Saturday, July 3, 2010
REAL MADRID | GETAFE PLAYER PEDRO LEON NEXT 2010-2011 SIGNING?
He was one of the revelation players of the SPANISH LEAGUE last season. The Spanish & GETAFE player PEDRO LEON of 23 years of age (below) has been followed by REAL MADRID for the last 6 months. The rumours have been ripe ever since that Pedro Leon was destined to play at Real Madrid next season, but the negotiations were halted with the arrival of new Coach José Mourinho. The latest news from
Friday, July 2, 2010
Theo Epstein, Juris Doctorate, Best GM in Baseball
Thirty years ago, Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein probably wouldn't have had the chance of becoming a big league GM. That may even have been true 20 years ago.He never played or coached professional baseball, college baseball, or even high school baseball, was never an agent, and he got his break while an undergraduate student at Yale University (where he served as sports editor of the Yale Daily News) when he snagged a press internship with the Baltimore Orioles.
That doesn't seem like a likely path to becoming a big league GM, especially by the age of 29, but Epstein -- who also completed his law degree at the University of San Diego School of Law while simultaneously serving as Director of Baseball Operations for the San Diego Padres -- managed to pull it off.
In fact, not only did he become a GM, but two World Series championships later, he's emerged as one of the best. According to an anonymous poll of 12 GMs conducted by Buster Olney, Epstein is the best GM in baseball. Here's the excerpt:
IF YOU NEEDED A GM, WHOM WOULD YOU HIRE? - Epstein (8 out of 12 votes) "Theo's career has been helped by being in Boston, but I think that if you had put him in Kansas City five years ago, they'd be pretty good right now. If you were an owner, it would be hard to find someone better."If its true that earning the respect of one's peers is the best measure of one's success, then Epstein's done extremely well. While it's hard to know if Epstein's legal training has helped him as a GM, I would venture a guess that it has. As anyone who attends or has attended law school knows, law school is extremely challenging and it forces people to be specific, use logic, and avoid reaching conclusions without explaining one's reasoning. I imagine when thinking about trades and player contracts, and drafting players, those are helpful attributes, even if they might make people occasionally seem less decisive.
Hopefully we'll see other law school grads who lack personal athletic achievement enter and excel in the professional sports world in management positions. Epstein of course isn't the only law school grad who's achieved success in team management -- Celtics Assistant GM Mike Zarren, a 2005 graduate of Harvard Law School, is one that immediately comes to mind, as does Sacramento Kings Assistant GM Jason Levien -- but he's probably had the most success, at least so far.
FC BARCELONA | YAYA TOURE GOES TO MANCHESTER CITY
Its official. MANCHESTER CITY has made the announcement on its website that FC BARCELONA midfielder YAYA TOURE will be their new player as of next season. The Ivory Coast player has to pass his oligatory medical exam before signing for the Club & the next 5 years.FC Barcelona has yet to make an announcement on the economic conditions but will do so in the next hours. Yaya Toure joins his brother
SPANISH FOOTBALL TEAM STARTING 11 AGAINST PARAGUAY
Source : Spanish Football Sports Most observers following the SPANISH NATIONAL FOOTBALL TEAM in South Africa, along with the National Sporting press, seem to have it clear after witnessing the training sessions & hearing the coments of the National Coach Vicente Del Bosque. The SPANISH FOOTBALL PLAYERS that will make up the starting 11 against Paraguay will be the same as thoses who started
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Did Kagan bury the umpire analogy? Maybe
As Mike notes, Elena Kagan took on the judge-as-umpire/ball-and-strike meme yesterday in response to a question from Sen. Klobuchar and knocked it out almost as successfully as she could. No transcripts to be found, but here is the video and some thoughts after the jump.
1) Kagan said it was apt in saying that judges, like umpires, should not have a "team in the game," should not come onto the field rooting for one team over another.
OK answer, although she lost points for not using the Twins in her hypo in response to a question from a Senator from Minnesota.
As I have argued before, to the extent this is what the metaphor means, it does no work. No one believes a judge should be "rooting" for one party over another and we don't need an analogy to baseball to drive the point home. Besides, no one seriously believes an umpire "roots" for one team or that a judge "roots" for one party.
