I think it’s fine that the justices sell books. I think it’s not fine that they stay on the Court for life.

I generally agree, at least in the absence of clear congressional blessing.

Most striking to me about these memos is the radically different assessment of the harm imposed by the president not being able to pursue his initiatives. Over the last 15 mos., that harm has in numerous cases been treated as almost per se serious and irreparable. Here, it gets no analysis at all.

This is an especially useful exercise in law, where the power of the state routinely rests on inherited wisdom. Interrogating those claims and tracing their genealogy is a great pedagogical exercise for students and can provide for a great paper for scholars.

Probably safe to delete "said she".

An extraordinary document.

I do think some critics of the academy simply misapprehend--or apprehend but wilfully misdescribe--what teaching is, and conflate exposure with indoctrination. Some of this is just incognizance, but some is opportunism or projection from people with authoritarian personalities (in Adorno's sense).

It is true that there's a dearth of conservative faculty. I wish there were more, but this seems to me less an intellectual or epistemic problem than a political and social one, since it makes universities easy political targets and deters conservative students.

This thread seems just right to me. I learned economics from Marty Feldstein and Greg Mankiw. This is not unusual. There is also LOTS of teaching of conservative ideas by non-conservatives, just as many conservatives teach progressive ideas. Good teachers teach the field, not their personal views...

So much on my mind, I just can't recline,
Blastin' holes in the night 'til she bled sunshine.

Academic work can be bad or misconceived or subject to partisan capture, of course, but a field’s misalignment with the political spectrum outside the field isn’t reliable evidence of that.

It’s obvious on reflection but bears occasional repeating that there’s no reason to think the ideological spectrum of professionally validated academic work should align with the contemporary political spectrum. Sometimes it’s left of it and sometimes right….

Constitutional double jeopardy doesn't generally apply across jurisdictions, but I wonder if an exception would be made if, e.g., a state just said any federal conviction automatically, as such, gives rise to a state prosecution. This isn't that, but may raise similar concerns. Not my area.

At a blush I'd think the strongest arguments against it would be (1) a Supremacy Clause argument a la McCulloch (state is specifically burdening the exercise of federal power) or (2) more weakly, a double jeopardy argument grounded in the state prosecution being parasitic on federal conviction. . .

I agree! Though I also think the personal politics of a professor is a *very* noisy signal of which ideas they expose their students to.

Tbf, there are few social problems in 2026 A.D. bigger than the suppression of conservative ideas. Like, has anyone heard from Heritage lately?

Quote post with something good that lasted longer than the Confederacy (1861-1865)

ThunderCats (1/1985-9/1989)

You might also not put babies in prison when they immigrate here.

The great Chris Fonzone lays out in detail just how lacking OLC's recent PRA opinion is in compelling or responsible legal analysis.

Rewarded with the famous.... jeweled iphone??

NBA playoffs off to a helluva start. What a game!

I often emphasize that the internet makes us conflate the virality of a phenomenon with its actual prevalence, which is both extremely socially destructive and extremely difficult to deprogram.

What would be the consequence of the Court refusing to uphold it? What would the remedy be?

Electoral College cartogram showing which states are in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and which ones could join in time for it to activate by 2028. Each state is sized and labeled according to its number of electoral votes. The states are spaced out enough to accommodate the changes in size but retain their general shapes and relative positions on the map. Current members are in solid orange, potential members are in light green, and nonmembers that are unlikely to join are in medium gray. Members have 222 electoral votes, potential states have 68, and the unlikely states have 248. The compact would only activate once states with at least 270 electoral votes have joined. The seven potential members and their electoral vote are Alaska (3), Arizona (11), Michigan (15), Nevada (6), New Hampshire (4), Pennsylvania (19), and Wisconsin (10). Democrats would need to gain the governor's office and/or legislative chambers to win unified power in these states, as detailed in the spreadsheet linked in this post.

NEW: Virginia just passed a law to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, giving it 222 of 270 electoral votes needed to activate.

This map and spreadsheet show which states could join to activate it by 2028 depending on the outcome of the 2026 elections docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

I have long thought that this is not as weird as it sounds.

These NY Times oral histories—of what the Trump administration is doing to federal agencies—are a public service. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

This order blocks, not an actual contempt determination, but *hearings* to explore the government's compliance with the district court's order to halt the El Salvador transfer. A lack of respect of reviewing courts for the work of district judges has been a running theme of the last 15 months.

Sentences are (famously) contextualized by adjacent sentences.

Well-reported, horrifying story on the Trump administration's resumption of detention of children, featuring clients of Columbia's immigrants' rights clinic. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...