OMFG. I cannot begin to describe my gasp at how Roberts & co decided to go all in on LOST CAUSE theory & insist that the Reconstruction Congress did Confederate sympathizer President Andrew Johnson wrong by attempting to keep him from destroying Reconstruction www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

The new racist double standard set up by Alito in the TPS ruling: if there’s any other motive in addition to the racism, the racism doesn’t count, but if the state wants to *prevent* discrimination against black people, that is racist and unconstitutional www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

The Tea Party was (1) small protests which were (2) hyped by media & (3) led to the election of radical nut jobs who (4) badly broke US politics. What we have now are (1) huge protests that were (2) dismissed by media but (3) still got a few candidates in deep blue NYC who (4) will work to fix it.

Four years after the Dobbs decision, pregnant people in states with total abortion bans are now nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period.

KBJ's dissent: "The court reduces some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements—federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more—to nothing more than the wheelings-and-dealings of an especially wealthy private party." www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

ugh-scotus guts individual liability under RLUIPA (&basically says all spending clause statutes don't provide for individual liability) so tally today: victims of human rights violations & beneficiaries of public benefits programs can't sue. oil companies can. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

@palesl.bsky.social outlines our empirical work of the past few years highlighting the ideological dimension of judicial selection and decision-making on the High Court of Australia.

Economists call this diminishing marginal utility. The first dollars change your life. The billionth doesn't. So the argument stops being about consumption and starts being about power.

Use the map in Virginia. Then, if you get control of Congress, be ruthless. Block everything. Do impeachments. Run investigations. Then in 2029, expand the Supreme Court, make DC a state, expand the House.

The Trump-IRS settlement talks are blatant corruption being laundered through the legal system in broad daylight. A president suing his own government. Kleptocracy usually requires some effort to hide. Resist the temptation to normalize this. Authoritarians have routinely been overthrown for less.

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

My new one @slate.com: Why is John Roberts in a Rush All of a Sudden? slate.com/news-and-pol...

As Justice Sotomayor's dissent notes, the district court's finding of unconstitutional discrimination is unaffected by Callais. But if the dist. ct. now reinstates that finding on remand, the state will run to SCOTUS and say Purcell forbids the court to do so. You can guess what happens next.

🚨 NEW TOOL for U.S. legal journalists ⚖️ I turned @allyjar.bsky.social's incredible crowdsourced Google doc on accessing state court records into an interactive map. Check it out and let me know about any errors, missing information, or ways I can improve this thing (link below)

I dream of a day when the legal academy spends as much attention to congressional and other legislative reform, than they spend debating whom among us is properly critical of the Supreme Court. Reforming Congress is equally (or more) important than rethinking Supreme Court practice and authority.

A very Strength In Numbers-coded article today: It looks like Republican Supreme Court justices made a very rudimentary, but willful, statistical error in their effective invalidating of the VRA in the Callais decision. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-05-08...

Motivated reasoning, naive realism, and the resulting bias blind spot are powerful, powerful drugs.

Pre-ordered this, looking forward to reading!

"Our screens are two-way, yes, but we can easily forget that the people on the other end exist as more than characters for our enjoyment. The degradation and humiliation rituals of reality television now play out across our social media feeds." www.liberalcurrents.com/the-parasoci...

We live in a time dominated by deeply unserious people making deeply unserious arguments in support of tragically serious results that serious people would have both avoided and known to avoid.

Jamelle Bouie: “John Roberts Believes in an America That Doesn’t Exist” electionlawblog.org?p=155957

Hardline Conservatives Including Justice Alito Really Do Not Like Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson Speaking Truth to Power electionlawblog.org?p=155951 Count me as all the way with KBJ.

Can't fix racist maps because the election is only a year away, but you can stop an election after voting starts to make the maps more racist. Good thing racism is over. 🤬

Norm Ornstein: “SCOTUS’s Brazen Power Grab Guts Voting Rights” electionlawblog.org?p=155877

“Who Will Stand Up to the Supreme Court Justices?” electionlawblog.org?p=155848

By gutting the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court is killing the Second Reconstruction. The first Reconstruction shows how Congress should respond. Me and Daphna Renan in the NYT on the tools we have to save democracy from a hostile Court.

