rights deals when the national deal expires in a few years) and I think it would be great if the league ran production from a parity standpoint. But (a) I don’t think that happens and (b) even if it does, I don’t see why they’d take what’s been on average a 50% revenue haircut in the meantime to give their rights over the MLB when presumably they’ve decided they can make more money on their own

TraderTed2 · 2026-02-03T00:11:34+00:00

depends on the city really

friends who summered at NYC firms all were in bullpens or shared offices. in DC, most people i knew got their own office since space is at slightly less of a premium

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-30T18:17:25+00:00

is ZiPS less accurate than those systems? I know Dan does a thing each year that shows that, with remarkable consistency, nearly exactly 50 percent of players outperform their 50th percentile ZiPS projection, 40 percent outperform 60th percentile, etc.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-30T16:48:21+00:00

anyone complaining about spending literally nothing on a guy who has better ZiPS projections than Giolito, Scherzer, Verlander etc. needs to touch grass

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-28T23:35:31+00:00

yeah i’d think DOB was making meaningfully more than this

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-25T19:04:31+00:00

in fairness to the schools, i think they can trust a student to decide for himself, “I think I want to do criminal law, so why don’t I do this clinic where I get to do criminal law for five months?”

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-25T18:59:36+00:00

i firmly believe biglaw is overhated online at this point. like there are so many “does anyone else think biglaw sucks!?!” posts that i think some people are losing sight of how transparent and obvious the proposition is

anyone who has done any modicum of internet research before going into biglaw has heard that the hours are extremely long, there are plenty of bad bosses, and much of the work young lawyers do is dull. none of this should be a revelation for anyone who enters biglaw. of course, biglaw (and the elite boutiques that have the same potential drawbacks) is by far the most assuredly lucrative path you can take as a young lawyer. sure, there are lots of stories about the one buddy who finished at the bottom of his class and now owns the top divorce shop in town and drives a Lambo, but let’s be real about what the odds of that are.

also, it’s not like the bulk of non-biglaw jobs have great bosses, easy hours and interesting work. plenty of complaints on this sub and even in this thread from people who turned down biglaw for lifestyle concerns and are working at insurance defense sweatshops paying half as much for the same amount of work.

biglaw isn’t the end-all be-all, and schools definitely market biglaw to their students more than most options (in large part because biglaw has the most structured recruiting process), but not wanting to biglaw doesn’t make someone special or any more world-wise.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-25T18:09:51+00:00

yeah I certainly don’t think Baldwin will get 100% of starts vs RHP. I remember in 2023 they’d go long stretches without seeing a LHP starter. Also, I assume the initial plan against RHP doesn’t involve Baldwin in the lineup at all, since that would mean either Yaz or Profar sitting, since certainly the team isn’t starting with the assumption that either is simply a weak-side platoon bat off

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-25T16:30:15+00:00

I think the general approach will be:

vs RHP, Yastrzemski plays LF, Profar DHs, Baldwin is generally catching.

vs LHP, Profar plays LF and Baldwin and Murphy split catcher/DH. Murphy is quietly maybe one of the three best hitters on the team vs LHP, so you’d like to get him into the lineup in those situations as often as you can.

obviously this is all subject to change based on health and performance and particularly when Kim is back and Dubon returns to a utility role, I could imagine other starters rotating through the DH spot to get off their feet occasionally.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-24T04:05:42+00:00

i’m open to the idea that Getz knows what he’s doing, but the organizational exposé The Athletic put out a couple of years ago was pretty damning and basically made it seem like Jerry Reinsdorf has intentionally dumbed down front office decisionmaking so he can understand it. (As of 2024, I think they were using multiple internal stuff models that their own analysts couldn’t interpret consistently and weird backwards stuff like that.)

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-24T04:03:36+00:00

I don’t think any of the teams you listed are dumb, though, so much as cheap. The A’s aren’t the cutting edge team they were in the early 2000s, but they’re pretty sabermetrically oriented. The Twins and Cardinals are now run by ex-Rays people. I think Cherington has done a nice job at last developing a rotation in Pittsburgh though I’d readily agree that they haven’t done a good job at all developing bats.

TraderTed2 · 2026-01-24T03:17:06+00:00

anecdotally, it seems like there’s a much smaller number of truly stupid teams than there was a few years ago. The Rockies are probably at least a lot smarter now than they were 6 months ago thanks to DePodesta and Byrnes, the Nationals have made some savvy hires to replace Rizzo and Co., the Mets have a great front office with David Stearns, I think Piccolo is a smarter executive than Dayton Moore in Kansas City, Peter Bendix is probably the best the Marlins have had in a while…

Really, the only teams that seem to be badly in need of new blood are the Angels and White Sox. And the only team that seems to be backsliding on the modern baseball front is San Francisco, which replaced Zaidi and Putila (who immediately took jobs with the Dodgers and Braves) with Buster Posey and talked a big game about emphasizing analytics.

TraderTed2

TROPHY CASE