Ditto for the new trend of people referring to their beliefs or actions as "legally protected". That's not what we're arguing about!

I’ve tweeted about this probably a hundred times, but since we’re doing the discourse again, here ya go

Bob Katter AND Shah of Iran jumpscare in as many paragraphs, truly a rich text

The paper is a formal look at a perennial problem: how is the doctrine of precedent supposed to constrain, if cases can always be reinterpreted and (at the limit) confined to their facts?

My article "Distinguishing and Reinterpreting in the Reason Model of Precedent" is now available Open Access in Legal Theory (I don't love the HTML formatting, so I recommend downloading the PDF): www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

It's sort of adjacent to several recent conversations on here but I think most centrist/ centre-right liberals don't see how badly the failure to defend trans rights would discredit liberalism.

I hadn’t read this story before and it’s jaw dropping. I know a lot of UK academics follow me on here and can I please say - I really hope you’re speaking out against this. Even if it’s just raising your objections to colleagues, pulling aside senior people for a quiet word and expressing concern

I just wanted to say something publicly in support of Sophie Grace Chappel, who is (again) being subjected to disgraceful attacks on her academic integrity. I think she is a fine philosopher and will do a great job on the REF panel. The UK and Open University are lucky to still have her.

Relatedly, it is misleading to say that the IOC policy restricts the categories to "biological sex". Something like the notion of "sport sex" (which is what they argued before CAS in Semenya) would be more felicitous.

Something to bear in mind is that the IOC has not disclosed the members of its working group on protection of the sex category. I have been looking for more expert statements in support of IOC policy but haven't seen any (yet). There are scientists who support it who will no doubt make statements.

The story of what happened to the ANU in the past few years is very sad but there is something darkly comic about Genevieve Bell's institute getting money from Meta to write a report on the 'Cybernetic approaches to the Metaverse" only for the Metaverse to be killed off.

My review of John Horty's "The Logic of Precedent" has been published in Ethics. It's a great, important book. This will probably not come as a surprise to people because Horty writes very good books. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... (DM me for a draft).

'Garbage in and garbage out.' No surprises in the 4 Corners investigation into consulting companies used by #AustralianUniversities Trying to moosh Art and Humanities into the same workload model as Science and Engineering is doomed to failure www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

I'm going to start a thread collating expert responses to the IOC's sex testing policy. Please feel free to reply with additions. I'm more interested in the views of scientists than lawyers or philosophers, but everything counts.

Law school grades are predictive of lawyers' incomes. But Gabriele Plickert and I found that women with the highest grades earned LESS than lower-achieving men in private practice.

We had only written the pilot of Halt and Catch Fire when we read Soul of the New Machine. That book had a huge impact not only on the content of our show, but the tone. The humanity at the center of the work. The book is still on my desk and will be forever. We owe Tracy a lot.

Here is the British Journal of Sports Medicine's consensus statement after the World Athletics announcement: a "harmful anachronism" bjsm.bmj.com/content/60/7...

Sex testing will harm cis women and girls far more than it harms anyone else.

In my experience the best way to convince a normal person (i.e. someone who might even be weakly "gender critical" but does not hate trans people) of the importance of trans inclusion is to ask them to think about the life they would want for their own child if they were trans.

This is heartbreaking. Please stop for a moment and consider the children caught up in this. Imagine you're a trans child - already a difficult experience, to put it mildly - and you've found a hobby you enjoy with friends, and now you're being kicked out for being trans. It's cruel.

A shortish note from me on intersex conditions and the Equality Act 2010. robmullins.substack.com/p/intersex-c...

A shortish note from me on intersex conditions and the Equality Act 2010. robmullins.substack.com/p/intersex-c...

I agree here with @johnquiggin.bsky.social: ‘Despite much confused talk about “left behind” voters, the rise of One Nation, reflected in the South Australian election represents, quite simply, a split in the Liberal Party…’ johnquiggin.com/2026/03/23/t...

