Top recent posts by Legal Academics on Bluesky

Gosh. It must be terrifying for those folks to contemplate how some lawless thug might abuse a vast trove of their private information to harm them.

Google won’t allow its chatbot to directly answer who won the 2020 presidential election (but other elections are fine, apparently).

If ICE thugs are actually shooting point blank and viciously beating unarmed people out of "fear," as these apologists contend, then they even more deluded -- and dangerous -- than we thought.

Today in Weimar moments. Always, the greater threat must be the socialists and not the fascists. Also, the wildly unserious racism & Herrenvolk overtones 🤷‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Again, I beg any reporter, when Ted Cruz says Abdul El-Sayed is "advocating for and supporting a terrorist organization," demand he provide a specific example for his repugnant claim. When he can't, tell the truth about what Cruz is: a bigot and a liar. www.cbsnews.com/news/abdul-e...

Literally nowhere on the front page of the New York Times that the President of the United States faces another rape accusation. We're just used to understanding that our president is a rapist and we need to move on. It's fucking nuts.

Holy heck

Literally beyond satire. The man does not have a valid passport, is wanted for serious crimes, is tied to drug traffickers, tried to rig his country’s elections, and will be interfering in that country’s elections from US soil. And we are giving him a visa while we deport ppl for paperwork gaffes

Here's Judge Seabright's reasoning for expanding the scope of his earlier disqualification of Bill Essayli as US Atty in L.A. It seems to hold that his "First Assistant" title is "not meaningful" here & he can't supervise cases. Order stayed for now. 1/2 storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

if this isn't foreign interference, i don't know what is

In case you were wondering whether Trump is operating according to a devilishly clever plan to win the midterms www.nytimes.com/2026/10/28/u...

"The IJ’s so-called 'hearings' were a flagrant deprivation of Rodriguez Martinez’s due process rights and have caused me to lose trust that any administrative, post-deprivation process will meaningfully safeguard his liberty interest."

Oh God someone turned the iPhone Duo into the MacBook Wheel. Does @bencollins.bsky.social know about this? www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5jf...

Fed. judge denies the Trump administration's attempt to get a TRO forcing California to segregate ballots from a dodgy list that DHS and unknown third parties made up. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Apparently getting “cancelled” is how someone I’d never heard of ends up with her face on a magazine cover.

The combination of two extra-constitutional doctrines---1) the president has complete power to personally order prosecutions (unitary executive) and 2) the president himself is completely immune from prosecution ever for violating the law (executive immunity)---is a recipe for dictatorship.

On my way to Boston for like 12 hours to do some law firm recruiting stuff: I am confident my pitch of less money and a small clerkship bonus will go over really well. {our theory is that a small number of weird students will remember us in 2-5 years when they realize they are appellate lawyers}

If you think the next six days are going to be bad, just wait for the post-election authoritarian shenanigans between November 3 and January 3.

this will send your redistricting anxiety into overdrive

Apparently under pressure Google has fixed the thing where their search chatbot refused to say who won the 2020 presidential election. www.businessinsider.com/google-who-w...

This is Gemini's justification for why it can correctly return who won the 2016, but not the 2020 election "subject to intense political debate" *right to jail*

I’m a lot less enamored of this than a lot of folks on here. I want him explicitly calling out the lawless authoritarianism. I don’t want jokes about gold medallions & arts & crafts. I want him calling for impeachment, removal, or resignation. And prison for Musk & the other unprecedented criminals.

“How will you pay for that?” they constantly asked the Republicans* [They didn’t do that]

awesome closing message here huh

Don’t. Print. Lies. In. The. Newspapers.

Correct. Unlike the Senate, the House is not a "continuing body" under its rules, so everything expires in the new year. It must be formed again from scratch: new officers and rules don't exist until voted on by the new members.

Trump's now appealing solely to MAGA dead enders, like himself, and doing so with ever more over the top expressions of hatred and bigotry. It is not a politically cogent strategy; but that is a reason to be concerned about what is in store for the country during the next two years.

It's impossible to exaggerate the feeling one had walking out of Phantom Menace in 1999 vs Fellowship of the Ring in 2001. So this wasn't just about unmatchable expectations & nerdiness. The former was an abject failure & disappointment. The latter was & remains a towering work of staggering genius.

The platform must be institutional reform, and that involves eliminating single-member districts & not living under this intolerable situation where one party has to win massive supermajorities to govern.

I don’t actually think the direct goal is to sabotage Dems. I think they are clinging to the desperate notion that if they’re performatively equally hard on both sides, maybe the Fox/Newsmax audience will start to trust them again & come trickling back.

