Prof @ Northwestern law, political theorist, cat parent. Black lives matter. Profile, pubs, etc: https://gowder.io All my books (rule of law, racial justice, platform governance) are downloadable in free open access pdf @ https://books.gowder.io
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New article! Inspired by @gowder.io and @bennettcapers.bsky.social I think about how originalism imagines fictional pasts, so I turn to fiction to think about constitutional futures northwesternlawreview.org/issues/const... I am lucky to be in an issue with amazing folks, read them all!
I have a new paper out online in @crispp.bsky.social: I argue that a focus on domination can help us better understand a renewed politics of working time - a reduction in work, the right to disconnect, and challenging employer authority over free time. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
trump can issue as many executive orders as he wants, perhaps coverage should reflect the fact that a lot of these have the legal force of a child's wishlist for santa
#history #romanhistory #archaeology #ancientbluesky Could Romans just say 'civis Romanus sum!' or did they actually have to prove their citizenship? If so, how? Find out here! (and please subscribe - it's free and makes me happy) đ jamescoverley.substack.com/p/how-could-...
âAmerica is now a society in which an administration that is engaged in naked abuses of power, the desecration of our public health institutions, the betrayal of our foreign allies, and carnivalesque displays of corruption still polls in the low-to-mid-40s.â furious +1
I've been pondering for a while what the "humiliation" at the root of our fascist moment would most accurately be identified as, and "trauma of desegregation" captures it as well as anything
If you say 'heteronormative' or 'unhoused person' or 'food insecurity' you're basically talking gibberish and nobody can understand you but if you say you can see inflammation in children at the airport and that vaccines lower IQ or that germs are a myth you get to fire all the scientists.
This is an unconstitutional and authoritarian power grab. The constitution grants power over federal elections to the states and Congress - not the president.
âWe all have to be witnesses to whatâs happening and make ICEâs terror campaign public.â
Some important âWhat to expect when weâre electingâ messaging from the Brennan Center. Election fraud lies are integrated into the administrationâs strategies of election interference going into 2026. What we need to be aware of⌠and what we can do:
NARRATOR: As it turns out, they could not keep it.
I sincerely believe we would understand him better were his surname Brown or Jackson. The Kennedy moniker still confers prestige (gag). But he is a basic male disordered-eating eugenics-pipeline health influencer promoted beyond all his abilities or sense.
If you had told me in 2012 that Mitt Romneyâs presidential campaign manager would be posting like this 13 years later i would not have believed you
If you follow this scumbag, reconsider it. I cannot believe he, out of the blue, just said this to a woman law professor. (Who is brilliant, talented, kind and lovely.) democratic socialist my ass! Profile link to block: bsky.app/profile/soci...
Gee I wonder if Trump will prosecute him like cook
I think more con law has to start from the premise that the one time Congress has (sort of) rolled both both other branches (Reconstruction), it was one of the most promising if ill-fated steps towards multi-racial democracy in our history, not unbridled despotism.
If you're arrested in Illinois protesting the planned ICE HQ in North Chicago, I can represent you pro bono. Email me at sheryl@weikallaw.com. As always, I will take as many cases as I can.
Fascism. "If this were happening somewhere else â in Latin America, say â how might it be reported? Having secured his grip on the capital, the president is now set to send troops to several rebel-held cities, claiming he is wanted there to restore order..." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Although I will enjoy RFK's pain when all that can be found on the grocery store shelves are high fructose corn syrup, seed oils, and red no. 3
Amartya Sen are you watching as we speedrun from no democracy to famine?
Since when is making sense a criterion for Roberts court decisions?
Though they might be tempted by the second which would also give them an excuse to continue exempting immigration from every principle of administrative law that might restrain executive power
The first one in particular would fit in nicely with the sovcit version of the unitary executive that the sorts of people surrounding the White House seem to be into these days, similar to all the emoluments stuff about him not being an officer
Oh god I've got a bad feeling that one of these two arguments is how the dishonest hacks on scotus find a way to distinguish all the Biden admin actions they struck down
n this post, I summarize key points from the Federal Circuit ruling against Trump's massive IEEPA tariffs, in our case against them: reason.com/volokh/2025/...
Pray that scotus actually meant the major questions doctrine as law and not just "democrats lose"
One of the most important and urgent pieces I have written! contrarian.substack.com/p/our-guardr...
If scotus is sufficiently honest to follow it on appeal...
I have an optician who just puts new prescriptions in old frames for me!
