Top recent posts by Legal Academics on Bluesky

Federal judge has ordered the release of Liam Ramos (the bunny hat boy) and his father. A brief and rather remarkable order. Clearly written to be shared widely, so please do. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

This judge does the thing quoting the Declaration of Independence at the Trump regime then adds for good measure: "Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power & the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds & are bereft of human decency."

I have been trying to write an essay for four weeks now about Article II under the Trump administration and I keep having to restart because the draft never appropriately conveys the insanity of whatever happened during the last week.

IF YOU ARE A LAWYER AND ARE INTERESTED IN BEING AN AUSA DM ME!

Looking at the precinct results in TX's 9th Senate district election and the shift is a consistent ~40 points on margin vs 2022 in the outlying areas, matching the pattern of persuasion and Republican dropoff we've seen in special elections for the 2025-26 election cycle.

You know who really ought to pay attention the result in TX Sen 9? Democratic leadership in Congress.

these are senator james talarico numbers

One way you know America is not/no longer an actual democracy is that the Republican Governor managed to delay this election for almost a year, giving the GOP an artificial advantage in a narrowly divided parliament. This is something that does not actually happen in real democracies anywhere else.

Chat is it good for your chances in court when the judge is writing 18th century broadsides about "the perfidious lust for unbridled power" as their opinion

Will the new tenants be able to keep the art & stolen property left in the deportees' "affordable housing" they now live in, or will the state confiscate it? One day we'll get movies about the lawsuits of the grandchildren of these "illegal aliens" trying to recover their families' belongings.

My piece on our break with our closest neighbor and ally:

The unitary executive as license to loot the U.S. Treasury.

Folks look at you like you're crazy when you say we're in the midst of the worst, most unprecedented Article I constitutional crisis in American history, & then it's Saturday. Again, every time someone says "Trump can't do that" the only serious response is "Yes, he can, until Congress removes him"

It is going to take years---years!---to rebuild the United States Department of Justice after Trump is gone from office. A jewel of the justice system has been emptied out of institutional knowledge and wisdom.

This is the epistemic cliff that American normie shitlibs are all peering over this morning. It appears to be literally true that our entire political discourse for the last 15 years is just rich sex monsters who are also 4chan edgelords. It is all posting. It’s posting all the way down.

Again, it all should have ended when he started monetizing the presidency at his hotel in 2017, three blocks from the White House. But everyone in Congress decided that he is One Special Boy, & so here we are. Unprecedented corruption in plain sight.

Personal goals: Live the sort of life that never results in people cheering on children beating the hell out of an effigy of my head.

In Minneapolis, they are starting to *wear their passports at all times* www.nytimes.com/2026/01/31/u...

SOS. Because they are under attack by their own federal government and their own president. The government to whom they pay taxes. The President who is sworn to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Seeing images of children gassed on the streets of an American city and recalling how in Trump 1.0, POTUS bombed Syria due to images of gassed children.

As a Jew, I honestly thought that voting for the Nazis would protect me from antisemitism

Again, it has all been “Everyone’s just pretending that he doesn’t need to be immediately impeached & removed” since he started monetizing his hotel three blocks from the White House in 2017. The constitution literally isn’t more clear about anything else than this.

"Reverse Emails"! It's been going on for a decade, & every time you point it out the elites at the Paper of Record circle wagons & call you an idiot & tell you that you're being unfair & remind you that don't understand journalism. bsky.app/profile/mcop...

Remember, those daily quotas are the sick brainchild of one Stephen Miller. Just unfathomably awful that one person's hatefulness drives so much government policy. Ben Franklin said that we have a "Republic, if you can keep it." This is no way to keep it. www.cnn.com/2026/01/29/p...

This is so Pam Bondi.

electrek.co/2026/01/30/t...

Trump only won in 2016 because of Jim Comey and the electoral college He lost in 2020 by a wide margin when incumbents did well He won in 2024 by a narrow margin during a major global anti-incumbent backlash He has never been popular

My friends used to roll their eyes & laugh at me (a native 🇨🇦) in the 1990s/2000s, when I insisted 🇨🇦 was far & away our most important ally & every president’s first call & trip should be to Ottawa. We’ll discover how lucky we were not to have a single worry & an ironclad ally on our northern border.

CBS News: A higher caliper of journalism.

The six-year results from the Dark Energy Survey highlight unresolved tensions in standard cosmological theory

Again, a central reason why we are here in 2026 is that the people involved with Iran-Contra, the Clinton impeachment, stealing the 2000 election, the entire GWB presidency, & Trump I not only weren't punished & shunned from polite society but were rewarded with special membership in the Big Club.

It's now clear to even the most gullible that "softened tone" & "pivot" were regime propaganda. Is there a mea culpa from the collaborators in media who disseminated this? NYTimes led the field w/a breakdown of how/why the "tone softened". At what point is it appropriate to use the term "vichy"?

