Somehow, according to the SCOTUS majority, perceived, possible, might-happen, could-be harms to the Trump Admin are always worse than actual harms experienced by people who lack resources or recourse.

I don't give a shit about Comey, but I give several shits about the president actually and personally using the carceral state as a vehicle for his petty grievances against individuals he doesn't like. You shouldn't risk jailtime if the president finds you irksome ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...

I'd like to commend the lawyers who wrote this complaint on behalf of the professors and employees of the University of California against the Trump administration. It's a sober legal document with strong claims, but also, this is a fight for public opinion, and this reads like the writers know it.

Coates is excellent here. And the headline writer understood the assignment.

The Dept of Education is now accepting comments on a proposed rule that would overhaul Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and make it too expensive for students to go into work that threatens the Trump administration Folks have til *Sept. 17* to oppose the changes ballsandstrikes.org/legal-cultur...

For the record. My posts were not even about Kirk directly, but about America's apathy towards political violence, and the coddling of white male shooters and hate peddlers. I was fired because I mentioned race: white men and violence-- that was my "gross misconduct."

Oxford University Press is introducing an AI summarisation & quizzing asst. into their law textbook ‘trove’: it took considerable effort from our Fac+Library to have them engineer in a license-level off switch (they initially refused!). They did not clock how important the skill of summarisation is.

This has been the Supreme Court in a nutshell: where clear and immediate harm has been done by Trump to others, they delay and prevaricate, siding with Trump. Even if later deemed to be illegal, the damage is already done and Trump gets his way.

"Harvard can't use race as a factor in admissions, but ICE can use race as a factor in detentions" is a retrenchment essentially to a pre-Civil War understanding of the Constitution. It's vanishingly few steps removed from "Latinos have no rights which the white man is bound to respect."

Sotomayor on the impact: "The Government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, U. S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction."

"Fueling Jewish studies on the fumes of the Trump administration’s attack on higher education is not a win. It’s a trap, and one we fear will bring ill consequences to our field, our universities, and American Jews." Me, @ronitstahl.bsky.social, and Kate Rosenblatt. www.chronicle.com/article/jewi...

"But fueling Jewish studies on the fumes of the Trump administration’s attack on higher education is not a win. It’s a trap, and one we fear will bring ill consequences to our field, our universities, and American Jews." From @lilacb.bsky.social, Kate Rosenblatt, and me.

Amazing, unusually direct rebuke to Gorsuch and Kavanaugh from Judge Burroughs. She is, of course, entirely correct.

The conclusion reached by Judge Burroughs:

Yep, Jessica Martucci has written about the development of Catholic theology on treating ectopic pregnancies: the doctrine of double effect led to permitting salpingectomies (tube removal) but not methotrexate (considered “direct abortion”). muse.jhu.edu/article/893319

NEW: Tenure-track position in History at UC Berkeley in the GLOBAL HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY. We are casting a wide net here: *all* periods, places, and fields are under consideration. I'm on the search committee, so do let me know if you have questions.

If "beautification" or even cleanliness were the actual goal, the federal government could do something radical like hire local folks to do this work full-time, year-round, with good salaries and benefits.

The Supreme Court’s conservatives bear SO much blame for this disaster. They really thought they could let Trump fire every agency leader EXCEPT members of the Fed, and Trump would abide by their stern admonition to leave the Fed alone. Embarrassing stupidity. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08...

I haven't seen it emphasized enough, but it's important to take a step back from Trump's ongoing seizure of autocratic power to see it's all emergency politics. All of it. The Constitution is being suspended bit by bit the same way autocrats have always eliminated them: declaring fake emergencies.

Luttig is communicating vastly more clearly and honestly about Roberts and Scotus than most Democratic officials are. It’s absolutely flabbergasting.

The next American Political History Conference will be in DC next June and will once again be open to historians from different arenas. Submission deadline is Dec. 31, 2025.

As a DC native and current Oakland resident: 🤯 Let it be known that I just took a stroll through my neighborhood w/o incident. I also walk around at night, by myself, w/o issue. Is there crime? Yes. Have I experienced property crime? Yes. Do I want federal intervention? Absolutely not.

“The court’s steady effort to make the law [VRA] an artifact of the past is of a piece with its broad expansion of executive power for the current president. Both work to undermine the basis for this more politically equal era of American democracy and clear the path to an American autocracy.”

Nope. Did AI write this? "Generative AI allows seemingly limitless possibilities for assignments that cultivate crucial literacies." Let's revise: "Generative AI allows seemingly limitless possibilities for assignments that thwart crucial literacies and critical thinking skills."

The Brown "deal" is bad for serious reasons (see below). And it includes a ridiculous provision of "outreach" to Jewish day schools as if Jewish day schools are not aware of Brown. Jewish day schools are college prep schools. They all know about Brown. This is not where college outreach $ should go.