Oh god the poor stoners who had to deal with an ai chatbot when they just wanted a damn crunchwrap
Oh I also need to remember to get the AOC "abolish ice" hat out of my office
I'm sure everyone on both sides will interpret "does 'regulate...importation' include 'levying tariffs'" consistently with how they interpreted "does 'modify [student loan] repayment terms' include 'forgiving repayment'"
Iâm so grateful that I have tenure and the academic freedom to call it like I see it. âDr. Kathleen Bachynski, a professor of public health at Muhlenberg College, described Kennedyâs comments as âabsolute gibberishâ and slammed the HHS secretary as a âdangerous buffoonâ who is âthreatening us all.â
Fuuuuuck
Hah, well for the record this is my designer of choice :-) (their website is deliberately unusable, fair warning...! www.theo.be
Old ones actually! I keep a neon rotation :-)
Officially prepared for the orange moron's national guard occupation (thanks @raygunsite.com )
But given that defying the constitution is fashionable these days and that Donald Trump has basically lit 2/3 of it on fire, what are the courts and Congress gonna do, tell Gavin and JB to shut down the group chat?
A federal appeals court has ruled that President Trumpâs tariffs exceeded his authority under an emergency powers law.
freedom's just another word for dying of typhoid
For years and years I believed Ted Cruz was evil but brilliant, because I read a quote once from one of his liberal Harvard law professors, who said Cruz was the smartest student heâd ever had. Then one day I looked it up and realized it was Alan Dershowitz.
đ¨đ¨đ¨đ¨TORTS EXAM FACT PATTERN ALERT đ¨đ¨đ¨đ¨
Same basic dynamic in all dictatorships: -Crazy tyrant detached from reality & surrounded by sycophants -Gets fixated on crackpot idea -Insane ideas implemented -Crisis -Sycophants hide problems -Crisis gets worse -Enablers intensify the cover-up -Crisis deepens -Consequences: Misery/Poverty/Deaths
What the Trump administration and Bill Pulte seem to have stumbled on is a way to get Fannie Mae and Sallie Mae to function as an anti-democratic enforcer of the regime. Whether they find any real financial misconduct is beside the point. You announce an "investigation" against any regime opponent.
In theory, if you are running Fannie Mae and Sallie Mae and don't follow ethical standards, you have access to private financial info on every American who has a mortgage or student loan. That's almost every middle-class or above person, which is basically every potential political opponent.
From an affidavit of a civil rights marcher who was trying to find out who the cops were
Of course they werenât so hot at obeying back then either. From a contempt petitionâŚ
Sinister in the best possible way :-)
(Or at least cover their badges, see the very last bit of the order)
In case youâre curious btw: Donald Trump isnât the first American racist to have his cops run around in masks to terrorize the community.
Hug a librarian today. My assigned liaison at @northwesternlaw.bsky.social âs library just used truly sinister and amazing powers to turn up the exact part of the order I needed from a 1965 injunction that the national archives had miraculously digitized.
Obama warns âall Americans are at riskâ after Trump after threatens to clamp down on Chicago âThe expanding use of our military on domestic soil puts the liberties of all Americans at risk,â the former president said www.the-independent.com/news/world/a...
McVeigh? Nash. Why take half measures? Someone tell Hegseth that Benedict Arnold was a Revolutionary War general unfairly dishonored due to the woke mob objecting to his traditionalist politics.
The abuses of the Trump administration are providing many civics lessons. Here, it it the importance of grand juries.
New legal pod with @weissmann.substack.com sitting in for @gtconway.bsky.social. A fun episode!
I wouldnât be surprised if the Trump regime tries to change venues in order to find more âfriendlyâ grand juries and juries. But that too will be a sign that the Trumpublican-Vancian regime sees the American public as being its primary enemy.
John Adams (AKA the Second Least Crappy Founding Father, after Franklin) is giving these jurors a hearty round of applause from purgatory founders.archives.gov/documents/Ad...
Loving this so much. Who would have guessed that if you send in a hostile military force to occupy a city and then ask the residents of that same city to agree to let you imprison people for disagreeing with you, they might say "no?" (John Adams, he would have guessed.
oh come on www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/u...
HRW is hiring an immigrant rights researcher focused on the US: job-boards.greenhouse.io/humanrightsw...
Robot who drinks all the earth's water while goading you into killing yourself can also call the cops on you!
A new piece I wrote appearing in FOREIGN AFFAIRS today www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/warn...
Who in the ever-loving fuck advises kennedy? Gwyneth Paltrow? Andrew Wakefield? Elizabeth Holmes? The unquiet shade of John R. Brinkley?
This sounds overstated but it is hard to come up with a competing hypothesis. If you thought, for example, that some CDC work was too cosy with industry, introducing a few reforms rather than blowing the whole thing sky high would have been the smart move.