The Onion never misses

Last night the court largely unsealed the search warrant affidavit for @washingtonpost.com reporter Hannah Natanson's residence. It asserts that 5 WaPo stories she co-wrote contained classified info sent her by govt contractor. Up to Top Secret. ... 1/2 storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Rightwing media is essentially being Fuentes-ified

A first for which we've waited long enough

if it walks like a duck, and swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck ...

ICE Took Liam Conejo Ramos. His Classmates Have Something to Say. I'm gifting this article.

Once again, I’m just a small-town political scientist, & it’s still relatively early, but it appears that The Actual Democrats do not Need To Do any of the Things or Learn any of the Obvious Lessons that Ezra Douthglesias said they Must Do & Learn 🤔🧐

I'm against there being a secret police in America, and I vote.

Merrick Garland, man. I don’t know. www.tmz.com/2026/01/30/t...

The Trumped GOP's Minnesota invasion is its own Ukraine debacle; the resistance and anger - in the Twin Cities and across the nation - is overcoming the thugs in the White House and on the streets. The GOP's labeling of protests to the militarized attacks as "insurgencies" underlines its failure.

Yes, we were right to warn about the danger of the entire post-9/11 proto-authoritarian response under GWB way back then.

Calling all volunteers! On Friday, 2/6, join the grassroots, people-powered campaign to send me to City Council District 3 to advance Zohran's affordability agenda, keep ICE out of NY, & ensure no NYer is left behind in a city that prioritizes corporate interests over people. RSVP bit.ly/LBVOL

The comps are rapidly going from Orban's 🇭🇺 & the PiS' 🇵🇱 to other far more authoritarian cases. Again, you don't <have> to go to 1930s' Germany, & we have enough authoritarian antecedents in 🇺🇸 history, but the folks who told you it was wildly overreacting to talk about Weimar were wrong & unserious.

Again, it doesn’t matter if you don’t like this dataset or that coding. They all unmistakably show the same thing: the GOP is now a far right authoritarian party & 🇺🇸 has experienced substantial democratic backsliding. Lots of folks got very angry at you when you said this c.2020-22, but here we are.

So the question is whether Republicans bail on Trump or double down and try to finish killing democracy before November. This is entirely uncertain and there is no way for us to know at this point who and how many will choose these options

The early vote in for the Texas Senate District 9 special election has Democrat Taylor Rehmet up 56%-44% over Republican Leigh Wambsganss. This is a Trump +17 district. #txlege

The bit of local context I should give to all the furore about Judge Biery’s (entirely understandable) habeas order is that he is known for unusual opinions, e.g. scholar.google.com/scholar_case...

Last year, Russia’s oil and gas revenue fell by almost a quarter, according to the Finance Ministry. The Kremlin is resorting to tax increases and deficit spending to bridge the gap. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/31/w...

This is it right here 👇🎯 Multiple things can be simultaneously true, which is why the backlash to those of us pondering worst case scenarios (bsky.app/profile/mcop...) is overwrought. We'll stop doing that when we're a full democracy again, & the probability of the tail outcome is ~0% once again.

Trump doesn't know much, but he does know how to steal money from taxpayers. His $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S is a brilliant theft deanbaker22.substack.com/p/trump-laws...

So weird. I’ve been hearing all this talk about “heritage Americans” on the right.

Judges are usually really circumspect. J. Biery correctly decides a difft tone is needed "The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children." Read the whole short order.

👇🎯🧵 He's been violating the emoluments clause in plain sight since the second he first walked into the WH. He spent Biden's entire presidency not being punished for a coup attempt. Etc. Things have accelerated rapidly since January 2025, but democratic backsliding was well under way before that.

I fully agree, but I’ll also note that it would be better if the Jewish Senator who once was deeply concerned about Democrats’ language didn’t use the antisemites’ own code words & stopped posting back at the antisemites’ own Nazi Bar: 🤔🤷‍♂️ bsky.app/profile/mcop...

Turns out people like civil liberties

Judge Menendez denies TRO in MN v Noem. MN had asked for extraordinary relief under 10th Am--the pausing of Operation Metro Surge and reduction of DHS agents to levels that stood on 11/30. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

You know things are going badly with the ICE assault when Trump releases the Epstein files as a distraction

This is racist of course, but also if you’ve worked with orthodox Jewish lawyers, which I have for years, you know the Shabbat situation has never stopped them from doing their work.

Getting rid of Miller *should* be easier than getting rid of Trump, but somehow I don't think Trump will part with him under any circumstances. Are there any really good deep dives on the nature of the relationship between Trump & Miller?

And ... not to belabor the obvious, but the fact that these X pleas for applicants come from the people who brought you "we only care about MERIT." Good luck getting smart and talented candidates who can pass the "I am Loyal to Dear Leader" litmus test.

