Top recent posts by Legal Academics on Bluesky

I don’t think it’s much more complex than he’s pushing 80, conscious of his own mortality, and scrambling to build as many monuments to himself (or slap his name on existing ones) as he can.

Who is responsible for the dramatic increase in violence and dehumanizing rhetoric in American politics since Donald Trump started running for president in June 2015? Who could it be? It really is a mystery.

Being bullied into denying the truth is extremely dangerous. Trump is a fascist. Period.

Just a reminder: Trump and his supporters are not opposed to political violence. They think it's fine if their side is the perpetrators and the people they hate are the victims. I go into that, and our age of chaos, in my latest for Public Notice: www.publicnotice.co/p/white-hous...

They're really just running the Charlie Kirk playbook again.

The next news conference will promote Trump's pool resurfacing project.

I confess! I am guilty of being critical of Todd Blanche, I may have even called him a stooge and a prosecutor only a convicted felon could love.

"and we the very serious grownups want to build a party room"

An underappreciated aspect of DJT's current political standing is that most Americans are just not that interested in him anymore, and are changing the channel to sports or reality TV. After 16 months, he is actually boring now, and everyone knows it except for the establishment media

Judge Kathleen Williams of SDFL seems disinclined to play along with Trump's charade that he's actually suing the IRS, rather than simply looting the Treasury to enrich himself. www.lawandchaospod.com/p/court-side...

Good morning, Fourth Amendment fans. I am going to be live-tweeting the Chatrie argument. Although the oral argument is formally scheduled for 10 eastern, they always do bar admissions 1st. Will start shortly. supremecourt.gov/oral_argumen...

Politicians of both parties stop proposing exempting entire classes of people from paying taxes we’re a society & taxes are the price of participation challenge bsky.app/profile/mcop...

A play, in three acts

In re: the utterly abject poverty of our National Conversation™️ about Tone Policing The Democrats while the far right authoritarian party does its daily dose of far right authoritarianism.

NEW: The Supreme Court has summarily reversed the 3-judge trial court's decision striking down Texas' mid-decade congressional map (the court had previously stayed the decision). The three liberal justices dissent.

You may not choose to ride in a self-driving car, but soon your car will still be choosing whether or not you can drive it autos.yahoo.com/policy-and-e...

One of the inspiring things about the House of Representatives is that it is, like America itself, full of morons

~Zero media outlets or journalists will ask how we can afford that or what about The Debt? If it were student loan debt relief by a Democrat, these questions would dominate the news cycle for 72 hours.

Lawmakers should slash funding for the Trump-class battleship and the Golden Dome missile-defense boondoggle. The defense budget should be tailored to the nation’s security needs, not to the president’s insatiable ego. wapo.st/3P4HKrR

Give Trump a ballroom and give me lots of high dollar contributions

Appreciate this novel, outside the box thinking.

Gen X here. We raw dogged it by going to the library and using a *card catalog* to look for books. And then typing up 20 page papers on a TYPEWRITER with no computer or ability to edit so we wrote papers out long hand first.

Sounds like a good plan to me: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb... cc: @princetonupress.bsky.social

I'm just returning from a conference where I ran into a friend. She started reading my book & said, "OMG...The writing is exquisite." High praise from another academic author. You still have until May 10 to read my Introduction chapter for free + the OUP conference discount is good for a month. 👇

this is the most anti-free speech administration in modern american history. not even arguable. and it is censorship of the most anti-democratic kind, focused on criticism of government & trump in particular.

At this point the Justices' have referenced @orinkerr.bsky.social so many times in oral argument he might as well be a 10th justice

It's true that "critics" say this, but multiple federal judges have said it, too, including Judge William Young, appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan four decades ago, who reached this conclusion after a nine-day bench trial in @aaup.org v. Rubio. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/u...

In which Justice Alito suggests the parties should have briefed an issue that the Court declined to grant certiorari on. www.supremecourt.gov/oral_argumen...

Thomas Ricks’ Waging a Good War is a favorite among the editors, so we’re very excited to get a chance to publish him on that topic

The Roberts 'Court' does not traffic in law, but arbitrary power. Its persistence with its present composition is an ongoing negation of the rule of law & an attack on constitutionalism as such.

Today in "neither our media nor our political system is designed to deal with a far right authoritarian party"

This is insane. Trump Administration Will Pay More Energy Firms to Cancel Wind Farms In exchange, the companies will invest in oil and gas projects, echoing an earlier deal with the French energy giant TotalEnergies. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/c...

