The Rest is History Lord Byron: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (Part 1) I don’t think I’ve read any Byron at all but I know who he is. It’s the 200th anniversary of his death this year. He was the first international celebrity- when he died in Greece during the War of Independence, they rather facetiously liken him to the idea of Taylor Swift dying in Ukraine. He had an influence on later writers: the Brontes (Heathcliff, Rochester), vampires, Dorian Grey. Byron himself had a club foot (talipes). He was born to a mother who had married for the second time, and his step-father went through all the family money, and even though he inherited a castle at the age of 10, it was a ruin. He was brought up by his Calvinistic nursemaid, who sexually abused him (so much for the Calvinism). He was sent to Harrow where he was bullied, then he went to Cambridge. Then he lost weight and became handsome. He was attracted to boys rather than men, and is often the way, became aggressively heterosexual when he left Cambridge. As a lord, he was entitled to sit in the House of Lords. He had Whig sympathies but did not align himself with them, and so he delayed giving his maiden speech and was politically inactive. Impatient with such passivity, he decided to travel to the East.
99% Invisible Fact-Checking the Supreme Court An anti-gun group Moms Demand Action found that when the Supreme Court had knocked back a concealed-carry law because there was no pre-1900 precedent, there was in fact an 1892 precedent, in amongst the archives of a small Orange County courthouse. Their archival detective work didn’t change anything, but it does raise the question: who fact-checks the Supreme Court? This episode goes through the changes in legal thinking from Oliver Wendell Holmes who encouraged judges to draw on their experience; to Louis Brandeis who introduced the idea of facts, through to legal realism and the rise of the ‘amicus brief’. The current Supreme Court of America is wedded to the idea of “history and tradition” (which they seem to have thrown out the window when considering Presidential immunity) but what if the history and tradition is wrong? Really interesting.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 