When the housekeepers at the three Hyatt hotels in the Boston area were asked to train some new workers, they said they were told the trainees would be filling in during vacations.

On Aug. 31, staffers learned the full story: None of them would be making the beds and cleaning the showers any longer. All of them were losing their jobs. The trainees, it turns out, were employees of a Georgia company, Hospitality Staffing Solutions, who were replacing them that day.

The move to outsource the jobs of about 100 housekeeping employees at the Hyatt Regency Boston, Hyatt Regency Cambridge, and Hyatt Harborside at Logan International Airport is unusual in the hospitality industry, which counts on the housekeeping staff to help make sure hotel guests are comfortable.

SNIP

Other hotels have taken a different approach to riding out the recession. Earlier this year the Liberty Hotel ended its contract with the company that provided its security and night janitorial service and replaced them with hotel workers from other departments who might have otherwise been laid off. "We would not [outsource housekeepers] because we want to tightly control the guest experience here and the cleanliness,'' said managing director Jim Treadway.

Representatives from the Hilton and Marriott hotel chains said they have not outsourced their housekeepers and have no plans to do so.

A pocket door is a door that slides into an opening in a wall.  The doors slide straight into the wall, and do not swing from either side, as in a hinged door, which swings from one side of the door jamb.

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Instead of hinges, the door is held in place by an overhead track, rollers, and door guides towards the bottom of the pocket door jamb.  The doors slide completely into the wall and out of the way. You can save up to 15 square feet of usable space per pocket door in your home.

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.

Probably a 5 -4 decision with Kennedy siding with the RATS.

On today's court, the direction Justice Sotomayor suggested is unlikely to prevail. During arguments, the court's conservative justices seem to view corporate political spending as beneficial to the democratic process. "Corporations have lots of knowledge about environment, transportation issues, and you are silencing them during the election," Justice Anthony Kennedy said during arguments last week.

Sedition may include any commotion, though not aimed at direct and open violence against the laws. That is deemed by the legal authority as tending toward insurrection against the established order.

The fundamental truth about the Obama administration is that it is the Bush administration run by slightly less incompetent, marginally less evil people.

Textualism and originalism are sometimes defended as the best way of restraining judges and preventing them from abusing their authority. On the surface this may seem to be at least a plausible claim. But on closer examination I believe that it owes all of its plausibility to the unspoken assumption that some version of the common law approach to constitutional interpretation is operating in the background.

A judge who conscientiously tries to follow precedent is significantly limited in what she can do. But a judge who acknowledges only the text of the Constitution as a limit can, so to speak, go to town. The text of the Equal Protection Clause, taken alone, would allow a judge to rule that the Constitution requires massive redistributions of wealth (reasoning that "equal protection of the laws" includes "equal protection" against the vicissitudes of the market); the text of the Contract and Just Compensation Clauses, taken alone, would allow a judge to invalidate a wide range of welfare and regulatory legislation. The text of the Due Process and Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clauses, taken alone without reference to the precedents interpreting them, could justify a thorough overhaul of the criminal justice system. And so on.

The notion that the text of the Constitution is an effective limit on judges is plausible only if one assumes a background of highly developed precedent. Within the limits set by precedent, paying more attention to text might indeed limit judges' discretion. The appeal of textualism as a limit on judges--as the argument was made, most famously for example, by Justice Black--stems entirely from the assumption that the text will be used to resolve disputes within the gaps left by precedent. If we assume that the various clauses of the Constitution are to be interpreted in something like the current fashion, then judges may indeed be more "restrained" if they insist on some relatively explicit textual source for any constitutional right. But that is primarily a demonstration of the restraining effect of precedent, not of text; the bulk of the restraint by far is provided by precedent.

This view of Constitutional interpretation as a common law process is one that I agree with.