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Those things look sort of like tables and kinda like Swiss cheese. Cheese tables? What will you kooky law people think of next?

I always feel bad for people that type their notes and try to transfer those freaky diagrams into MS Word on the fly during a lecture...

The swiss cheese things are "islands of powers" or "islands of rights." Barnett's point is that today we have islands of rights in a sea of government power where as we should have islands of power in a sea of rights.

For the folks just cruising in from Volokh.com, welcome. These Randy Barnett cryptograms are part of an occasional series of diagrams I discovered in my notes while studying for finals during my first year of law school. They make sense to me, but stripped of context they're a lot more fun. You may find the others here. (Just scroll up.)

My law school profs never taught me about "islands of power." :|

Bastards.

Christopher: That's what a Tablet PC is for!

Kind of reminds me of Easterbrook's Venn diagrams noting the interface between positive rights for some vs. loss of rights for others.

Nonetheless, if I read your charts right, its nice to see even conservative constitutional scholars recognize that the 9th amendment is a real cannon of construction that affirmatively states that, contrary to certain Supreme Court justices' comments, the constitution is a floor, not a ceiling.

Tribe's got spiffier diagrams. Full color, multi-layered. "Blessed be the cheese-makers" and all, but Tribe has included the anatomicists and the architects as well. But this may be the "Volvo effect" -- Harvard professors can afford better art supplies than B.U. professors.

Students in Tribe's classes will do much better in the future making those pencil sketches of witnesses for the nightly TeeVee news.

David: Just for clarification, Randy Barnett didn't draw these diagrams. They're by me, a modest first-year University of Oregon law student. Maybe I should have brought a few colored pencils to the lecture, but I didn't really anticipate competing with Laurence Tribe.

Doug: Recognizing the 9th amendment as more than an inkblot would mark the difference between a conservative constitutional scholar and a libertarian constitutional scholar like Barnett.