don’t they know it is wrong it makes me anxious Posts reflect personal views. law.umn.edu/profiles/matthew-bodie
6,819 followers 696 following 306 posts
view profile on Bluesky 
A impressive team of nonprofit law experts (+me), have banded together to comment on the new proposed rules from the Education Dept. on public service loan forgiveness. The rule purports to give ED authority to strip PSLF eligibility from any employer that acts with an "illegal purpose." 🧵 1/13
Just putting this out there in case people don’t know of the case: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankin_...
Kavanaugh, J., concurring. www.lawdork.com/p/scotus-tru...
This is a perfect excuse to watch “A Perfect Candidate” and read “When the Clock Broke” by @lioneltrolling.bsky.social
"How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?" A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons. Presented by The Gilded Age's Morgan Spector.
Oh no! Hope you are feeling okay. Sounds close to a workers comp claim!
Apocalypse Now, famously a movie about how war is awesome and always turns out well
I know this is useless to even point out but: if Mexico bombed a boat off the shore of the U.S. and killed a bunch of American citizens on the stated case — without providing a real criminal case in a court or anywhere else and after having lied about everything for 8 months — that those Americans…
It makes sense as a way to test what’s possible at a media and a legal level, with an escape hatch if things go too badly on either front. I
This is gibberish. Trying it as a Mad Libs makes just as much sense. Trump may try to declare a [noun] crisis to claim “[imposing adjective] powers” over [noun] and override [collective noun]
Count me in! I’ve long thought this was the way. GM elections would drive overall voter turnout!
let's goooooooo, this is step 1 on the road to state-owned pro sports teams which generate money for local governments and can't threaten to move whenever they want money for a ballpark. we will figure out whether head coach is an elected position or government appointee at a later date
1/ I worked at DoD. I literally cannot imagine lawyers coming up with a legal basis for lethal strike of suspected Venezuelan drug boat. Hard to see how this would not be "murder" or war crime under international law that DoD considers applicable. Read expert analysis by @bcfinucane.bsky.social⤵️
This is important. The first 24 hours of press coverage fumbled the ball. But the US just murdered 11 people in international waters. Analogies to the US’s (highly suspect, morally and legally) targeted killings of suspect terrorists don’t work. This crossed their own lines, and they know it.
"Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...
AAUP-HARVARD, AAUP, & UAW WON THE HARVARD CASE!!!! storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
“a university, non-profit, or media outlet that engages in union-busting in 2025 is making a strategic mistake, prioritizing limited short-term benefits over the big picture.” www.acslaw.org/expertforum/...
There’s a lot of pressure on more mainstream brands to chase the extra money from high-income folks. Price differentiation to the nth degree. That’s happening at Southwest Airlines—it explains how their new seat pricing policies can be deeply unpopular and still financially beneficial.
TIL
Reenacting “Hamilton” on the playground but for reals
President Pritchard Dixon and his international advisor Harry Schmitzinger.
Cliffhanger! I’m enjoying this serialization.
When you consider that businesses are run by dictators—that a firm is not a democracy—it makes sense why a series of rich guys at the top of the capitalist world think government can be run without following any laws.
Wow. On NPR, @gbrumfiel.bsky.social reports a Social Security official “copied the Social Security numbers, names and birthdays of over 300 million Americans to a private section of the agency's cloud.” The source is a whistleblower, who is named: Charles Borges, SSN chief data officer.
The Supreme Court made possible the administration's threats to send Mr Abrego Garcia to Uganda -- because the Court blocked the lower court decisions that had restricted the gov'ts ability to send noncitizens to far-flung places they've never been & where they could face violence, torture, & death.
If you had told me 30 years ago that Michael Luttig and Bill Kristol would have a clearer understanding about what's going on than a lot of Democratic leaders, I'd have wondered whether you tried the brown acid.
Still nothing! Please correct me if you see something.
So a federal appellate court has essentially stopped the federal labor agency from enforcing federal law in Texas and Louisiana and it’s not even on the landing page of the NYT?
me, April 2024 www.wheresyoured.at/bubble-troub...
1. We have normalized having a toddler in the White House who uses random " marks ("HOTTEST"?). How is any of the below normal? How are we okay with this? 2. We have a president who doesn't want us to cover, in our museums "how bad Slavery was". Was it not bad? Imagine if Reagan had said this? FFS
A few thoughts on the 5th Cir. decision enjoining the NLRB from proceeding with ULP charges against SpaceX & 2 other employers. (Opinion linked from this story: news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-...)