Is the president engaged in unprecedented corruption & facing credible rape allegations? Are you really serious? What is journalism, anyway?

paulwaldman.substack.com/p/everybody-...

To the coding agent writing the Simulation: You’re laying the dramatic irony on a bit too thick by having the JD Vance character relive his childhood trauma, only this time as the villain.

Signs you might be a far right authoritarian party

The other thing totally missing from today's front page is anything about the supposedly important investigative pieces that the NYT publishes & defensively touts as evidence that they're taking the authoritarianism seriously. It just totally disappears again within days 🤷‍♂️ bsky.app/profile/mcop...

What a team. What a season.

As a card-carrying "chungus gen X nerd," let me assure you that I was a grown adult in 1999, and this was not social media revisionism. The last hour of Episode III is decent. The Duel of the Fates was amazing. The rest of Episodes I-III were & remain a shanda of what might have been.

The House Progressive Caucus is ready for the collapse of the AI bubble. The rest of us should be also. No bailouts for the AI billionaires prospect.org/2026/10/28/h...

This would be a unity government born from a shared refusal to govern with Arabs. Or a “broad unity government” born from a “thorny dilemma,” as the NYT describes it. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/10...

"Reverse Emails," all over again: bsky.app/profile/mcop... Six days.

Revisiting (for class) Chief Justice Roberts' characterization of the dissenters in Trump v. U.S. as fear-mongers, spinning wild hypotheticals about a lawless president!

This is the last fucking straw! This Obama guy is NOT getting my vote next week!

Ass not what your country can do for you...

this is really fantastic

so, like, (1) this is haley stevens abandoning democratic politics which (2) highlights the absolute folly, fecklessness, inability to meet the moment of chuck schumer

To recap where we are in the D.C. golf course case, on Monday Judge Reyes ordered DOJ to explain why Trump again posted that the course would be closed and renovated starting Nov. 15 after DOJ told her there was no plan to close the course, and instead of explaining they appealed to the DC Cir.

Congrats to the Chiefs for assembling the most thoroughly unlikeable kicking squad in NFL history www.sbnation.com/nfl/1134022/...

Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door www.nytimes.com/2026/10/27/w...

A handy dandy map of poll closing times on Election Day (all times ET) via @the-downballot.com

Grotesque use of the euphemism “meddle” by @nytimes.com editors. “meddling” is done by the pesky kids from Scooby Doo cartoons. In reality the goal is to subvert democracy. Fascinating and informative to watch editors like those at @inquirer.com reformulate NYT editors’ headlines.

My furthest-right family members peeled away from Fox years ago and are way out in the fragmented, hard-to-measure RW online video news world. I would tend to read this as Fox losing viewers to apathy on one hand and increased radicalization on the other.

👇🎯 Again, even if Democrats win this election & take back some power in Congress, we will not have had free & fair elections by any meaningful democratic standard. This stuff does not happen in any actual full democracy.

Bolsonaro's trip into Donald Trump's arms seems to have been on a jet owned by an alleged cocaine smuggler paydayreport.com/bolsonaro-es...

oh fuck me this is what they're gonna be using instead of the fired guy

Breaking: Federal District Court Denies DOJ’s Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order in California Ballot Case; What’s Next? electionlawblog.org/2026/breakin...

Every Israeli coalition scenario seems, at present, impossible: 1) The right-wing elements of opposition won't work with Arabs 2) Opposition won't sit in national unity with Bibi, and he controls Likud 3) Bibi *obviously* can't sit with Arabs Unless something changes, new elections are inevitable.

My favorite class in my teaching lineup is one on the history of the American jury system + it's revolutionary, pro-democracy role in checking government abuses of power. I'm teaching that class next semester with the problems of the jury's exclusion of women, African Americans, other key groups.

👇🎯 I cannot scale this to 340 students, & our entire budget model now is organized around maximizing "butts in seats" & majors, so I only get to teach a seminar this size once in a blue moon. It's not that public university students don't want it. They tell me they do in office hours every week.

I don't think this Osborne scheme (as I'll dub it) to refuse to seat some elected House Dems is likely to succeed, but since it's from the former base of operations of Russ Vought, it might be worth taking note.

"Freedom of the press doesn’t just guarantee the rights of the press – it also guarantees the public’s right to independent and uncensored information about what our government is doing."

In a new @sienaresearch.bsky.social poll of people in New York City, Zohran sienaresearch.bsky.soci favorability is 69-28%, up from 60-31% last month. He won election with 51% — so a third of the people who voted against him a year ago have decided they like him. sri.siena.edu/2026/10/28/s...

Now I’m seeing news that Weil has officially told people it is winding down. Gobsmacked.

