Thanks for the comments. Yes, it works as described in BOL, just not as I would have thought.

How about some comments on the warning suggestion? Since the criteria of a column to a constant works as one would expect in an inner join, yet is worthless in an outer join, shouldn't there be a warning to that effect emitted by SQL?

Bottom line, as suggested, constants go only in the where clause unless required to make the outer join make sense.