Korean rice dish often served in a hot stone bowl / SAT 2-5-22 / Like the villainous Max Shreck at the end of Batman Returns / Russian writer and dissident Limonov / Bygone Vatican money / Eponym of lifetime achievement award in fashion since 1984 / Archetypal bossypants

Constructor: Kameron Austin Collins

Relative difficulty: Medium (i.e. properly hard but not brutal)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: AD LITEM (11D: Appointed by the court) —

Ad litem (Latin: "for the suit"^[1]) is a term used in law to refer to the appointment by a court of one party to act in a lawsuit on behalf of another party such as a child or an incapacitated adult, who is deemed incapable of representing him or herself. An individual who acts in this capacity is generally called a guardian ad litem in such legal proceedings; in Scotland, curator ad litem is the equivalent term. In England and Wales, since the amendment of the Children Act 1989 established the role of children's guardian, the term is now used only in the term "guardian ad litem" in Private Law proceedings under rule 9.5. The United States legal system, which at its inception was based on the English legal system, continues to use the terms "guardian ad litem" and "attorney ad litem". The legal system in the Republic of Ireland also uses the term guardian ad litem.

The term is also used in property litigation, where a person may be appointed to act on behalf of an estate in court proceedings, when the estate's proper representatives are unable or unwilling to act.

The term is also sometimes used to refer to a judge who participates in only a particular case or a limited set of cases and does not have the same status as the other judges of the court. Such a jurist is more commonly called a judge ad hoc. Judges ad hoc are particularly common in international courts, and are fewer in number elsewhere.

The Latin term (ād lītem) translates literally as "for the suit" or "for the proceeding". (wikipedia)

Now that's a Saturday. That hit the Saturday sweet spot for me, dead center. It's very hard to make a puzzle that is both very tough and very delightful, and this one pulls it off beautifully. Usually, if I have to struggle a lot, it's because of obscure garbage or because of clues that think they are being clever but are actually being extremely tenuous. The lovely thing about this puzzle—and it's at least somewhat a product of the grid structure—is that, with the exception of the NW and SE corners, I never felt like I might get trapped. There always seemed to be another path to find, another route around whatever roadblock had flung itself in my way. Also, the puzzle alternated moods, rewarding me with some colorful gimmes (or near gimmes), but then punishing me with ambiguity or legal Latin or some reality show contestant's first name. A real rollercoaster, this one, but it did what rollercoasters are supposed to do: thrill me, not give me whiplash or make me barf. I will say that there was one part of the puzzle, one square, that seemed borderline unfair to me, and unsurprisingly, it involved the crossing of two proper nouns at a vowel (the thing that should set off All The Alarm Bells with constructors / editors). But I'm realizing now that it felt unfair because I was getting my Congressional CORYs mixed up, i.e. despite what the clue obviously says, in my head it was referring to CORI Bush, not CORY Booker (damn, they even have the same initials, and same-sounding syllables opening their last names!). If you are reading the clue correctly, then you know you're dealing with the senator from New Jersey, Booker, who is a man, and not the representative from Missouri, Bush, who is a woman. Because he's a man, CORY Booker would not (in all probability) spell his name CORI. So even if you assumed that RIDERS was spelled like that, with an "I," the normal way, you'd have to change it to accommodate CORY, who is, in fact, famous enough to take this crossing out of Natick territory. That is, he's very famous (in the U.S.), and so you can be expected to know his name, and infer the "Y" spelling. Don't do what I did and get CORI Bush involved. *Do* put CORI Bush in your puzzles, though ... just watch that last vowel! (And in case you're wondering, COREY Feldman spells it with an "E"):