And I can't think of anyone less deserving of one than Jonah Lehrer.
In a prescient dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall warned that the Court's treatment of phone numbers as less deserving of protection than the actual content of phone calls "ignores the vital role telephonic communication plays in our personal and professional relationships" and "the First and Fourth Amendment interests implicated by unfettered official surveillance".
Should they conquer their Etihad jitters, it would be hard to think of a grand finalist in the short history of the competition who was less deserving of being there.
Or decreeing that a student who tries several different kinds of volunteer work — or spends extra hours on chemistry experiments or writes short stories instead of feeding the hungry or craves the challenge of multiple Advanced Placement exams — is less deserving of a college education than one who works for several years on a local cause?
"We [as doctors] find it easier to say 'she failed on chemotherapy' than to say 'chemotherapy failed her.' This shifting of blame has the unconscious effect both of relegating our own inadequacies to the shadows and of making the patient seem less deserving of our solicitude and sorrow".
Mourning for one group of civilians doesn't make the other group less miserable, less deserving of sympathy, of understanding.
"I can think of few people who are less deserving of a pardon than Pepe Rojas-Cardona," Ms. Lyness wrote in her response to the pardon request, adding that it would be "a travesty of justice".
We need the humanities, she explains patiently, because they may end up giving us other stuff we actually like: "We do not always know the future benefits of what we study and therefore should not rush to reject some forms of research as less deserving than others".
"But since the defendant was claiming that the purpose of marriage law was to protect the children of heterosexual parents, we wanted the defendant to have to answer why the children of same-sex parents are any less deserving of protection and support".
This is fitting with our anecdotal experience whereby participants who were survivors of melanoma often questioned the legitimacy of their contribution to the study as they perceived themselves to have suffered less than survivors of other cancer types, and therefore less deserving of attention.
