(How's that for a clickbait title??) David Hackett Souter, former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, died on Thursday. We learned this yesterday, and the encomia poured in. Everyone loved Justice Souter, well, everyone except the right-wingers convinced he'd betrayed them. He was, as everyone saw,
I know I said I mostly wasn't going to use this newsletter to do legal analysis of contemporary controversies. However. I think it's worth spelling out at some length everything that's wrong with the Trump Administration's claim of authority in the case
The Supreme Court, in a per curiam opinion that seems like it was probably written by Chief Justice John Roberts, just vacated District Judge Boasberg's order preventing the Trump Administration from "deporting" Venezuelan nationals to a slave camp in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act
Over the last couple of weeks we've been having an exceptionally tiresome debate about birthright citizenship. Two conservative legal scholars, Randy Barnett and Ilan Wurman, have been arguing in various public fora that the overwhelming scholarly consensus that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment means what it
In the last few days, people have started wondering whether we're in a constitutional crisis. Sensible enough, given everything that's going on. But not everyone is convinced. There's certainly something afoot, they grant, but perhaps it is only a "constitutional moment," not
People are starting to talk about remaking the Constitution. It makes sense, right? We're in a state of constitutional collapse due to the election of a usurper president, and his campaign of usurpation since taking office sixteen days ago. Constitutional rules are being trampled left and right, indeed
Much is said of the danger to liberty from the Army program for deporting and detaining these citizens of Japanese extraction. But a judicial construction of the due process clause that will sustain this order is a far more subtle blow to liberty than the promulgation of the order itself.
Okay fine, I'll start. Last night I said on Bluesky that I want to see people laying the foundation, in the public discourse, for the idea that if and when Trump orders the military to go invade Greenland – because apparently he is quite serious about this whole "
How many amendments does our Constitution have? You would think this should not be a difficult question! And yet. You may have seen headlines recently to the effect that certain liberal activists are asking President Biden to declare that the Equal Rights Amendment has been duly adopted as the Twenty-Eighth
Magic: the Gathering
A week ago I wrote the following on Bluesky: I agree with this, BUT ALSO, I do sort of think we need a vision of a green-mana-aligned left-liberalism, that the current orientation is pretty anti-green in a way that bothers me — Robert Black (@hurricanexyz.bsky.social) 2024-12-08T23:45:11.264Z
This post is going to be a little weird, particularly if you're here for the legal theory. This is going to be different from my last primer, about the six modalities of constitutional argument. But I got involved in a discussion about this stuff on Bluesky over the
So the latest insanity is apparently Trump talking – how seriously is anybody's guess – about conquering and/or annexing Canada. He is said to have joked(?) with Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau that Canada should become America's 51st state. I have a better idea. In the couple of