Virginia is one of only 2 states (the other is South Carolina) that uses legislative appointments for its state supreme court judges. news.ballotpedia.org/2025/03/18/a...

Idk if y’all are following the Canvas hack story, but apparently whoever hacked it is holding each uni’s access to canvas for ransom. Grades are due for graduation and no one can log on. 😬

Important corrective to influential article

It is pretty striking to see the speed with which the Court wants to implement this rule — as opposed to the delay it exhibited in other pressing cases in the recent past, like Texas’s abortion ban or the Trump immunity decision.

Quite a remarkable exchange between Justice Alito (concurring) and Justice Jackson (dissenting) respecting the Supreme Court’s decision to issue the judgment in the Louisiana redistricting case immediately: www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Gilens' data shows responsiveness to low-income public opinion for both issues where affluent favor change more & less. Seeming lack of responsiveness is due to a higher rate of policy change when the rich favor more Article: sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13... Post: medium.com/3streams/one...

Hains Point is a national treasure & a beloved civic space for hundreds of thousands of Americans who live in DC. The community golf course & surrounding parklands need maintenance, but not at cost of permanent loss of public access for all public uses. www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2026/...

I am back. And I have seen the self-parodic antics of these NIMBYs. Imagine being a titled professor at Princeton University and accusing an inclusionary housing development of being "a monument to conspicuous privilege"!?! They will say literally anything. They have no shame!!

The RBG cult is very weird and it's important to smash its icons. Souter retired at age 70, healthy for that age, because he wanted Obama to replace him. In 2013 (the obvious time to retire, Dems ran Senate) Ginsberg had beaten cancer several times, was 80 years old, and... just rolled the dice!

Totally unprecedented for a Supreme Court justice to cite a tendentious statistic that purportedly supports their predetermined preferred outcome. bsky.app/profile/devi...

The decision in Louisiana v. Callais claims, "By 2004, the racial gap in voter registration and turnout had largely disappeared.... Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate" (26–27). This is misleading: White turnout remains much higher than non-White.

Strange choice for the Washington Post to publish some generic NIMBY-ism about a small town in Central New Jersey. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Lots of alternative approaches to districting. But none will work without Supreme Court reform, because the Supreme Court is highly likely to strike down proportional representation, a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering, or anything. The text of the Constitution does not matter to them, sadly.

Just a reminder that in Shelby County, Roberts told us not to worry about the loss of VRA preclearance, because we’d still have VRA sec. 2 suits. That was, of course, disingenuous nonsense even at the time. Now, with Brnovich and Calllais, it’s all the more so.

1/ As far as I can tell, the only thing Randy has posted about Renee Good or Alex Pretti is to complain that Jonathan Last referred to their murders as state terrorism. He openly mocks Obama's reaction to the murder of Trayvon Martin, in the process accusing Obama himself of violent leanings.

Many thanks to Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Wioletta Dziuda, and Anthony Fowler for inviting me on the Not Another Politics Podcast to discuss bargaining on the Supreme Court. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i... jkastellec.scholar.princeton.edu/document/166

Just a reminder that past motives for assassination attempts have included: "because the ghost of William McKinley told me to," "to save the trees" and "to impress Jodie Foster."

From our FirstView: Replication of “Instrumentally Inclusive: The Political Psychology of Homonationalism” (Turnbull-Dugarte and López Ortega 2024) by @dandekadt.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1017/S000...

Tragic and heart-breaking. Why we must not let our guard down - measles is terribly contagious and can and will come roaring back if we let it.

Once again I am begging my fellow legal academics to remember that judges are the objects of our study, not our bosses, priests, or revered elders.

I don’t know much of anything about the rules of professional responsibility for lawyers, so I defer to my friend @stephenesachs.bsky.social on the details. But if a reporter reporting out a story violates the rules of professional responsibility, so much the worse for the rules.

I agree with much of this, but it seems to me that your fourth point leaves some serious--dare I say scandalous--questions as to why the Court does not seem more alarmed now than it was then. The things you say *we* now know seem to have escaped the current majority's notice.

