A WHOLE CIVILIZATION WILL DIE TONIGHT My son needs lunch, and I have to put his backpack together, but a whole civilization will die tonight, so I'm wondering if they've closed their schools. Like, a snow day, maybe, except instead of snow it's "keep your children home so if you die, you die together" — instead of "well open back up once the plows have cleared" it's "we don't know if we'll be here tomorrow, hold your babies tight." It's just "talk" I'm told, which I've been told before. "It's how the president makes his deals." But I've never heard anyone talk about other human beings this way, and I'm not certain I can look my son in the eyes if we all agree to stomach it one more time. A civilization will die tonight, but as I zip up his backpack and kiss him off to school I think: if this is what we call leadership then I'm not entirely sure ours isn't already dead. @michaelfdubois Mukad A QuBoy @michacifdubois

Brutal.

Just spitballing here, but I'm wondering whether maybe it's possible we've ceded too much authority to the "I don't enjoy writing and I don't see the point of reading" crowd.

As a starting point, may I recommend:

scholarship.law.marquette.edu/mulr/vol101/...

A new @frankpasquale.bsky.social paper always goes to the top of the reading stack!

Screenshot from the early days of covid.

Whatever else I might be, I am definitely proof that it is possible to (a) be kind of a scold when it comes to tone in some contexts (eg, judges - stay tuned), and also (b) really relate to someone who opens a communication with “listen up dipshits.”

Remember the law-review author who outsourced his writing to generative AI? The one that made me say, "I now know that neither this attorney’s new article nor their old one is worth reading."

He outed himself, and it turns out the article in question is as bad as I predicted.

Worse, even.

1/

My grandfather, with a team of three draft horses.

My grandfather on my dad’s side. (My other grandpa farmed with horses, too.)

They lived hard lives, and I try to avoid romanticization.

But damn there was a nobility in those lives that’s well beyond my reach.

Inadvertently makes a case here for why we need to keep the humanities in school

Cf. Stanley Fish, at the Ethics of Legal Scholarship conference we held at Marquette a decade or so ago.

Finding the right words is definitely the trick - I haven't tried in earnest yet, but my sense is that it's hard to find terms that aren't overinclusive.

Looking for new and old examples of dissenting opinions that accuse a majority of acting illegitimately. Not just vitriol, but accusations of result-orientation, blatant disregard of law (as opposed to vigorous disagreement about the law), and other serious charges of coloring outside the lines.

I’m planning to! I’ve got plenty of fodder from our state supreme court alone, but as is often the case I fear that being here gives a skewed perspective both in terms of how often these accusations get made in general and to what extent (if any) they’ve become more frequent.

I’d forgotten that (if I ever knew it). Thanks!

It’s at the edges. What I’m hoping (well, sort of) to find more of is the type of thing that’s become all too common in the Wisconsin supreme court, where, e.g., a justice in dissent suggested that her colleagues in the majority should resign. That’s an extreme example, but we’ve seen lots similar.

Looking for new and old examples of dissenting opinions that accuse a majority of acting illegitimately. Not just vitriol, but accusations of result-orientation, blatant disregard of law (as opposed to vigorous disagreement about the law), and other serious charges of coloring outside the lines.

There should be norms in favor of high-profile college coaches expressing concern and outrage over cuts to the academic side of the house

Last night, elsewhere in Milwaukee, my wife & I showed up at a restaurant without a reservation. They took our number, said they’d call when a table became available.

No trouble, because the only question was whether we’d have to cross a street to find a place just like these.

We did not.

Yes

An array of compact discs, each of which is a new music sampler.

Shoutout to finding new music in the late 80s.

Exploring State Checks Against Federal Overreach Published: August 8, 2025 Updated: January 21, 2026 States have many tools to help counter federal abuses of power. Facing a torrent of controversial federal government actions, states today are pursu...

To learn more about states’ powers in this moment, check out our checks on federal overreach pieces, including on state prosecutions of federal officials and on DOJ’s efforts to access state voter rolls (which Bondi raised in her MN letter yesterday) statedemocracy.law.wisc.edu/research-exp...

Jesus Christ.

Multiple goons had a man on the ground but that wasn't enough brutality for them. One had to pull his gun and shoot someone who was prone on the sidewalk.

They're going to tell us the agent feared for his life and was justified.

@nytimes.com look at what a *news*paper looks like

My first year as a prof I wanted to really emphasize a point so I stood on a table in the front of the room as I made it.

A couple years later an about-to-graduate student in that class told me that he didn’t remember the point I was making but he definitely remembered me standing on the table.

I think this is related to my sense that law professors spend way too much time trying to change the world and way too little time trying to understand it.

I generally agree with this, but I also wonder how much of a convention it actually is. I'd guess that maybe 30-40% of my articles have had a "Part IV" in this sense, and that most or all of my most-cited pieces don't (and to the extent they do, that's not what they're cited for).

An Originalist Case for the Hostile Takeover of Venezuela:

1. Hostile takeovers are a thing. From time immemorial.

2. Art II does not prohibit hostile takeovers of foreign countries.

3. Hostile takeovers have an "executive power" vibe.

4. Art II implies presidents have a hostile takeover power.

The entire thread is worth your time. The portion around and including this post gets at a point I tried to make in my book - the less common ground within the profession about what the rule of law entails, the less likely we are to be able to sustain the rule of law.

Yikes

I wanted to see if it had ever been used elsewhere, so I googled "insensitive to the nuances of human interaction," which a former colleague once used as a way of describing someone as kind of a dick. (It's also applicable to certain interpretive approaches, imo.)

Google AI took it personally.