I’m not surprised, given the Supreme Court’s failure to deal with the alternative holdings in Jarkesy. But this is bad bad news for federal labor rights.
Not until “More Everything Forever” by @adambecker.bsky.social did I appreciate the extent to which tech giants like Bezos and Andreessen aren’t just soft on sustainability but actually in favor of burning as much energy as possible, regardless of the climate and environmental damage.
In fairness this was written by George Will.
RIP Terence Stamp If you’ve never seen THE LIMEY, correct that immediately
I wrote about a certain kind of Gen Xer (white, middle class, believes themselves to be CEO-shaped) who’s disappointed that they invested in neoliberalism and it didn’t work out. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/17/o...
We had actual an actual assassination of a Democratic legislator in Minnesota two months ago & it’s completely disappeared from the National Conversation™️. This happens the time over & over again 👇
it is incredible to see the extent to which the Sensible Centrists are simply incapable of grasping the very simple and obvious fact that the president's concern with crime is a pretext, and that to deny claims of a sudden epidemic in crime is not to say that crime is nonexistent.
Documents with sensitive details about the meeting between President Trump and Russian President Putin were left behind on a public hotel printer.
Trump is starting to get the late-stage Sumner Redstone look
June Squibb is a national treasure.
To me, the most lawless actions of the Biden Administration were not enforcing the TikTok ban and not enforcing federal marijuana laws. I think nonenforcement makes policy sense in both cases, but as a law professor I’m puzzled by the consensus on ignoring these laws. Congress should act on both.
Okay but then what did Biden *do* that you considered loud lawlessness?
I mean — this was in April
Or perhaps you’re thinking of harassing a state electoral office into “finding votes” for reelection? Baselessly suing media companies and holding up mergers to extract settlements? “Emergency” tariffs against the entire world? Putting out a cryptocurrency? Threatening law firms, judges, schools?
To what are you referring, Prof. Garnett? A vaccine mandate that was struck down per curiam as not being “work-related”? A loan forgiveness plan struck down under the major questions doctrine? Allegedly speaking a bit sternly to Mark Zuckerberg?
Remember the quiet lawlessness?
Remember the quiet lawlessness?
“We have committed our professional lives to learning and free inquiry, working together with students to advance truth for the collective benefit of society. Unlike our distant governing boards, we will not give up so easily — no matter what kind of deals are signed in our name.”
New blog post! The funny Avaco stockholder voting agreement case, just decided in Delaware: www.businesslawprofessors.com/2025/08/word...
Trump has halted or dropped enforcement actions against 160+ corporations, including: -42 consumer protection cases at CFPB -20 foreign bribery cases at DOJ -6 employment discrimination cases at EEOC -7 crypto cases at SEC It's a new golden age for corporate criminals.
We need a deep dive long read on the current moral exhaustion, the sense of torpor and powerlessness, the idea that there must be some societal response to injustice or lol nothing matters.
The stuff that, 15 years ago, would have been a screaming 72-point all-caps headline — and now appears in the sixth paragraph, almost as an aside www.wsj.com/world/russia...
George Packer hates this book! Buy it today! Out tomorrow wherever books are sold. Bookshop: shorturl.at/ykg4a Amazon: shorturl.at/0d7A3 Barnes & Noble: shorturl.at/EFA9I www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...
Time for the Big 10 Alliance
“As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources, and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians.” —UC President James B. Milliken
Time for the Big 10 Academic Alliance to activate
All right, to hell with it. One like, one enraging, amusing, or obscure labor history nugget.
1. This week, the FBI released its comprehensive crime report for 2024, which revealed that both VIOLENT CRIME and PROPERTY CRIME reached their LOWEST LEVELS SINCE THE 1960s This a massive story. But you might not have heard about it, even if you follow the news closely. Here's why.
In Kluge, CA7 today reinstated a public school teacher's claim for a religious accommodation to avoid calling transgender students by their chosen names. Judge Rovner's dissent cites and quotes @profjdnelson.bsky.social's article, Disestablishment at Work, www.yalelawjournal.org/article/dise...:
Clear admission from Uber in today's earning call of what was long suspected but never admitted: Uber is harvesting data from their driver workforce to train autonomous vehicle AI models to replace them.
Been saying this since Trump started using the phrase: “Russia Hoax” is a deliberately vague phrase meant to make his cultists think that because Trump’s direct complicity couldn’t be proven, the indisputable & abundantly documented Russian interference campaign on his behalf somehow didn’t happen.
