Sigh.  The pattern that I was originally following for all unit tests was to wrapper the .save with an asser_raise ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid.  When this code was originally reviewed by Greg, he pointed out that this was not necessary since save! will throw an exception if an error occurred, resulting in the test failing.  I agreed, and removed all of these asserts in all my unit tests, and am not including them in new model level unit tests that I write.