But there's more something going on here, tied to the complexity of law and the fact that different judges can reach different conclusions (which Kagan talks about later). An umpire may not be rooting for a particular team, but an umpire who interprets and enforces certain rules a certain way may benefit one team over another. An ump with a wider strike zone will make calls more to the benefit of a team with control pitchers who work the outside corner; an ump with a narrower zone benefits teams with patient hitters who work counts. Similarly, I would not say that Justice Scalia "roots" for the government in a challenge to abortion laws. But given that his reading of the relevant (far-less-determinate) rule is that Due Process does not provide a liberty to obtain an abortion, he is likely to find for the government in any challenge to a restriction on abortion. That does not mean Scalia is biased towards the government any more than it means Umpire X is biased towards the team with patient hitters. And it does not make their approach to law illegitimate. But the nature of the legal rules is such that one party always will benefit from that person's legal views. This is why you cannot evaluate anything solely based on outcomes.
2) Kagan also said the metaphor is right (and she believes this is what Roberts meant) in saying that judges must understand that they, like umpires, are not the most important people in the game. Policymakers (Congress and the Executive) are the more important players in the game, with judges playing the limited role of policing the constitutional boundaries of congressional and executive action and conduct.
I did not like this part of the answer, in part because it could give the metaphor new, different life. Neither courts nor umpires play a limited role. Umpires necessarily are involved in every single play--not one pitch is thrown in a baseball game that does not result in at least one pro forma call on the play. Moreover, I never read Roberts as using the analogy to say that judges should not vigorously exercise the power to police the constitutional boundaries; certainly his behavior on the Court does not indicate a belief in according great deference to the elected branches. So I hope the metaphor does not become a catchphrase for more constrained judicial review.
Plus, it's just wrong. Umpires don't "decide" the game--who wins and loses. That is done by the players who throw the ball, catch the ball, and hit the ball. So, sure, umpires are secondary to the players on the field. But judges (at least in non-jury cases) do decide the case; it is their job to determine who wins and who loses in litigation that has been brought before the court. So judges, of necessity, are a major player in litigation. As I argued in my LSA panel on the metaphor: We could have a baseball game without umpires and we would understand it to be baseball, but we could not have litigation or adjudication without judges.
3) The metaphor fails at the task for which many Senators and others (not clear if Roberts falls in this group) have put it: Making judging appear simplistic and law clearly determinate such that any judgment is unnecessary and, in fact, bad. Quoting in full:
It would have been nice if she also acknowledged that even umpires do not just go "'ball' and 'strike'" and that they exercise interpretation and judgment as well. Thus the broader point is that no decisionmaking is robotic or automatic and we should stop acting as if it ever is. Part of what always has bothered me about the metaphor is that it is based in the first instance on a misunderstanding of what umpires do.
Otherwise, this answer was spot-on in explaining why the metaphor does not work--rules always must be interpreted and judgment exercised. Stop pretending the rules are easy, mindless, or clear, obvious, and determinate. And stop acting as if a decision with which you disagree was illegitimate or based on person preferences (that accusation was a recurring theme towards any justice or decision with which a questioning Senator disagreed).
Is the metaphor gone forever? I doubt it. I expect to hear it repeated in the committee and floor debates on Kagan, as well as in the hearings on Obama's next nominee. But Kagan started to lay out a pretty good map of how to attack the analogy--certainly as much as is possible in the current (unfortunate) political context.
1) Kagan said it was apt in saying that judges, like umpires, should not have a "team in the game," should not come onto the field rooting for one team over another.
OK answer, although she lost points for not using the Twins in her hypo in response to a question from a Senator from Minnesota.
As I have argued before, to the extent this is what the metaphor means, it does no work. No one believes a judge should be "rooting" for one party over another and we don't need an analogy to baseball to drive the point home. Besides, no one seriously believes an umpire "roots" for one team or that a judge "roots" for one party.
But there's more something going on here, tied to the complexity of law and the fact that different judges can reach different conclusions (which Kagan talks about later). An umpire may not be rooting for a particular team, but an umpire who interprets and enforces certain rules a certain way may benefit one team over another. An ump with a wider strike zone will make calls more to the benefit of a team with control pitchers who work the outside corner; an ump with a narrower zone benefits teams with patient hitters who work counts. Similarly, I would not say that Justice Scalia "roots" for the government in a challenge to abortion laws. But given that his reading of the relevant (far-less-determinate) rule is that Due Process does not provide a liberty to obtain an abortion, he is likely to find for the government in any challenge to a restriction on abortion. That does not mean Scalia is biased towards the government any more than it means Umpire X is biased towards the team with patient hitters. And it does not make their approach to law illegitimate. But the nature of the legal rules is such that one party always will benefit from that person's legal views. This is why you cannot evaluate anything solely based on outcomes.
