Legal Commentary

My nerdy and pedantic colleague Christian Turner sent around an email pointing out an error the Supreme Court made in an opinion yesterday -- in math.  Christian, it's worth noting, has a Ph.D. in math from Texas A&M so we're all prone to trusting him on this one.  With his permission (and on the condition that I introduce him as "my nerdy and pedantic colleague"), I'm sharing his email below:

It's not everyday that my prior experience in math proves useful in reading a Supreme Court opinion.  Today is still not such a day.  However, math did provide a chance to task-avoid by focusing on an inconsequential, stray remark in an opinion. Roberts just issued an opinion in Winter v. NRDC - ruling in favor of the Navy in a case involving the Navy's NEPA obligations with respect to the use of certain kinds of sonar in training exercises, where the sonar might have ill effects on marine mammals.  (Kind of an interesting case actually.)

The opinion contains the following line:  "There is an exponential relationship between radius length and surface area (Area = pi r^2)."

This is decidedly not an exponential relationship, but it could be called a power relationship, quadratic relationship, or geometric relationship.  An exponential relationship is something like y = 3^x.  The difference between the two kinds of relationship is huge, easily seen as x grows large.  (Though there's disagreement, the number of electrons in the universe is very, very likely less than 10^100.)

Correcting this could be my only shot at leaving any kind of mark on the Court.  Too bad I don't have a blog.  Maybe I could become the crank who submits nitpicky correction petitions (if such things exist) on an ongoing basis.  In fact, crank is probably my pre-destined endpoint.