A reminder that the Dennis Green Unified Theory Of American Politics started as a theory of professional sports

Trump and Vance eliminated funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to prevent reporting on their authoritarian actions like this. One of the best acts of resistance is to donate to public radio.

State constitutional politics set precedents for national constitutional politics. Note how Republicans expand a supreme court when it generates uncongenial decisions without feeling like they need to tie themselves into knots with overly complex reform schemes

I thought this was so fancy.

This is the moment for which Secretary Mayor Pete was formed in a lab. He can get booked on Fox and go into the bubble and say these words so that at least someone does, and at least some of the people who are hate-watching may just say “hey, yeah, good point…”

Good turnout in Austin

I never know how I end up on PR lists for companies like Johnnie Walker but I think they should step their game up and send me bottles instead of emails.

Feel like I’m just gonna be reposting this constantly for the next week

Talk about a high crime or misdemeanor. Abusing his sacred public trust, his duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to openly help himself to billions of the people’s hard-earned tax dollars. (As for the “charity” remark, please.)

It's difficult to overstate what a brutal and unequivocal rebuke this is, by a very sober and respected judge, of deeply unprofessional and meritless conduct by the AG. It begins by pointing out that DOJ offered no evidence at all to support its claim--even after being requested to do so-- ... [1]

Second Amendment advocates are warning that Republicans shouldn’t count on them to show up in November, after President Donald Trump insisted that demonstrator Alex Pretti “should not have been carrying a gun”…. Second Amendment advocates are “furious.” www.politico.com/news/2026/01...

As the lawlessness of the regime accelerates, the logic of impunity ratchets up the stakes of removal

Next up: White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt says residents of suburban Fort Worth are Marxists who hate America.

“We wanted workers, but we got people instead.” -Max Frisch, 1965

"Now it feels impossible and unfair that there can’t be more from Catherine O’Hara. She was already so rare."

Schumer is killing America as much as Trump. Because he's letting it happen when he long could have taken steps to at least have slowed it down. He fiddled for a year while America burned.

The clash in Minneapolis and across the US is embodied by two men: Gregory Bovino and Alex Pretti. Their choices should clarify ours. Which one would we want our children to emulate? Do we want to live in Alex Pretti's America or in Gregory Bovino's? www.nytimes.com/2026/01/31/o...

Please imagine what it was like to be involved in actual child protection at the height of QAnon. I was trying to raise money for NCMEC through Trump 1. I hadn’t yet realized that the NCMEC Board liked QAnon.

Again, you don't have to go to 1930s' Germany to find comparisons. We have <plenty> of our own in American history. But the people who dismissed you in c.2017-2022 for drawing the clear comparisons to Weimar/the Nazis were wrong then & look deeply foolish & unserious now. bsky.app/profile/mcop...

I just learned about the existence of this recipe . Have to try with potato chips or pita

Today in "neither our media nor our political system is designed to deal with a far right authoritarian party"

I've long known/contended that there are far more child sex abusers than widely known because of victimization rates. But even I have been taken aback by the seeming prevalence and relative openness of pedophilia among rich elites exhibited in the Epstein files.

We are so screwed. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

If you are old like me, this thread will trigger all your Internet PTSD.

Ms. Thao, who is also a citizen, has canceled two trips out of the country out of fear that officials will seize her passport. She rarely leaves her Twin Cities home, and if she does, she tries to travel with white friends, or her children, “who look more racially ambiguous.”

👇🎯 It was wild going from being the “rich” public school kid in a poor PA steel town (we weren’t rich, but my dad was a dentist & we were comfortably fine) to learning that I was “poor” at Yale. And yeah, it wasn’t just about not being able to spend 3 figures of $ on social life 4 nights a week.

Maybe Bari Weiss can organize a town hall on Epstein withdrawal syndrome with her new star contributor.

Tell me more about how this administration is deeply, genuinely concerned about antisemitism.

Many pundits concluded that Trump winning the 2024 election meant the American people wanted full Calhounism and to burn the Bill of Rights, 14th Amendment, and Habeas Corpus clause. Turns out it wasn’t true, and people were primarily dissatisfying with the pandemic and its aftermath.

Not a mesage Trump and his Stalinist allies in Venezuela wanted to hear. Exxon CEO says Venezuela needs to transition to democracy for oil investment to make sense

What I mean by “written to be shared”: Many judicial texts are written to be read—by higher courts who may overturn or confirm, by future lawyers/judges, and sometimes by the public. Here, the Franklin quote, the striking metaphor, the sad photo, and the scripture are all intentionally included.

Instead of endlessly writing about the dangers of wokeness (ie not being an asshole), the media could spend that time talking about the crisis of elite depravity and impunity, as exhibited in the Epstein files. The latter is an actual threat to our culture and society.

Wait, did I just read that the guy who dresses like a Nazi made antisemitic remarks? Hardly seems possible.