Cassidyâs full statement The ACIP meeting next month is part of a process expected to lead to new, narrower CDC recommendations on who should have access to covid vaccines
Breaking: BILL CASSIDY is calling for CDC's vaccine advisers meeting to be postponed. "If the meeting proceeds, any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy given the seriousness of the allegations and the current turmoil in CDC leadership."
ChatGPT offered bomb recipes and hacking tips during safety tests
RFK Jr. is well on his way to making plagues great again. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...
The Trump administration moved to oust CDC leader Susan Monarez, but her lawyers said she would not resign and that she was being âtargetedâ for her pro-science stance.
New: In 7 months, Kennedy has broken the CDC, perhaps irreparably. For all heâs done with mass firings, gutting expertise, and attacking vaccines, Wednesdayâs loss of its most senior and competent leadersâtruly the CDCâs backboneâis the most consequential attack yet. www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/c...
But there's no denying that at this very moment we're experiencing life under authoritarianism: people having to measure what they say and in front of whom, secret police snatching people into vans, president completely unconstrained by Congress -- this is the real deal...
The way I describe it is: we are under an authoritarian regime, but we don't know that it has consolidated -- for all we know, it could still be thrown out via elections.
Well, I really hoped this piece would spark some debate, mostly because I *want* to be proven wrong! Please read the piece. My view is that Trump has made extraordinary progress on most of these items, but what constitutes an endpoint is up for debate.
Thanks!
This sums it up nicely. The republic has already fallen. Now it's up to us to get it back, hopefully better.
đŁ Quentin Skinner Lectureship 2025â26 Are you an early-career scholar in modern intellectual history since c.1500? Join our research community as a Visiting Fellow and deliver the Quentin Skinner Lecture 2026 with @camhistory.bsky.social Apply by 1 Oct 2025 buff.ly/tQABBo4
New, from me: America is no longer a functioning democracy. It is a competitive authoritarian system, hurtling rapidly toward authoritarianism. This was a hard piece to write but we can't move forward if we donât acknowledge where we are. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-author...
Full resignation letter from Demetre C. Daskalakis, a CDC leader, does not hold back. "The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning. My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud."
Nicolae CeauČescu, who called himself a "genius", crushed everyone in government who constrained his absolute powerâwhich simply evaporated one day when a crowd, finally sick of his lies and arrogance, shouted him down at a public speech.
(And the question: do you by any chance know of pharmacies there will give the Covid booster for cold hard cash to nonresidents? Asking for the obvious reason...)
Oh whoops I forgot you were up there!!
Ok do I know anyone in Toronto on here?
Are vaccines safe? Letâs ask a guy who has put live animals in a blender to make food for his hawks and injects an illicit tanning drug that the pharmaceutical industry chose not to try to take to market for humans because it caused sexual aggression in rodents.
imagine being so maniacally racist that you side with the fire over the firefighter
CDC WRAPUP: A White House spokesman emailed me at 9:30 p.m. to say that Susan Monarez, the CDC director, has been fired. This came after days of back-and-forth in which RFK Jr. tried to force her out and she refused. 4 other top CDC officials have quit. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/h...
In a functional government, this would be a five alarm fire where Congress calls in Kennedy and asks him what the fuck is going on
Re the whole Lash/Native Americans birthright thing---let's just be Bayesians about it. You need a *Iot* of evidence to upset the prior that anyone would think about undocumented immigrants the same way that they think about subjects of totally sovereigns sharing & contesting over overlapping land.
Kurt Lash is seems mad at @evanbernick.bsky.social, @gowder.io, and me. I don't have too much to say other than the entire point of our essay was (1) when you do sloppy historical work for political ends, you should get slammed for shoddy methods and jumping into the debate before finalizing work.
Trump take mail
UC Berkeley is hiring an Assistant Professor this fall, with a preference for candidates in International Relations, American Politics, or Public Law. I am on the committee and glad to answer questions. Please apply! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF04948
Theocratic slavery no less
Thanks. Reminding myself that I'm a civilian in peacetime, I'm not supposed to have to be able to identify military uniforms at 40 paces...
Maybe they're trying to fake the feds into not coming? Like, "look, we've already got guys in fatigues on the street."
(Or I guess whatever you call that like green brown soldier color, not actually camo)
BTW memo to CPD: this is an *incredibly* bad time to have guys dressed in camo standing outside a Cuban restaurant FFS
(Deleted original post because they appear to not be federal)
Thank goodness. (I never thought I'd say "thank goodness" about CPD swat but here we are.) Deleting to not cause alarm
One of those guys has a Chicago flag on his arm
MisterJayEm 