The Scholarly Bobby Jindal

So there I was peacefully reviewing what the editors had done to one of my law review articles, feeling quite content because they hadn't changed much and the changes they had made were generally improvements, when I suddenly realized that I had cited an article by recently defeated GOP Louisiana gubernatorial candidate Bobby Jindal (Relativism, Neutrality, and Transcendentalism: Beyond Autonomy, 57 Louisiana Law Review 1253, 1253 (1997)) for the proposition that: "Because all conceptions of the good necessarily invoke non-derivable moral assumptions, we cannot avoid an inquiry into the morality of an act we propose to regulate." Later in the article I also cited it for the proposition that: "Laws mala in se derive their legitimacy from ideals—justice, love, liberty—that have traction precisely because they are based in a common belief in the truth of some abstract principle." When I wrote this article 2 years ago I had no idea who Bobby Jindal was, of course, and the editorial process had taken so long I had forgotten all about those footnotes. But now, these citations are quite literally footnotes to history. Or something like that.