Hillary was right about everything.

These figures are *crazy.* And, yes, that's a technical term in the study of judicial politics.

American Black women now have fewer voting rights and reproductive rights than their mothers did at the same age. Progress isn’t a straight line, indeed.

I don't think it's a coincidence that lots of folks are publishing books this year that explain/contextualize this #SCOTUS & the current moment. Some to look for (& if you've got one I've missed, pls add!). Mine, the Political Supreme Court, will be out in October 1/ uncpress.org/978146969713...

We must understand that the Voting Rights Act was not merely about ensuring Black Americans rights, it was about democratizing America. This ruling is not just a decimation of Black rights and Black Americans’ ability to have representation, it is a fatal blow to multiracial democracy.

My New One at Slate: “The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century; This evisceration of the Voting Rights Act requires us to take SCOTUS reform more seriously.” @slate.com slate.com/news-and-pol...

Please ignore that "Racism is Over" talking point undermines "there is nothing worse than considering race" talking point.

"I dissent because Congress elected otherwise. I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity. I dissent."

Justice Kagan: "I dissent. The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—'one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation's history.'

The result of Callais will be that black and latino voters will be prevented from electing representatives of their choosing at every level of government.

If you’re a law professor thinking about reposting the claim that the Unite the Right rally was staged or faked, I’d encourage you to read the transcripts from Sines v Kessler. I know they run several thousand pages of testimony from the organizers, but they’re easily accessible and linked below.

To those complaining about the Democrats' partisan gerrymander in Virginia: Congress has the power to ban partisan gerrymandering in congressional elections under its Article I, Section 4 powers. So far Republicans have been almost uniformly opposed. Is this going to change now?

There is a WILD ONE out of the 8th Cir. today about a man who stole another man's identity 30 years ago, lived all those years under the other man's identity including getting married and having a kid, who then got the other man prosecuted for identity theft. ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/26/04...

CA5 rules that there is no secular purpose requirement under the Establishment Clause. So when individuals act for religious reasons, their actions are treated as religious, triggering exemption claims; but when the state acts for religious reasons, its actions are ... well, nothing to see here ...

Delighted that my article "Supporting Comparative Studies of Judicial Behavior: Introducing the Australian High Court Database" with @palesl.bsky.social, Tonja Jacobi, and Russell Smyth is now published in the Journal of Law and Empirical Analysis, available here: tinyurl.com/859cdpa2 1/3

Most striking to me about these memos is the radically different assessment of the harm imposed by the president not being able to pursue his initiatives. Over the last 15 mos., that harm has in numerous cases been treated as almost per se serious and irreparable. Here, it gets no analysis at all.

John Roberts has destroyed the Voting Rights Act, ended affirmative action, implemented the unitary executive, used the shadow docket to further GOP interests, changed the first amendment to transform free exercise into religious supremacy, and end the establishment clause. Hubris all the way down.

Public confidence in SCOTUS has plummeted. There are many reasons for that, but a shadow docket that seems plagued with motivated reasoning & double-standards certainly isn't helping. Ultimately, public trust has to be earned. /fin www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...

"In public Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution.The papers reveal a different side of him.At a critical moment for the country and the court the papers show he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis"

Time for your periodic reminder not to sleep on state constitutions when making civil rights claims. Many states have broader protection than the U.S. Constitution offers.

My latest @slate.com tells the story of the Black Convention movement during Reconstruction & how it shaped the Reconstruction Amendments. With three huge 14A cases awaiting decision, it's time to heed Justice Jackson's call for a more inclusive history. slate.com/news-and-pol...

A man with HIV has gone into remission after receiving bone marrow from his brother, who has a rare mutation that prevents the function of receptors that HIV binds to

Honestly still in shock by its placement, but my article (and job talk paper), “Indigenous Constitutionalism,” is officially out in the Harvard Law Review. A brief thread on this project🧵 harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-13...