The rich must be incentivised; the poor must be disciplined. The political economy of the super-elite in one headline.
Is Elon Musk a populist? Can populism explain what's going on with his companies? His stock prices? His weird company governance? Well, I dug through my old political theory notes and my new corp law notes (and spent too much time on his feed) to come up with: YES. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
I wish @mattyglesias.bsky.social had bothered to read the post. Uber's existence isn't a policy failure; letting tech businesses play on an uneven legal playing field and get a competitive advantage that way instead of thru tech is a policy failure. And it keeps being repeated: fintechdystopia.com
President Romero highlights one way that undocumented workers benefit citizen workers, rather than the opposite—undocumented workers see contributions to Social Security taken from their paychecks with no hope of getting retirement support back.
The 👏 president 👏 has 👏 neither 👏 statutory 👏 nor 👏 constitutional 👏 authority 👏 to 👏 unilaterally 👏 negotiate 👏 “trade deals”
Exactly—he can’t even be bothered to engage with the actual argument in the post, as opposed to his ridiculous framing.
Also, it's a real coward's move not to link to the post, which proceeds to explain *why* and *in what way* it represents a cautionary tale! Here's the post, so you can judge: lpeproject.org/blog/why-we-...
I held out hope for Matt Y longer than most because of his support for codetermination and other economic reforms, but this lazy, engagement-driven dismissal of LPE and blind support for all-things-Uber really points up my earlier error in perception.
It’s a terrific piece — my pleasure to get the word out!
📣 Starting soon: the second day of the Consortium on the American Political Economy virtual research conference! We'll have a roundtable on plutocracy with @adambonica.bsky.social, Kristin Goss, and @reillysteel.bsky.social and a fantastic set of research papers on business and civil society!
Lifes Rich Pageant was released on this day in 1986. The title was inspired by a line in the 1964 Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark when Inspector Clouseau, says “It’s all part of life’s rich pageant” after he falls into a fountain. What’s your favorite track from “Pageant”?
Wanted to share my latest jot on two great articles from @veenadubal.bsky.social and @iajunwa.bsky.social on employee data and how we should regulate its use.
High resolution video of Trump’s caddie placing a golf ball for him at his Turnberry Golf Resort in Scotland. Trump approached to play like it was no big deal.
It’s a terrific piece!
Wanted to share my latest jot on two great articles from @veenadubal.bsky.social and @iajunwa.bsky.social on employee data and how we should regulate its use.
i'm super mad about a lot of things so to distract: anyone want to make a playlist? share one song that makes you happy these days. I'll make the playlist on apple music which is not great but spotify is a nightmare and idk where else to go for now. yay!
Or music.apple.com/us/album/set...
music.apple.com/us/album/the...
Ah I see — weird that Nino is smiling though!
This puts universities between a rock and a hard place, as they just agreed to limited pay-for-play to avoid “endless, debilitating antitrust” challenges. Maybe the unitary executive can just wave away the Sherman Act.
I don’t think the possibility that this is a radical critique of SCOTUS should be ignored, especially the “🇺🇸 BUY ONE GET ONE FREE”
Anyone else noticing a big uptick in spam calls? Not sure if this an idiosyncratic experience or part of the ongoing destruction of the CFPB.
Reading the text of the Columbia deal right now. president.columbia.edu/sites/defaul... Live bleating it 1/? 🧵
Gen X gonna have some explaining to do when it all comes due
"In mid-2024, a study of 2,500 workers found that 77 percent reported decreased productivity and even higher workloads when using AI. Just under 40 percent of workers reported increased workloads caused explicitly by AI's sloppy mistakes."
!!!
Once again Trump bans a newspaper from the White House press pool in retaliation for its reporting. The White House has been free to do this ever since 2 DC Circuit judges in June held that Trump can exclude reporters from the pool based on viewpoint. A page from the authoritarian playbook.
I don’t think Gen X has gotten enough appreciation for its heel turn
For my column today, I wrote about how Trump leveraged America's collapsing trust in institutions — and how his second term has accelerated that collapse. Gift link: wapo.st/3IzN4QA
Very sorry to hear that—more disappointing news from the WP in a season full of it.
Funny how I can't find "minimum wage" or "union" in this article about Democrats who allege the need for a more economic focus. But I can find "Lis Smith" and "Tesla executive" in it. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/u...
