Chris Seaman
@cbseaman.bsky.social
Law professor at W&L teaching IP, property, election law and remedies. Husband of @elyons822. Childhood cancer dad.🎗️Pro-public education. All opinions my own.
He says this as the president rages about the DOJ refusing to prosecute a man they know is innocent, rather than admit the he hired a shitty pool guy.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · yesterdayTillis admits Trump is weaponizing the DOJ during his speech announcing he'll vote for Todd Blanche: "Maybe it's a little bit more intense in this administration than the last one ... I'm going to support Mr Blanche's nomination"
BIG DEAL on voting rights this morning: Governor Spanberger just restored the voting rights of some 60,000+ Virginians. Her move reverses Youngkin's abrupt decision in 2023 to end automatic voting rights restoration, which brought Virginia back to a system of default lifetime disenfranchisement.
Virginia Governor Restores Voting Rights for Thousands With Past Felony Convictions - Bolts
This is the only state that, absent action by the governor, bans people convicted of any felony from voting for life. Virginians have an opportunity to end that system for good in November.
boltsmag.org
As to Haiti, remember that this is happening because Justice Sam Alito — joined by all of the Republican SCOTUS appointees — insisted that Trump's racism isn't racism. www.lawdork.com/i/203137816/...
Brandi Buchman@brandibuchman.bsky.social · last wk.At least 363,000 Haitians and 7,000 Syrians who have legally lived and worked in the U.S. for years after escaping war, famine and natural disaster, are expected to officially lose their temporary protected status on Monday. My latest for @huffpost.com. www.huffpost.com/entry/i-want...
John McGuire is deceptively using a nasty push poll to test out lines of attack against Tom Perriello. The anti-George Soros stuff is particularly despicable. (The survey link is on opinions-survey.com.)
How it started / how it's going, Lena Wen edition. I appreciate the change of heart but I'd be substantially more sympathetic if it hadn't been breathtakingly in March of 2025 that Bhattacharya is utterly unsuited for the job.
#ELB: “Supreme Court Upholds Temporal Gerrymander That Would Cost Democrats 1932 Election” https://electionlawblog.org/?p=157028
to mark the 250th i wrote about the ways that black americans did vital work to invest the declaration of independence with the universalism and egalitarianism that we now see as its core promise. (gift link)
Opinion | Five Words That Changed America
nytimes.com
While some law profs (including originalists) represented themselves and legal academia very well, the collective effort of law profs was to invent a controversy based on theories previously only supported by crackpots like Eastman that almost rewrote 14A.
I'm not sure what the solution is. A disaster was barely averted. But the laundering of fringe conspiracy theories through legal academia is something our community has to squarely confront. Otherwise, legal academia becomes the handmaiden for authoritarians, cranks, and nihilists.
Today's near disaster in the birthright citizenship case is a damning indictment of the ability of lawyers, judges, and law profs to "do" history. It's certainly not easy, as Randy Barnett contends (and who was on the wrong side of history, on at least 2 levels, in this particular case).
The upcoming midterm elections are going to be contested amid a broken Voting Rights Act, "rigorously" invalidated campaign-finance laws, and federal election commissioners who can be fired for no reason. The only people who voted for this absurd legal regime are the unelected justices on the Court
Josh Chafetz@joshchafetz.bsky.social · last mo.I will once again remind folks that a very sizable chunk of what looks like Congress not doing anything to push back against the president is in fact a consequence of the Court disabling/destroying all the ways Congress has tried to push back.
As Kagan sharply points out, Kavanaugh's opinion simply transforms Thomas' dissent in that 2001 case into controlling law of the land. She highlights how radically the newer justices have changed campaign finance precedent. Whole thing feels like a farce. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...
This seems to me the headline. I happen to think there’s a lot to be said for the legitimacy of incremental constitutional change through genuine movement-building over decades. This is something else entirely. Unworthy of a constitutional democracy.
Quinta Jurecic@qjurecic.bsky.social · last mo.2 more thoughts on birthright: 1. The movement to overturn Roe and Humphrey's Executor was built over decades. It took an enormous amount of effort to manufacture that sense of scholarly viability (see: Teles, Hollis-Brusky). The right got 5-4 on birthright with a sloppy last-minute scramble
About Trump v. Barbara: Do not give the Court and the CJ credit for reading and upholding the Constitution. It's a travesty that this is not a unanimous decision... it's also a travesty that the Court let this question percolate for a year, giving credence to a crank theory of citizenship.
Justice Roberts’ majority opinion on birthright citizenship traces (accurately) the history of citizenship law. But J Brown-Jackson’s concurrence discusses the larger history of America, and how the 14th A fits into it.
