I grew up during this time and it is not for nothing that the major artistic responses of the 1980s openly grappled with this economic dislocation and malaise. Rap, of course, but even pop and country music, grappled with this decline.

@design-law.bsky.social is circulating a great explainer on “who owns the syllabus” in copyright law. I would note that there is an additional problem from an academic freedom standpoint from UNC’s policy which also states that the system retains instructional control over the syllabus.

A really important point to keep in mind: open.substack.com/pub/musgrave...

The first time I voted in a presidential election I voted for Bob Dole b/c of “welfare reform”. I pissed off every feminist I knew in law school (including me), by taking up for Monica Lewinsky. Lani Guiner was a Queen. The only Clinton that should have been President was Hillary.

Vought is one of the top three or four enemies of the Constitution & American democracy. His removal from power is one of the highest priorities for any project of checking the dictatorship's lawless wielding of the vast powers of the state

Take a deep breath Article 1: you can appropriate, you can name federal buildings, you can impeach, you can design public trusts to limit executive, you can abolish ICE.

As Speaker of the House, I would just authorize the Capitol Police to take it down on January 1, 2027. It is graffiti. As a citizen of DC, I might just start calling Cool Disco Don.

There is always a statute, folks. If you want to name things owned by the federal government you have to go through Congress. That is why we actually name how many post offices are named each year (68 in 2023-2024!). This is getting very awkward.

Congress appropriates the money and already had appropriated a change in housing allowance. And as I have noted before: where is President Trump placing all of the money he extracted from law firms and colleges? Is it in Treasury?

Again, even under the looser standards of due process within the administrative context, pleading the same way in deprives people of an individualized hearing. This is bad because the Administration has fired immigration judges that do not toe the line and abolished the immigration judge union.

The Christmas Trees look like they are holding this old man hostage on my TV and forcing him to yell at me. I mean, I like Christmas Trees, but these trees are a Junta of Trees.

I am pretty sure the manual lists 221 types of spiritual beliefs because the Department of Defense read the First Amendment. There is one group I don’t mess with when it comes to the Free Exercise: the Satanists. They will sue and win. Good luck with that suit!

This will be an important decision, not only for the CFPB, but for the Department of Education as well. Only Congress should be able to terminate an agency. And on this feed, as far as I am concerned USAID still exists as an agency waiting for Congress to appropriate it.

I would just note everyone hated on Healthcare Hakeem but a key part of politics is picking one subject and annoying everyone about it incessantly so you reach ubiquity. It is still why everyone knows that Bernie Sanders is for single payer healthcare.

I noted in February the Trump Administration would present lawyers with a dilemma: my job or my bar license? I am not sure these lawyers are incompetent but you really can’t put lipstick on a pig and call it law.

Decoration 👏🏽 Retribution👏🏽 Corruption👏🏽

As a Trusts and Estates Prof, my favorite moment is where the letter where they rejected the bid b/c the Ellisons are using a revocable trust to fund their bid. A revocable trust does not have to be fully fund at the time of the bid. Warner Bros is saying the Ellisons don’t have the money.

No. No. No! This is critical research. It's not even centered on climate. It's solar physics! It's geomagnetic storms! It's space weather! It's sunspots! It's a research center needed for satellites and spaceflight!

The three Decoration, Retribution, Corruption. The three priorities of Donald Trump…

Adding all data that the government collects in one big database is is illegal, and unlawful, and someone needs to sue Palantir. It has been very hard to track this story because the government is not publishing the notice and comment rulemaking required for such a major change.

The amazing amount of critique over Taylor Swift may be flowing from her commodification of what was always a pretty radical form: the female singer-songwriter. The whole point of Carole King, Roberta Flack, Emmy Lou Harris, Tracy Chapman was not to be a showgirl.

@anthonymkreis.bsky.social, this is just perfection. No notes.

One reason the GOP is repeatedly terrible at managing the economy is that they believe public sector jobs aren’t real jobs, & they demonize/defund the govt - at both the state & federal levels - every time they hold power. Only difference this time is how wildly illegally they’ve done it via DOGE.

"The newspaper industry served as a feeder for our entire news media ecosystem. So when we lose those newspapers, we've lost that journalism. In the early 2000s, we had 40 journalists per 100,000 people. We're now down to 8 journalists per 100,000 people," says @victorpickard.bsky.social.

