Excited to present today; any folks who know me online and want to meet offline, come say hello!

outcome: Judge Ellis orders agents to only use force when it is "objectively necessary to stop an immediate threat of the person causing serious bodily injury or death to another person", requires them to wear "conspicuous identification" in two separate places, and to activate bodycams.

The preceding post in this thread suggests to me that this is an admission of viewpoint discrimination that runs to the core of what First Amendment doctrine prohibits.

For the remarkable number of folks in excellent law firms, corporate suites, non-legal academia who still aren't really sure "where we are" country-wise, I'm just not sure how much clearer he can be. Countries in which opponents of the government can "never obtain power" are not democracies.

More than 200 people in the room for this @knightcolumbia.org panel on the future of press freedom. Thanks to @columbiajournalism.bsky.social for hosting!

The last month of the anti-Mamdani campaign was an absolutely shameful undertaking, an attempt to rip the city and Democratic coalition apart and I'm very happy to see it failed.

stay tuned

This is an unusually busy and anxious fall for me for a number of boring personal reasons, so I’m experiencing the news more as intermittent flashes of horror than as a steady drip of dread. Important to mix things up imo

the president has destroyed the east wing of the white house without so much as a word of input from anyone else to build a royal ballroom paid for with bribes

Relatedly, a savvy-coded account on here insisted it wasn’t feasible to block JD Vance into irrelevance—I continue to believe it was both good and effective to do so. Neither epistemic closure nor your mental health will be made better by “debates” with bad faith trolls on the internet.

Lotta people to be proud of today, but especially thrilled for the talented @chinmayiarun.bsky.social who has managed as Executive Director of the @yaleisp.bsky.social while also finishing her dissertation -- and turning it in today! Congratulations, Chinmayi!

From me in @lpeblog.bsky.social today: The lesson of the US investment in Intel is "public capital without accountability. The result is not sovereign wealth but corporate capture—an arrangement that entrenches incumbent power while eroding the state’s ability to direct economic development."

Incredible. If you grew up in Indiana, you know what a big deal this is.

🧵 This @bostonreview.bsky.social piece, like Bernard Harcourt's recent piece (linked here), is incredibly helpful in mapping the conceptual and (sorry) phenomenological terrain as people try to understand what Trump 2.0 represents for American constitutionalism, politics, & governance.

Now up on SSRN: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... Just in time to think about Section 2 VRA compliance minority-majority districting and the 14th/15th amendments. 👀

I learned a lot from this, and I think it's worth your time: come for the Alan Moore reference, stay for the rich historical literatures Evan consistently and rightly boosts.

Justice Kavanaugh in the Callais oral argument keeps alluding to some longstanding requirement of strict scrutiny that use of race have a time limit. This is invented.

The empty formalism used to constitutionally forbid diversity-enhancing or remedial action—that to “stop discriminating on the basis of race we must stop discriminating on the basis of race”—is possibly the most invidious trope the Roberts Court has cultivated in our modern legal culture.

"[T]he authorities rely on the memo’s mere existence to establish their essential point, which is that everything is as it should be . . . In that way, the document is not meant to be law. . . . Rather, it is meant to look like law, and by its existence, to establish legitimacy."

I wrote about how SCOTUS facilitates autocratic legalism, as Scheppele describes, by invoking democratic values while ruling in anti-democratic ways, in my piece Democracy Hypocrisy. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

And let us not forget

The Democratic presidential primary is going to be an absolute nightmare on this site.

The solution to the violent and wanton suppression of free speech is not to more considerately suppress it.

The weird snipe at @stevevladeck.bsky.social aside, Ilan misses the entire point that even the framers accepted the general idea of judicial oversight re: the president's deployment of military forces. Congress enacted a statutory regime. The president is bound by it. Courts have equitable powers.

This is a recurring tactic: use strangely fine distinctions to create logical epicycles which then function as wedges to disrupt settled law. He did the exact same thing by arguing that technical international law principles historically explain (and thus drive) how the Citizenship Clause operates.

The Trump Administration’s “Compact of Excellence” for Universities is... far from excellent! Indeed, it’s unconstitutional. In this post, let me count the ways. blog.dividedargument.com/p/the-uncons...

ICE all across the northwest side of Chicago with hotspots in Hermosa and Belmont Cragin. There is a recent development in Logan square as well around Central Park and armitage where videos and eyewitnesses are sharing tear gas thrown at protesters trying to intervene.

Check out my latest in @theatlantic.com, wherein I review EXTRACTION (@wwnorton.com), a dazzling new book by @triofrancos.bsky.social. I argue that it is "by far the most clear-eyed of mining’s many recent chronicles." www.theatlantic.com/books/2025/1...

In a sane world these institutions would band together and sue on First Amendment grounds. If unconstitutional conditions means anything, it means you can't unlawfully leverage funds to alter a recipient's conduct like this.

Transactional administration (“regulation by deal”) and an emergent friend-enemy logic is just a wretched combination for the health of both U.S. governance and civil society.

Our little AAUP chapter went 2/2 vs. Trump! Noem and Rubio…misused the sweeping powers of their offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their 1st Am protected political speech. They did so in order to strike fear into similarly situated non-citizens…

Just going to leave this here. I continue to believe that this whole thing is a catastrophe for legal scholarship, and I hope it doesn’t do any more damage. publications.lawschool.cornell.edu/lawreview/wp...

This is why the Dunning School analogy was made. Some folks were uneasy with it. Our interlocutors did not like it. It is fitting.

Just to take stock: the first claim was that there was an entire literature supporting the anti-birthright position. Then, *after* that claim, scholars emerged to post drafts on SSRN. And *now* the government points to a "growing body of modern scholarship" all drafted after the initial claim.

Put together some thoughts here. In an earlier time he would have been the kind of writer being paid $5 a word by magazines to go write about whatever he pleased. And no one would be pissed off or jealous about it either. www.welcometohellworld.com/life-is-a-pr...

This only happens to you once

This is a ridiculously broad understanding of the President's foreign affairs powers -- that the Executive Branch experiences "harms to [its] conduct of foreign affairs" when it is must spend foreign aid money appropriated in a bill signed by the President. Whither Congress's power of the purse?

This is an infuriating and shameful scandal. The Roberts Court is condoning Trump’s law breaking, again, pure and simple. There is no serious path forward for democratic government without Supreme Court reform.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court keeps in place Trump funding freeze that threatens billions of dollars in foreign aid.

I don't really know how to write about free speech and competitive authoritarianism in a scholarly way when this administration is adding new, crucial evidence every single day.

Good column. This conceptual error is of a piece with the error made by many (though not all) originalists in conceiving of the Constitution as a lock box with a fixed meaning to be deciphered deductively, like a puzzle, rather than a contested resource for structuring and arguing about politics.

From beginning to end, this is an utter horror show for academic freedom.

This is well done.

Professor Post is right. I'm currently working through similar issues in what I hope will be a law review article, but I think the reality is this: we can't assess whether First Amendment doctrine can slow our free speech crisis by de-contextualizing it from our greater *institutional* crisis.

What we might refer to as a Kavanaugh Raid

Just unbelievably evil and lawless.

fubar

"Fischer later learned from the owner of the company that all five of the detained workers were documented."