Steven Mazie@stevenmazie.bsky.social · last mo.
Holy G-d, Alito is legitimately going full Great Replacement in his Barbara dissent. This is batshit. A SCOTUS justice is legitimately complaining about "the overall foreign-born population" and its "grotesque results" 😬
5-4 for what it explicitly says in the constitution is incredible. They were this close to undoing the civil war entirely. bsky.app/profile/mjsd...
Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc.bsky.social · last mo.The Supreme Court strikes down Trump's attack on birthright citizenship. By a 5–4 vote, it holds that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to children born of unauthorized and temporary immigrants. Roberts and Barrett join the three liberals. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...
I am stunned that the constitutional question was so close. I thought it would be 6–3 or 7–2. It is profoundly disturbing that four justices would allow either the president or Congress to rewrite the plain text of the 14th Amendment. This is obviously a good outcome, but the margin is alarming.
BREAKING: Supreme Court rules AGAINST Trump's EO limiting birthright citizenship. The vote is 6-3.
Goddamn it. Kavanaugh also has the campaign finance case. 6-3, spending limits on dark money violate the First Amendment. Peter Theil's boy comes through for him, throwing WIDE the gates on the billionaire class buying elections.
The Supreme Court's second opinion is NRSC v. FEC. By a 6–3 vote, the court guts another campaign finance statute and overturns a 2001 precedent that upheld restrictions on political parties' coordinated expenditures with candidates. The three liberals dissent. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...
Clarence Thomas wrote a whole concurrence just to say that he thinks trans people don't exist. There's no extra *law* there or anything. Just fired off a couple of paragraphs to say that transgender is not a thing and people who think they're trans are crazy.
thomas simply couldn't join the opinion, this corrupt, misanthropic bigot had to throw in his two cents and put his bigotry into the record
Jay Willis@jaywillis.net · last mo.Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion in the trans sports ban case in West Virginia contains some of the ugliest transphobic stuff I have ever seen in a legal opinion. Straight-up gleeful. Vile man. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...
![2 WEST VIRGINIA v. B. P. J.
THOMAS, J., concurring
judgment). Because “gender dysphoria” is a mutable men-
tal state that is the object of psychiatric treatment, it does
not resemble the immutable characteristics on the basis of
which our precedents have applied heightened scrutiny—
race, sex, or national origin. Instead, gender dysphoria re-
sembles other characteristics on the basis of which legisla-
tures may classify with a merely rational basis. See, e.g.,
Heller v. Doe, 509 U. S. 312, 321 (1993) (mental illness);
Plyler v. Doe, 457 U. S. 202, 220 (1982) (immigration sta-
tus). Legislatures have many obvious rational bases to
keep men who believe that they are women out of teams
and private spaces reserved for women.
Second, as the Court recognizes, this case concerns “bio-
logical men” and “boys who identify as girls.” Ante, at 10,
27. Men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or
girls, even if they believe that they are. Sex is an immuta-
ble “biological” characteristic, see ante, at 10; it is binary;
and “man” and “woman,” “boy” and “girl,” are the terms that
correspond to adults and children of each sex. See A. Byrne,
Are Women Adult Human Females? 177 Philosophical
Studies 3783, 3786–3787 (2020). To use language to ob-
scure reality—to show “indifference regarding the truth”—
is to lie to the public and cease to treat our fellow citizens
“as equal[s].” J. Pieper, Abuse of Language—Abuse of
Power 17, 21 (1992).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:bpna2qi2e44fafbhhtqjak3x/bafkreibwsxtosqddkiskx5oxonnai4ha7ygixfcqmnbsxb27z3q43jh4iu)
Now into the equal protection stuff. Kavanaugh again cites the VMI case to say that using a stereotype to exclude some people for whom that stereotype isn't accurate doesn't violate intermediate scrutiny. This is the exact opposite of what VMI held.
Fuck the Supreme Court and long live our trans friends and family
See, people always want to make this just about "sports," but the real upshot here is that, 6-3, trans women can't make a claim under the Equal Protection Clause. And if they can't do that, it's hard to see how they have constitutional rights.
Quick read of the trans sports decision.. *Categorical exclusion of trans athletes from sex-separated school sports is lawful under Title IX and equal protection *A biological-sex law is not a transgender classification *No as-applied challenges under intermediate scrutiny or rational basis
Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion in the trans sports ban case in West Virginia contains some of the ugliest transphobic stuff I have ever seen in a legal opinion. Straight-up gleeful. Vile man. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...