There is a good reason why the Navy hasn’t built a battleship since 1944: These massive surface vessels were already an anachronism in the days of propeller-driven airplanes and dumb bombs. They are all the more outdated in the age of satellites, submarines, drones, jets, missiles. wapo.st/3P4HKrR

Here’s @cameroncorduroy.bsky.social on this kind of nonsense www.liberalcurrents.com/actually-col...

There’s a lovely line from a Wallace Shawn essay, which I am undoubtedly mangling, along the lines of: Morality is the radical proposition that other people are real. Which is still about the best one-sentence definition I’ve encountered.

Happy week, everyone!

Narrator: It was in fact a vanity project and Trump making a monument to Trump.

Many researchers believe this shift—seeing the vascular system not as a series of clogged pipes but as battlefields of inflammation—could transform public health and save millions of lives

I particularly like how not only did Trump drag the country down but he managed to drag it under a country that wasn't even on the list before.

In the conclusion of my book I discuss one particular element of this whitewashing of the legacy of slavery, which was the Dunning School's erasure of the policing practice of deputizing whiteness based on the principle of "posse comitatus." www.amazon.com/White-Power-...

Pleased to have @reuters.com cite my critique of the Trump administration's legal argument for the Iran war. "[T]his defective and overly permissive justification risks further eroding legal constraints on the use of force." www.reuters.com/world/middle...

You know who we haven't heard from in a while? Nikki Haley. I guess she's waiting for just the right moment to jump up and say "Hey, remember me? I always hated Trump!"

No lie detected. www.wsj.com/livecoverage...

CBS edited out Trump's rant about the lawsuit he brought for CBS editing its interview of Harris (he inflated the value of the absurd settlement from the reported $16 million to $38 million).

I am at heart a moderate institutionalist, but find few things as grating as insipid, pious, formulaic denunciations of “politicial violence” in a country founded by it. Politics IS regulated violence. And when the regulatory systems break down, no intrinsically better than the freelance sort.

My overall reaction to the Chatrie argument, screenshotted from the other place b/c can't do long tweets here.

many coders have rubber ducks on their desks because often you will realize you can solve a problem by trying to explain it, even to a rubber duck the cost comparison between a rubber duck and ChatGPT is left as an exercise for the reader

Part of the reason why the Navy Secretary was fired last week was because Trump had given him an impossible and unnecessary assignment to build a new “Trump-class” battleship, the centerpiece of what Trump calls a “golden fleet,” before he leaves office in 2029. wapo.st/3P4HKrR

holeeeeee shit Leon is going to have absolute kittens in the morning. I cannot fucking wait. @lizdye.bsky.social

Unsurprisingly, I agree with Professor Chemerinsky’s bottom line, but he doesn’t really engage in the specifics of how those seeking to enforce the WPR in court could do so, e.g. who would have standing? www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/o...

Yeesh. This was a very dense district court opinion.

In the law firm executive order cases & the Mark Zaid security clearance case, the DC Circuit rejects the govt's (weird) oral argument proposals and adopts those of the law firms and Zaid. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

The Affordability Agenda: Let Them Eat Balllroom

Whole lotta people in here I haven't really thought about in years, including Paul Manafort, Lev Parnas, and John Solomon.

Performative public lying is a hallmark of far right authoritarian parties. And the deeply unserious media outlets that have bent the knee to them.

Fox News has what purports to be the proposed new Florida congressional map. www.foxnews.com/politics/ron...

Fantastic midterm message

“Ron DeSantis unveils new Florida congressional map that would give the GOP an extra four seats” electionlawblog.org?p=155678

only in America could millions of people think that a hideously ugly ballroom is a solution to gun violence

The daily unprecedented violations of both domestic and international law continue to happen daily, while the entire country now participates in a charade that the problem is the Democrats’ heated rhetoric about something or other.

The ballroom will also whiten your teeth and cure what ails you.

A growing body of research suggests that GLP-1 drugs do more than control appetite and blood sugar. They could also fight inflammation

“…Frankly, it's part of the reason why I am so gung ho supporting the fight against the buffer bill, because Stonewall was a riot, and our ability to protest is oftentimes what has moved the needle forward…”

Sherrod Brown is an economic populist and he doesn't have a Nazi tattoo or blame rape survivors. And yet Platner's stans love Platner far more than Brown. Why is that? 🤔

Hey, @mirandayaver.bsky.social , look what I'm reading!

Wait, are you saying that CBS edited their 60 Minutes interview & didn’t air the full unedited video?! Because I thought that was grounds for a lawsuit, blocking a merger, & the threatened loss of licenses according to Trump.

don't think that was about the shooting

The Iranians are successfully wielding a weapon of mass economic destruction, and Trump still hasn’t figured out a counter. Speaking on MS NOW.