AP article, middle of page 3 in today’s Strib: airdrops of aid to Gaza are dangerous & inefficient

Oh hey! Can't wait to get a copy of this reader (which features an article co-authored by @ronitstahl.bsky.social and myself).

I understand why American Jews have concerns about rhetoric coming from the pro-Palestine movement. I understand feeling upset by how some responded to 10/7. But American Jews who, at this moment, still deny all war crimes and famine in Gaza, will be looked on by history like Holocaust deniers.

This is enraging. SCOTUS shadow dockets the end of another agency’s independence. The majority refuses to call it precedent, because they know that would be laughable on its face. They just say one like ruling “control[s]” another. And you, district judges, need to figure out if it’s so.

This really breaks my heart. It also reminds me of a work thing where I was asked to opine on public tech. The resident billionaire in the room became VISCERALLY angry when I used public media as a model for how we could build a mission driven, interest oriented response to social media 😭😭

What Democrats Must Do is find leaders & spokespeople who can explain to the public that the policies they want will <only> ever happen if <first> there are major institutional reforms that fundamentally fix our broken legislative, electoral, & judicial institutions.

let's take stock here: (Democratic) Presidents, via the Dept of Education, can't cancel student debt because statutes don't clearly authorize it. Republican Presidents can cancel/shut down the Dept of Education because, even though only Congress can shut down departments ..., ... 🤷‍♀️ YOLO?

The SCOTUS conservative majority continues to view harm in the most wildly incongruent way: not allowing the president to speedily dismantle a federal agency is somehow more harmful than pausing to let a court review (or, say, let Congress* halt) the process. *lol, if only

I’m loathe to acknowledge that I might not hate Word’s new(ish) default font (Aptos). I can’t tell if it’s just significantly better than the Calibri monstrosity or actually good. But I have now used it without poking my eyes out or immediately changing it. (Yes, I am years late on this change 🤷🏻‍♀️)

7/“What hurts the most is not just losing our jobs, but the loss of an institutional voice that once stood for the core ideals of U.S. foreign policy: human rights, democracy, and accountability. That voice is now being silenced. Not by necessity. Not by accident. But by choice.”

"[The district court's] temporary, practical, harm-reducing preservation of the status quo was no match for this Court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture" - Justice Jackson, dissenting.

If the Supreme Court cared about either precedent or the Establishment Clause, this would be a violation of Texas Monthly v Bullock, or if it cared about viewpoint neutrality, Rosenberger v. Virginia. Alas … welcome to the new preferentialism. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/u...

Reading the Mahmoud decision and thinking of this excellent 2015(!) article by @ronitstahl.bsky.social "Does pluralism mean everyone gets exactly what he or she wants, or does pluralism mean giving up a little to be part of a larger whole? Who gives up more?" tif.ssrc.org/2015/01/14/t...

3. I'm tempted to give hypos about the logical extension of the opinion (can an unmarried woman go by "Ms." instead of "Miss") but what's the point? The only logical consistency that matters is that the trans person loses.

The holding in Mahmoud that strict scrutiny applies even if the no-opt-out policy is neutral and generally applicable is a nuclear bomb.

There's a real throughline across this term's cases of "but the children" when the conservative SCOTUS majority wants to promote its preferences (LGBTQ-positive books, porn, etc) and "such is life, kids" when they want to impose harm (birthright citizenship, gender-affirming care, etc).

Harm is only what *we* think it is. On the one hand, parents have the right to "protect" their kids (and by extension, prevent other people’s kids) from encountering Pride Puppies at school. On the other hand, parents have no right to get gender-affirming care for their kid if the state says nah.

When Obergefell was decided a decade ago, the Christian right immediately declared it the new Roe, pledging to eventually overrule it, even if that meant, like with Roe, they would spend decades chipping away at LGBTQ equality in a multitude of ways. They got a chip with Mahmoud v Taylor today

The Supreme Court has neutered the ability of every other federal court to stop Trump's lawless decrees.

KBJ's Medina dissent highlights the twin prongs of the pro-democracy vision she's been articulating since joining SCOTUS: generally deferring to Congress's will and specifically reading Reconstruction-era civil rights laws as robustly as their framers intended: www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...

See now personally I think if you care about antisemitism and living in a society that’s safe for all people, you should come out and say that this is racist, conspiratorial, generally despicable, and outrageous.

“I don’t like his politics so we should remove his citizenship.” This is who they are.

Important to read this decision in the context of longer-term efforts by SCOTUS to chip away at private enforcement of civil rights & social welfare laws. I'll put a bunch of relevant background reading in the thread 🧵:

In her furious dissent, Jackson writes of the Supreme Court's decision: "The project of stymying one of the country’s great civil rights laws continues." She likens today's ruling to notorious decisions after the Civil War cutting back civil rights statutes. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...

I deleted my NARA II post because it contributed to the panic, which was unproductive. However. It was clearly easy to believe that Trump et al would shut down access to federal archives. Knowledge is a powerful force, which is why they are trying to destroy cultural & intellectual institutions.