I don't really care f someone uses it or not but, I don't think a lot of anti-AI people on bluesky realize what outliers they are in mainstream society.

All graphs are comparisons, and the relevance of this principle to practical advice for producing better graphs statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/04/12/a...

Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest, by Henri Rousseau, 1905, via @garrett_TFE

"7 prominent law professors" has some big toothpaste commercial energy

🚨 TRUMP: “I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks.”

1/2 Here's the thing about the fund nothing option ... it still relies on some sort of internalized sense in the executive branch that it ought to follow the law. Or, put differently ...

It's @professormusgrave.bsky.social o'clock again, alas

Under the baseline scenario, the median justice doesn't return to the center of the political spectrum until after 2050

I used Claude Code to build an website that implements the simulations presented in "Making in the Supreme Court: The Politics of Appointments, 1930-2020" (with Chuck Cameron) that predict the composition of the Supreme Court under different scenarios. jkastellec.github.io/msc-simulator/

Very cool, and a useful tool for legal scholars to game out the future composition of SCOTUS.

I used Claude Code to build an website that implements the simulations presented in "Making in the Supreme Court: The Politics of Appointments, 1930-2020" (with Chuck Cameron) that predict the composition of the Supreme Court under different scenarios. jkastellec.github.io/msc-simulator/

In the April @apsa.bsky.social ejobs release, we're still tracking a 30% decline in political science tenure track jobs since 2023-24.

It's almost like there is a trade-off between loyalty and competence 🤔

How should scholars who study American politics change what they do in a political time like ours? I'm skeptical it will get much circulation on this site, but in a new review, I critique the emerging turn toward a kind of political advocacy mixed with research. myumi.ch/w9R2W

From our FirstView articles: The Path of Law: Legal Uncertainty and Issues of First Impression in the U.S. Courts of Appeals by @anthonytaboni.bsky.social . doi.org/10.1017/S000...

The Madisonian system with extreme levels of party polarization AND where the majority party can't effectively coordinate even during periods of unified government really is the worst.

Do you need to measure precise preferences for visual outcomes with very little survey space? Markus Prior, Justin Curl, and I have some solutions for you! Now officially published in @polanalysis.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/pan....

1/ It's not just that unilaterally paying TSA agents is illegal. It's that Trump has now repeatedly undermined the core of the congressional power of the purse. He's not spending money that has been appropriated by law (impoundments) and he's spending money that has not been appropriated.

I really enjoyed writing this review of state interest group scholarship with Tom Holyoke for SPPQ (not to say writing isn't usually "fun"). In our view there's good research emerging in recent years on interest group mobilization, how lobbyists matter and interest group effects on policymaking.

war_iran_final-blow_v1.pdf war_iran_final-final-blow-v2.pdf war_iran_final-blow-no edits.pdf war_iran_final-blow-no edits (1).pdf war_iran_final-blow-no edits (1) APPROVED.pdf IRANWARPLANSFINALFINALFINAL.pdf IRANWARPLANSFINALFINALFINAL (1).pdf

From our FirstView article: The Political Transformation of Corporate America, 2001–2022 by REILLY S. STEEL doi.org/10.1017/S000...

I remember when back in the 90s the spring breakers they interviewed were never ignorant. They would debate interpretations of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Einstein’s refusal to recognize quantum mechanics.

"What kind of TSA PreCheck Member are you"

Posted without comment…

Professor Wurman seems to relish in calling me a bad academic who doesn’t sufficiently extend good faith presumptions and scholarly charity. He also demands I produce evidence in real time. Fairs. So, Ilan Wurman, I’d like you to meet Ilan Wurman.

Every article I read about sports betting--and the McKay Coppins piece is an excellent one--just makes me more and more convinced that we need to ban this scourge. And that we shouldn't sleep on Murphy v. NCAA in the pantheon of Terrible Roberts Court Decisions. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...