2) Kagan also said the metaphor is right (and she believes this is what Roberts meant) in saying that judges must understand that they, like umpires, are not the most important people in the game. Policymakers (Congress and the Executive) are the more important players in the game, with judges playing the limited role of policing the constitutional boundaries of congressional and executive action and conduct.
I did not like this part of the answer, in part because it could give the metaphor new, different life. Neither courts nor umpires play a limited role. Umpires necessarily are involved in every single play--not one pitch is thrown in a baseball game that does not result in at least one pro forma call on the play. Moreover, I never read Roberts as using the analogy to say that judges should not vigorously exercise the power to police the constitutional boundaries; certainly his behavior on the Court does not indicate a belief in according great deference to the elected branches. So I hope the metaphor does not become a catchphrase for more constrained judicial review.
Plus, it's just wrong. Umpires don't "decide" the game--who wins and loses. That is done by the players who throw the ball, catch the ball, and hit the ball. So, sure, umpires are secondary to the players on the field. But judges (at least in non-jury cases) do decide the case; it is their job to determine who wins and who loses in litigation that has been brought before the court. So judges, of necessity, are a major player in litigation. As I argued in my LSA panel on the metaphor: We could have a baseball game without umpires and we would understand it to be baseball, but we could not have litigation or adjudication without judges.
3) The metaphor fails at the task for which many Senators and others (not clear if Roberts falls in this group) have put it: Making judging appear simplistic and law clearly determinate such that any judgment is unnecessary and, in fact, bad. Quoting in full:
[T]he metaphor might suggest to some people that law is a kind of robotic enterprise. That there's a kind of automatic quality to it. That it's easy. That we just sort of stand there, and we go "ball" and "strike" and everything is clear cut, and . . . there's no judgment in the process. And I do think that that's not right, and it's especially not right at the Supreme Court level, where the hardest cases go, and the cases that have been the subject of the most dispute go. . . . Judges do in many of these cases have to exercise judgment. They're not easy calls. . . . But we do know that not every case is decided 9-0 and that's not because anyone is acting in bad faith. It's because those legal judgments are ones in which reasonable people can reasonably disagree sometimes. . . . [L]aw does require a kind of judgment, a kind of wisdom.
It would have been nice if she also acknowledged that even umpires do not just go "'ball' and 'strike'" and that they exercise interpretation and judgment as well. Thus the broader point is that no decisionmaking is robotic or automatic and we should stop acting as if it ever is. Part of what always has bothered me about the metaphor is that it is based in the first instance on a misunderstanding of what umpires do.
Otherwise, this answer was spot-on in explaining why the metaphor does not work--rules always must be interpreted and judgment exercised. Stop pretending the rules are easy, mindless, or clear, obvious, and determinate. And stop acting as if a decision with which you disagree was illegitimate or based on person preferences (that accusation was a recurring theme towards any justice or decision with which a questioning Senator disagreed).
Is the metaphor gone forever? I doubt it. I expect to hear it repeated in the committee and floor debates on Kagan, as well as in the hearings on Obama's next nominee. But Kagan started to lay out a pretty good map of how to attack the analogy--certainly as much as is possible in the current (unfortunate) political context.
SPAIN WORLD CUP TEAM PLAYER DAVID VILLA BEST FORWARD IN THE WORLD ACCORDING TO IFFHS
Source: Spanish Football Sprts According to the FIFA backed "IFFHS" organization – International Federation of Football History & Statistics – Spanish International & FC BARCELONA player DAVID VILLA is the “Best Goal scorer/Forward currently in World Football”. They base this with mathematical formulas & coefficients that simply described goes something like the following. Since the 1st of
SPAIN FOOTBALL TEAM STARTING LINE UP 11 AGAINST PARAGUAY | TORRES vs LLORENTE NO DEBATE
Source: Spanish Football Sprts /Latest news from South Africa on the SPANISH NATIONAL FOOTBALL TEAM is that Coach Vicente Del Bosque will most likely repeating the starting 11 that played Portugal last Tuesday against Paraguay in the Saturday Quarter – Final. A debate has be opened on whether FERNANDO TORRES is up to his best level & tall FERNANDO LLORENTE has been suggested by media observers as
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