Another explanation within a factual basis is private equity funds have entered into Brown and Black communities harmed by dispossession and will soon enter into Poor White communities harmed by environmental degradation and purchased these homes, forcing working families into a rental market.

What keeps happening is that crazy conservative legal theory keeps on getting ratioed by the Founders. It was a Revolution, folks.

I always say being a lawyer is like being a super hero. Note here: what is happening, though! You have to have a lawyer, a good lawyer, to bring a lawsuit to achieve what was happening as a matter of course. What happens to those potentially naturalized citizens who don’t have a lawyer?

What was funny about all of this I was like, we need to establish a National Trust to advocate for the American People and their plans for the White House. The National Trust for Historical Preservation: cough, cough.

Gosh, it seems to be a theme this morning: Trump Adminstration reduces individualized review for agency determination as an policy choice. This is going to be quite the mess to clean up on January 1, 2027.

I wrote this brief talk on why “augmenting diversity” with LLMs is empirically unsubstantiable, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful and a nice surprise to see the organisers have made it public synthetic-data-workshop.github.io/papers/13.pdf

Well, when the impeachment proceeding starts on January 1, 2027, we will know where to start.

Another example of how fucked originalism is as a methodology. Basically directly imports schmittian colonialism into the constitution, like hey there were some white guys who made an apartheid state and hoarded the weapons for themselves and so we have to read it like a settler colonial hoard law

We are seeing this tactic in patent litigation; currently, the USPTO is asserting all inter parties proceedings are decided by the Director.He then is declares that since all inter partes proceedings are unlawful, he will not grant a request for this inter partes proceedings.

Gender — and restrictive gender roles — are core to authoritarian projects. Society uses concepts of gender to sort people. Data both reflects and imposes these social definitions. Some notes from a speech about this last week: buttondown.com/stetdele/arc...

WTF is going on with people that I loved growing up. RIP Anthony Geary aka Luke Spencer 💔

@dorfonlaw.bsky.social astutely explains why I have been befuddled why University general counsel have reacted to the DEI order with such terror. An EO is scary because the government has the means to enforce it; the Department of Education fired 1365 people yesterday in the Civil Rights Division.

My problem with the SHADOW Docket is not substantive or procedural. I see it as a legitimatation crisis. What makes a democratic court different? It explains its reasoning in an opinion. And if you don’t bother to explain yourself as a court, you cede that power. It weakens you as a player.

I can’t even get the students to read the syllabus, much less indoctrinate them on various leftist whatnots. What I will say my biggest issue is well earned cynicism: the gap between Gen X and Alpha Generation is a belief in that politics can be functional.

It would throw gasoline on a fire precisely because President Trump is also wildly unpopular; the latest NBC noted that 23% of Americans view the threat to democracy as the primary reason why they dislike him; it was second only to the economy. Tearing down the East Wing was a little on the nose.

No one has told me where the crazy college “settlements” are going; apparently, a sticking point with Harvard “settlement” is exactly who will control where the payment goes…

You know who should be Time’s Person of Year—not a bunch of billionaires, for sure—but the American people, who stood on constitutional business against a government that decided to launch on an attack against decency in all forms.

What is the legal authority for ICE to say that valid IDs and passports are not sufficient vectors of identification and that they are allowed only to rely on databases that they have created with out any legal authority? This decision, my friends, seems to be a major question left to Congress?

I submitted a notice and comment letter on a similar effort to require state databases to collect data on SNAP recipients. The letter is here: downloads.regulations.gov/FNS-2025-002....

You know what trains have apparently? A way to travel where ICE isn’t building an unlawful Infrostructure to surveil the American people? I am pissed right now that crazy airport security measures post 9-11 have provided a rogue, lawless administrative agency access to our information?

I have been murmuring from months of about the abuse of the Infrostructure—government-provided information—who is giving ICE this information? Under what legal authority?

The Renew Deal!

One big correction: It is Ex Parte Hamilton, not Hamilton v. Alabama! Quite an active docket of Hamilton, but anyhoo: tminstituteldf.org/tmi-explains...

I can’t keep up, LOL. I made a joke about Judge Boasberg ten minutes ago.

Judge Boasberg is not the only judge who is going to be holding a contempt hearing. Imagine the emails Drew Ensigh got last night; I am surprised that President Trump has yet to order a corruption on Truth Social.