Credible vows of accountability may serve to deter some in the administration from participating in its lawlessness.

Has the U.S. injected bleach yet into the Strait to reopen it?

I stand behind my comments

Good luck today grinding out in late stage capitalism so you can "afford" to retire at 83.

Members of the National Science Board, which the U.S. Congress founded in 1950, were given no explanation for their termination

The president has no higher priority than the president's safety. For once, a plausible assertion.

There is also the issue of how much waste and corruption is buried in the defense budget. In all likelihood, even more than usual. The president’s son Eric Trump bragged last week that a company he invested in just received a $24 million Pentagon investment to build robots. wapo.st/3P4HKrR

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments today about cancer warnings on Roundup, also known as glyphosate. Here's what to do know about the chemical

It is Islamo-Communism to oppose the (now) taxpayer-funded ballroom.

If only we had a budget and a Congress

Grumpily noting - after glancing at the front pages of the papers - that the completely unresolved middle east war we inexplicably started and then turned into a dog's breakfast is still on.

Oh my god what is happening? Did Stan Woodward’s ECF login get hacked?

OK seriously, take this quote back in time to 2014 and tell someone at Fox News that it was made during a DOJ press conference and watch them lose every single ounce of shit they could lose.

Nine Senators Led by Senator Durbin Sponsor Resolution to Amend the Constitution to Provide an Affirmative Right to vote electionlawblog.org?p=155687

Oh terrible rhetoric leads to terrible outcomes you say interesting

“Trump-class” battleships are projected to cost as much as $17 billion each. Even assuming no cost overruns, that would make them more expensive than the Ford-class aircraft carriers or any other warships ever built. Yet battleships were already an anachronism in the 1940s. wapo.st/3P4HKrR

10th Cir.: it was reversible error for prosecutor to tell jury in closing argument that the prosecution has removed the "cloak" of the presumption of innocence and defendant "now stands before you naked in his guilt" *flashes nude photo of defendant*. Held: no. www.ca10.uscourts.gov/sites/ca10/f...

Just outside of Hamilton, Ontario, this morning, I snapped what's probably the most Canadian photo I'll ever take.

law.yale.edu/yls-today/ne...

Excellent news—this is the kind of pro-democracy reform a true opposition party should be championing. I wrote about Virginia’s role in distorting democracy through felon disfranchisement in PRACTICAL EQUALITY:

In his vapid world, all he thinks about or cares about is how to inflict pain and injure. (And money) But calling them NICE agents wouldn't be an insult to the press. No skin off my back. But it is a continuation of the 1984-esque hellscape propaganda he so enjoys www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...

Computer, show me a small insecure scared little man

<JohnLegendMyBrotherKeepReading.png> The case for more, not less, liberal arts education remains stronger than ever

Somehow this hypothetical warship with non-existent weapons is supposed to start construction in 2028, notwithstanding the pathetic state of the U.S. shipbuilding industry. It’s hard not to feel a smidgen of sympathy for John Phelan — seemingly fired for not doing the impossible. wapo.st/3P4HKrR

I would like nothing better than to disappear into the woods and rest. The reason I'm still promoting my book by posting, taping podcasts, and writing multiple opeds is no one is going to do it for me. I'm not going to sit down in mile 24 of a marathon & say "Phew, that's close enough!"

Reading “It Can’t Happen Here” because <gestures at world> and so far the main thing I’m struck by is how much more articulate Berzelius Windrip is.

I love crows because they hold long grudges, like me. Source: www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/s...

Potatoes on the right I had in Matosinhos a few weeks ago, roasted and slathered in parsley/garlic mix. On the right, my own roasted small potatoes slathered with ramp pesto. Different flavor profile--extremely garlicky, if you like that kind of thing. cc @profhalloran.bsky.social

Incorrect. You are talking about Melissa DeRosa. Not all women are the same person and certainly not one who participated in smears of me when I came forward.

There is some real elves and dwarves energy going on in this photo

NEW: we talk DOJ indicting SPLC, Kash Patel suing the Atlantic, the 5th circuit OK-ing 10 scripture in schools plus …. goings on at SCOTUS. Then Shaun Ossei-Owusu joins to talk his new book LAW ON TRIAL crooked.com/podcast/how-...

US defense needs are real (eg replacing missiles fired against Iran). But is it right to spend so much on defense while slashing spending on scientific research, which is integral to the nation’s economic & military competitiveness, and adding to the growing mountain of public debt? wapo.st/3P4HKrR