Con law, con law everywhere. Randy Barnett and Jack Balkin continued their debate over the constitutionality of the individual insurance mandate of the health care reform law. Barnett argued on Sunday that the Obama administration’s move to defend the mandate as a tax indicated its assessment that the Commerce Clause might not be sufficient, thus refuting those who dismissed the Commerce Clause challenge as frivolous. Balkin responded that it just shows government attorneys being good lawyers by piling on every argument they can think of, and that what’s really going on here is an attempt to turn back the clock on the cultural-legal shift that accompanied the New Deal. (See Josh Blackman for more on Balkin’s argument.) Barnett replies that if he’s making an “off-the-wall” argument, he’s got 21 state Attorney Generals with him, and that the truly unprecedented argument is “[t]he claim that Congress may require any person in the US to do anything it deems to be in the public interest or pay a fine or penalty to the IRS.”

That wasn’t the only New Deal flashback this week.

(Part 2 of 2) I fully expect that we will get some resolution to several important plot threads in Lost’s finale tonight, particularly matters that have been developed over the last season and Season 5’s finale: what “sideways world” is, what Desmond is up to, how MIB is going to be defeated, what happens to the remaining main characters, what Jack’s nuclear bomb explosion did, and perhaps more about what the Island is/does. The head writers have said that they don’t intend a Sopranos-style fade to black. Whether the resolution is fulfilling or not is a separate issue, but my guess is that I’ll like it.

But I also expect, just because there is limited time, that several key elements of the plot from past seasons are going to be simply dropped. I don’t mean comparatively trivial items like why Libby was in Hurley’s mental institution or where the polar bears came from. I mean crucial components of the plot from one or more seasons are going to get left behind like jettisoned cargo. Here’s my top 4.

(Part 1 of 2) Back when I was a teenager, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons with a group of friends. D&D, for those who have never played it, is essentially a pen-and-paper version of World of Warcraft. Instead of a computer running the game, that role in D&D was served by a person—the “Dungeon Master,” or DM—whose job it was to map out a location in advance and fill it with monsters, traps, and other characters and events, and keep that material hidden from the players until they reached certain points in the game. Whereas computer games display information visually to the players as they wander through the game world, in D&D the DM simply describes what happens, according to his or her pre-established plan and a set of fixed rules governing things like combat.

One of my friends was a particularly good DM. He would create settings full of portentous omens, intrigue, and mysterious characters. Seemingly random encounters would lead to unexpected coincidences. The world he created seemed richly populated with deeper meaning, and my friends and I loved exploring it.

But we ultimately discovered that there was no deeper meaning; there was no there there. He was making it all up on the fly, and when we started scratching beyond the surface, improbable barriers such as invulnerable gods and invincible monsters began to block our path. The narrative structure of the world collapsed under its own weight.

I’m reminded of all that by the final season of Lost. Lost, I think, illustrates a trap that the creators of D&D dungeons and network television series alike are apt to fall prey to: it is much, much more tempting to build suspense than to resolve it.