I just entered this ticket. http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/tickets/404-named_scope-bashes-critical-methods It turns out that in an ActiveRecord model like this Model << ActiveRecord::Base named_scope :public private def private_method end public def public_method end end The method public_method will be private because named scope overrides Ruby''s public method! Also this can cause additionally hard to debug failures in metaprogramming, I discovered this when the RSpec stub! method blew up when it used class_eval to generate a stub method which apparently caused public to be called internally by Ruby, at which time the named_scope generated method failed. See the ticket for details. I''m not sure what the fix should be, but I think that named_scope should not cause public/private, and the like to be clobbered. -- Rick DeNatale My blog on Ruby http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/