Does anyone know what is happening at Philosophy & Public Affairs? Is it still a journal that people should take seriously for submissions etc, or is there an embargo on publishing there? I've lost track of the editorial dispute from a while back.

One of the hallmarks of a failed institution is that its management will try *desperately* to do things it’s not that good at, while giving up on its rare excellences. It happens in art galleries, museums, universities. Perhaps libraries, too.

Antoinette has just died and highkenuinely Georges Danton is very interested in Teen Jacobin.

I just want to say, because I happened to stumble upon her work last year and have found it enormously helpful, that I think Rach Cosker-Rowland's book is excellent and I recommend it highly. It helped me understand gender identity.

Australia is doing ok but I'm sorry to say I don't think we've defeated populism and we are probably a decade or so away from some kind of truly demented bunyip populism that will make the UK's politics look civilized. I really hope I'm wrong.

😵‍💫

This afternoon I am appearing in court as the victim of a beating I received in the street. I informed HR, as it happened on my way to work. I never received an acknowledgment. Universities are structurally craven, and will not reliably support minoritised employees.

I still love the last page of Kelsen's Pure Theory. I think more debates about legal interpretation should use it as a starting point.

Adjacent to the horrible Chavez revelations, but I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the figures taken down by the "me too" movement were liberals. (Weinstein was famously a donor/bundler for the Democrats.) The counterinsurgency took off when conservatives realised a precedent was set.

I think this story is helping me understand why the generation Dolores Huerta inspired was so strongly tied to the idea that activism should be intersectional before anything else. It's not a buzzword, it's about keeping abusers out of your movement

It's not my thing, personally, but it is important that once in a while someone publishes a book arguing that Shakespeare was gay, or that his wife wrote his plays, or that she was a Black woman, just so that the usual suspects can foam at the mouth and write irate rebuttals.

Dolores Huerta's statement on Cesar Chavez: “I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for... I can no longer stay silent and must share my own experiences"

On the one hand, I do think academic freedom is really important its protection should be indiscriminate. On the other hand, if there is a case for banning anything it is "race science".

I may as well keep repeating that the UK is walking briskly down this same path and, unless courts and parliaments act quickly to pull it out of this barrel roll it won't just be be trans people who are hurt.

low-priority for the third reconstruction, but something we should do: abolish every such center at a public university and force the universities (under new leadership) to redirect the budget to hiring faculty in the real departments you don't get to keep the public funds you stole

The UK in a period of "autocratization", according to the V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 v-dem.net/publications...

If there is a strand that unites several fronts of the culture wars at once, it is the idea of "naturalness": "natural" childbirth, "natural" puberty, "natural" death.

My handbook chapter on arguing from precedent (and arguing about precedent) has been published: www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/b... . I don't think I'm allowed to share a preprint but DM/email me for an earlier draft. There are other, better chapters (Lucas Miotto's is my favourite.)

I feel like most professionals (including legal professionals) need to receive undergraduate training in how to read scientific papers, evidence reviews etc. I don't really know how to do it, although I've tried to teach myself. But you see these sorts of basic errors all the time.

Check the date

Geese thought they had come up with a great viral marketing campaign for gens z and alpha. But I'm sorry to say they are a dad band. We've claimed them. The stink won't wash off.

1/ A short thread on my post. I've been travelling and wanted to make some additional points. ukconstitutionallaw.org/2026/03/09/r...

Colin and his colleagues have been doing terrific work trying to explain why UK equality law has shifted away from the ECJ jurisprudence on gender. It's not the most important thing by any measure, but the court spelling this out so clearly vindicates their work.

Today's CJEU decision in Shipova has major implications for legal protections for trans people in Northern Ireland, where relevant EU law still applies. First the Court underlines that different treatment of trans people vs biological sex is not generally acceptable: share.google/MKNxuwd2oXHB...

I read this debate today in Susan's honour. It's well worth a read.

Susan Haack, a leading epistemologist and philosopher of logic, passed away yesterday. Sit ei terra levis news.miami.edu/as/stories/2...