You know what feels good? Walking into the Tarlton law library at the University of Texas law school to do a little research and seeing this glorious portrait of Heman Sweatt. Sweatt v Painter was a pivotal case in desegregating public education. The case, and Mr. Sweat, deserve this recognition.

Mantra: Learn to use AI. Do not use AI to learn.

Expand the court, yes, but also make the court into rotating terms drawn from the circuits, panels of 5-7 justices that are determined after cert is granted so petitioners don't know their judges in advance and so can enforce ethics recusals.

My five things are: 1. Multimember districts with proportional distribution of House seats by party. 2. Expand the House. 3. Guarantee voting rights for all (DC and PR included) 4. Reduce authority of the Senate. 5. Increase pay and professional staff for House members. 2/3

Everything is awful, but a new paper with @profjvross.bsky.social provides new evidence that state court chief justices are much more like academic department chairs than ideologically-driven seekers of policy outcomes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I have a little bit of time to kill so I’m going to start a thread on the Spanish Inquisition that I probably won’t finish today. I’m trying to tell an interesting story to people who might not know a lot about this stuff and also I don’t work here so I’ll probably be making some generalizations.

Context for gerrymandering debate “How responsive/congruent is state policy with state public opinion” is one of the most studied poli sci questions Red & blue states both passed more 'extreme' policy in recent decades. Blue state policy shifts were aligned with state opinion. Red states’ weren’t

Buffoonery aside, I think a lot of Americans can't process that multiple generations of Germans renounce and revile past actions rather than treat them as an aspect of of their culture that must be maintained.

NEW: ALA salutes Dr Carla Hayden for her exceptional service to the nation as the Librarian of Congress. We are deeply disappointed in Dr Hayden's abrupt & unjust dismissal last night, an insult to the scope & breadth of her work. Read ALA Pres. Cindy Hohl's statement: www.ala.org/news/2025/05...

Dr. Hayden has been such a transformative and inspiring Librarian for the past decade. If you haven't had the privilege to spend time with LC staff, you may not realize what a sea change she brought to our national library. One of the all-time greats. A huge loss for millions and millions.

The key is not limiting the actions of lawmakers, but structuring a party system so the radicals who would welcome authoritarianism are kept out of coalitions of power. At least for now, we see this working in Germany's hybrid party-list PR / plurality vote system

The biggest reason why I dislike the idea of respectability in dress is because it conflates the *appearance* of virtue with *actual* virtue. Wearing a suit doesn't make you respectful, intelligent, or capable, just as wearing a leather jacket doesn't make you rugged.

The exchange between Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy in the Oval Office today in which our country attacked the victim in defense of a brutal aggressor has to be one of the most shameful moments in Modern American history.

It is not within our modern constitutional tradition for the Executive Branch to make no apparent effort to conform its behavior to law. This is an incredibly dangerous development, indeed a "crisis" in any reasonable sense of that word, regardless of what courts do. (fin)

I teach NYT v. Sullivan in my intro class because it's important for them to know this ruling is what gives them the right to broadly criticize public officials without worrying about being harassed via lawsuit by the rich and powerful. It would be devastating to free speech to overturn Sullivan.

saw this circulating on Instagram the other day and I can’t stop thinking about it. “Who cares anymore what particular knot they used in the binding?” is such a perfectly expressed repudiation of the “economic anxiety” framing

Auschwitz was at the end of a long process. It did not start from gas chambers. This hatred was gradually developed by humans. From ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder. Auschwitz took time.

My dad was tortured by the Gestapo for 4 days and thrown in a concentration camp for being in the Norwegian Resistance. Growing up, he would tell me things he learned in the Resistance. I thought, I'm never going to need this stuff. Here's some of those things #Thread

We didn’t have any semblance of a democracy until 1965 for those that forget.

forgive and forget, but "did you support the iraq war" remains an almost perfect predictor of "are you an asshole over 20 years later"

I didn’t leave X because people there had different opinions and ideologies, I left because it stopped being fun. I get on social media to chat with people who think thinking is fun. X stopped being a place where that was true.

I’m sorry, I know we’re all distracted and busy but you don’t get to try and sneak “swang” by us today.

I guess it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president wapo.st/3UqHWRM

If you're at the airport and the pilot says he's going to crash the plane, you refuse to board. You don't say "well, he says lots of crazy things and the first officer will keep him from doing anything too dangerous." We can argue about the exact probabilities, but you wouldn't get on that plane.

Optimist: the cup is 1/2 full Pessimist: the cup is 1/2 empty Judicial Politics scholars: the cup is as full as the ideological majority on the US Supreme Court says it is

Uh it’s definitely been charted

But that IS gender! The “small and weak” critique hits Trump in a specific way because his claim has always been traditional male power over. And Harris as prosecutor was presented as strong in defense and protection of others.

The kids murdered in the Sandy Hook school should have been voting this year.

the kids have repeatedly said they want to stay up past their bedtime, but their parents have not let them do that; therefore, it is an exaggeration to claim that the kids want to stay up past their bedtime

If you only trust election results when you/your candidate wins, you don’t respect election results. And headlines should reflect that.

There is a lot of research on this. Learning about racism doesn't make white kids feel guilty. Here is what it does. Summary of some of the studies here: fivethirtyeight.com/features/wha...

Without even clicking the link, I’ll guess the reason — all the talk of racism makes white kids feel guilty. Again, if your kids are reading histories of slavery or segregation and identifying with the racists in the story, that suggests you’ve got your own problems to work through. Leave us out.

The Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority didn't happen overnight. This is the inside story of how Leonard Leo built a machine that reshaped the American judiciary and legal system.

This is one of the most dystopian signs I've ever seen. Republicans are quickly turning this country into an unrecognizable freakshow.

Anyhow, now I have to find some motivation to keep teaching students about American democratic institutions as if they still matter.

The idea that Biden is uniquely doomed and any other Democrat is guaranteed to beat Trump was always Aaron Sorkin fantasyland

the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on corruption is basically at a point where the only thing that counts as a bribe is someone handing a public official a giant bag of money with a dollar sign on it while saying “this is a bribe” out loud

America isn't a conservative country. It's a center-left country with a democracy problem.

If you saw the Senate in another country, you'd think it was a preposterously undemocratic institution leedrutman.substack.com/p/wither-the...