After spending a long weekend in New Orleans, I discovered firsthand the locals really love their food, their drink and, much to my delight, their seersucker (pre-Memorial Day, natch). But that town really, really loves its football team, the New Orleans Saints.

I know there are rabid football fan bases all across the country, including right here in Baltimore. But the connection feels deeper in New Orleans.  A lot of it is because the team is forever intertwined with Hurricane Katrina, and some of it has to do with the team winning the Super Bowl in February. But I got the feeling that even if the fleur-de-lis was not named the state symbol two years ago, the Saints logo might still have been emblazoned on the side of every city trash can.

I bring this up to point out a class-action lawsuit set to be heard this week in U.S. District Court in New Orleans. More than 2,100 plaintiffs are suing a Chinese drywall manufacturer for product defects causing both structural damage and health problems. The lead plaintiff? Sean Payton, the Saints’ head coach.

Sports Illustrated’s Peter King noted the hearing yesterday in his Monday Morning Quarterback Column. “Heck of a choice for lead plaintiff,” King wrote under a “Home-Court Advantage Dept.” heading. “Sounds like kicking off in a football game with a 21-0 lead.”

To that, I would add: good luck, defense, finding impartial jurors. And I wish I had thought of a way to convince my editors I needed to cover the proceedings.

The Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision in U.S. v. Stevens, striking down a federal ban on animal-cruelty videos as “a criminal prohibition of alarming breadth,” shouldn’t surprise anyone who paid attention to the oral arguments in the case last October, Kimberly Atkins writes for our sister blog, DC Dicta.  

The law, 18 U. S. C. §48, was designed primarily to target “crush videos,” which fetishize the torture and killing of small animals (and the descriptions of which should really not be read at lunch time). But the law was used, in this instance, to convict one Robert J. Stevens, proprietor of “Dogs of Velvet and Steel,” which sold videos of dogfights and pit bulls attacking other animals.

And the language of the law is even broader, banning depictions of live animals being “maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded, or killed.” And therein lies the problem, since there’s an awful lot of legal killing of animals that winds up on camera. Just open any hunting magazine. 

As Justice Antonin Scalia noted at oral argument, “How do you limit ‘killed?!’ … ‘Kill’ has one meaning, which is ‘kill!’”

Who could argue with that? In the end, only Justice Samuel Alito, who would have vacated and remanded the case. The other eight voted to affirm the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — but they did leave the door open to Congress to try again, saying the court would not decide “whether a statute limited to crush videos or other depictions of extreme animal cruelty would be constitutional.”