Think I'll leave you with this thought tonight. On the way home from her music class, Saoirse and I stopped by the local community center, where I let her run over and drop my ballot in the drop box. The sheer joy she got out of this small act of civic engagement fills me with pride and hope.

Is this one of those Mandela Effect things? I thought the broad consensus of older viewers was that the first two were awful and the third was OK.

1. A quick thread to summarize my and Cosma's new piece on LLMs as Homeric songs at the Economist. The piece has its origins in bactra.org/weblog/feral... and this fantastic article by Murray Shanahan et al, which we couldn't link as we would have liked www.nature.com/articles/s41...

are we the baddies? dot meme

I understand why people are mad, but I think NLNet’s actual explanation of their AI ban is pretty sympathetic. (1/2) nlnet.nl/news/2026/20...

C’mon Alabama, you’re almost there, make us proud.

Your regular reminder that - in stark contrast to the unending laser focus they receive in The Discourse™️ - that there are <approximately zero> other institutions in civil society, business, politics, or anywhere else that are <more> protective of free speech & viewpoint diversity than universities.

In the next round of elections Democrats will get to run on "The Republican-led federal government wants to force gambling into the state"

👇🎯 The platform must be institutional reform (bsky.app/profile/mcop...), but this ain’t it & he ain’t the guy.

Okay, DOJ actually replied to this. Stanley Woodward says that DOI "is working to develop a plan to implement" Trump's direction to close the course on Nov. 15. Link: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Obviously, there are always unique domestic politics & institutions. But the running 🧵, from 🇺🇸 to 🇩🇪 to 🇫🇷 to 🇮🇱 to elsewhere, is that ~25-35% of the public in rich countries now wants far right authoritarianism, & the question is whether the 65-75% can overcome their mishegas to keep them from power.

The Department of Justice taking multiple election-related legal actions in the weeks before the elections sure smacks of election interference and would not have been permitted by Justice Departments of either party in the past.

The Legal Implications (or Not) of the New York Times Bombshell Story Alleging Democrats Recruited the Second “Dan Sullivan” to Run in the Alaska U.S. Senate Race electionlawblog.org/2026/the-leg...

At least it's Friday, right? (Me and every other election lawyer and scholar)

Everything about this story makes me, a dedicated agnostic, want to believe in Hell.

This article describes a dysfunctional White House that's like a bunker.

Our local Post Office is going through a crisis while the postmistress experiences an extended mental health breakdown and refuses to communicate with anyone. (Our national house reps and senators are involved. It is wild.) But it did mean I got to see other people at the ballot dropbox!

I mean, they weren't really following any of his plans anyway...

Donald Trump demanded charges against former FBI Director James Comey, whom he considers a political enemy. The Justice Department keeps charging him, even though charges keep getting thrown out. The latest charges didn't come from career attorneys or from a grand jury. This is an outrageous abuse.

I had 3 really pleasant years at HLS, and it’s great to be back and wander around and buy some extraneous merch.

"Pennsylvania has reported five measles-associated deaths ...out of about 1,300 total reported cases since the start of the outbreak in April. This puts the measles death rate in Pennsylvania at least 1.5 times higher than average..." www.cnn.com/2026/10/21/h...

From "Don't be Evil" to this BS. Google, you are such a disappointment.

"CDC cited privacy laws in not sharing the name of the state, but experts say there are no privacy concerns in doing so – and this information is important for the public to have as the outbreak continues accelerating...”" www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026... @melodyschreiber.com @theguardian.com

Was just taking a look at FEC contribution data for this cycle and I'm seeing a lot of donations to Democrats from Catholic priests. Also, kudos to the Catholic nun who, when asked to list her employer, said God.

and ... scene www.wsj.com/business/wei...

Looks like foreigners are ripping us off more than ever under Trump. Second-largest trade deficit ever in September www.census.gov/econ/indicat... Trump had the largest in March 2025, just before "Liberation Day."

there is a dire shortage of cats on the feed. do your civic duty and post a cat

I never get tired of friends finding my book Coverage Denied in the wild. This is at one of my fav indie bookstores, Literati in Ann Arbor. Many thanks for the pic, @xrkulik.bsky.social!

www.huffpost.com/entry/live-u...

An excellent win for @americanoversight.org here. FOIA people know all too well the "fire and forget" strategy that agencies use, where they "refer documents to another agency" and then shrug and disclaim any responsibility for that other agency's failure to respond. Judge Moss got fed up.

UPDATE: 5th Cir. will rehear this case en banc. The panel decision is vacated. Link: www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub...

Wouldn't want to say something bad about the Dear Leader

Meanwhile, we are still expecting a ruling some time today or tonight from Judge Carter in the California ballot case brought by DOJ...

Structural things remain structural, US balance of payments edition

"Voting"

This is performance art