Voulez Vous Coucher Avec Stephen Breyer?

Oh that wacky Justice Breyer. He's going up to Harvard Law School to deliver a speech... entirely in French!

My fellow Americans, I have some terrible news to tell you. I’ve just been made aware of a terrible secret. Apparently all the fears you’ve heard from the far right about the desire of certain liberal justices to impose foreign law on the Unites States of America were justified. I know, I know — I’m as shocked as you are.

I don’t know how else to make sense of what is going to happen tomorrow. The far, far right was right. They just got the kind of foreign law wrong. The Supreme Court doesn’t want to impose Sharia law on us; instead, they want to impose French law on us.

I know this because on Friday, July 22, Justice Stephen Breyer is going to go to that bastion of liberal elitism, Harvard Law School, and deliver an entire address in French. Sacré bleu!

Let’s look at the announcement….

UPDATE (5:30 PM): Please see the update added to the end of this post.

The note sent out by the HLS Dean of Students will shock all red-blooded Americans out there:

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Hi —

Sorry to break into your summer but Justice Stephen Breyer will be on campus this Friday, July 22. He will be giving a presentation in French and is inviting any French-speaking HLS students to join him.

The conference will take place from 11:30am to 1:00pm. Please contact me as soon as possible if you will be here and would like to participate. The event is closed so all names must be given to the US Marshals in advance. Thanks!

There’s more: I have it on good authority that this is but the first of many concessions our Supreme Court has had to make to the French government, as part of an apology for our legal system’s treatment of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. If we don’t do what they say, all of our sports arenas will be used for Cirque du Soleil performances during the lockout.

Also… wait, my tinfoil hat just fell off. Whoa, weird, my head hurts.

Anyway, it’s pretty bad-ass to have sitting Supreme Court justices who are multilingual, even if most people won’t know what the hell Breyer is talking about.

(Recall that Justice Sotomayor speaks Spanish. And Justice Scalia speaks Italian.)

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One of our tipsters reports that Harvard is handling Justice Breyer’s speech in a very un-Harvard way: “Note that no explanation is given as to what the justice will be speaking on nor why it will be in French.”

Come on HLS, get your act together. At the undergraduate commencement, the kids are given English translations of the “Latin speech” during the ceremony, so they can all look like everybody speaks Latin in front of the parents and onlookers. Surely the same rules should apply to Breyer’s French speech. Give the kids an English copy of his speech, so all the HLS kids can look smart and laugh along with Breyer when SGB makes jokes in French.

That’s a lot easier than expecting young would-be lawyers to learn French. It’s not like our laws are written with the French code in mind… or are they?

(We reached out to the Supreme Court’s Public Information Office with an inquiry yesterday, but we haven’t heard back from them yet. If we do, we’ll provide an update.)

UPDATE (5:30 PM): Le mystère has been solved. From a posting on the Facebook page of Co.Nx:

Parlez-vous français? U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will speak in French with members of Tunisian civil society and legal community about the U.S. Constitution and its role in our democratic system. Watch a live stream of this web conference between Washington, DC and Tunis tomorrow, July 22, at 12:00pm EDT (16:00 GMT) right here on our Facebook page. Click on the “Live Events” tab to the left to tune in!

Tunisia needs all the help it can get when it comes to defining a new democracy. Rule #1: when stealing the election, let the lawyers fight, not the people in the streets.