  The "n! conjecture" of Garsia and Haiman has inspired mathematicians for
nearly two decades, even after Haiman published a proof in 2001. Kumar and
Funch Thomsen proved in 2003 that in order to prove the conjecture for all
partitions, it suffices to prove it for the so-called "staircase partitions"
$(k,k-1,...,2,1)$ for each $k>1$. In the present paper we give a construction
of a specially designed two-dimensional family of length-$n$ subschemes of the
plane, and use that to prove the $n!$ conjecture for staircase partitions.
Together with the result of Kumar and Funch Thomsen, this provides a new proof
of Haiman's theorem.
