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Zoe Robinson

@zoerobinson.bsky.social

Law Professor

42 Posts408 Follower 390 Folgt

Brianne Gorod @briannegorod.bsky.social · 2d ago

If you're a law student who wants to spend your summer working in the public interest & is interested in appellate advocacy, apply to join the @myconstitution.bsky.social team this summer! www.theusconstitution.org/legal-intern... 1/2

Legal Internship Summer 2027 | Constitutional Accountability Center

About CAC Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) is a nonprofit law firm and think tank dedicated to fulfilling the inherently progressive promise of the Constitution’s text, history, and values. ...

theusconstitution.org

The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 6d ago

A cancer vaccine succeeded in a clinical trial in preventing the recurrence of melanoma, a result experts say is a breakthrough for mRNA-based treatments. Trials for lung cancer, pancreatic cancer and other diseases' vaccines are also underway.

A melanoma vaccine was hailed as a breakthrough. Which cancers are next?

Trials investigating mRNA vaccines for lung cancer, pancreatic cancer and other diseases are already underway.

washingtonpost.com

Jen Taub @jentaub.bsky.social · last mo.

“A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.” ysph.yale.edu/news-article...

Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects

A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it

ysph.yale.edu

Adam Bonica @adambonica.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Anti-corruption is how you beat authoritarians. Two lessons from Hungary: 1. Our affordability crisis is a corruption problem. Say so. 2. “a message that treats [corruption] as a Trump problem alone will fail to connect with those who believe the entire system is rigged.”

What Hungary's Anti-Corruption Election Can Teach U.S. Democracy Advocates

Hungary's anti-corruption win offers U.S. democracy advocates lessons, but success requires a credible messenger and a concrete plan.

justsecurity.org

Daniel G. Aaron, MD, JD @medlawdan.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Each year, my Torts students create podcasts about the intersections of Tort law with social policy. Below are this past year's podcasts. Most of them are stunningly good and cover important topics like AI, wildfires, medmal, and deepfakes. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Tort Reports

Here, you will find the Tort Reports—podcasts created by Prof. Daniel G. Aaron's Torts classes from 2023-2025. They cover an array of social issues that interse

papers.ssrn.com

Prof Caroline Mala Corbin @carolinemalacorbin.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Is Trump planning some announcement about stolen elections, election fraud, or some such nonsense? Makes me think of a paper I wrote a while back. Trump's Lies: The Unconstitutionality of Government Propaganda buff.ly/gzk9lYS

Trump's Lies: The Unconstitutionality of Government Propaganda

Government propaganda—the government’s deliberate dissemination of false claims on matters of public interest—has increasingly become a source of concern in the

papers.ssrn.com

Leah Litman @leahlitman.bsky.social · 3mo ago

OMFG. I cannot begin to describe my gasp at how Roberts & co decided to go all in on LOST CAUSE theory & insist that the Reconstruction Congress did Confederate sympathizer President Andrew Johnson wrong by attempting to keep him from destroying Reconstruction www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The new racist double standard set up by Alito in the TPS ruling: if there’s any other motive in addition to the racism, the racism doesn’t count, but if the state wants to *prevent* discrimination against black people, that is racist and unconstitutional www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

The Roberts Court has been turning anti-discrimination law upside down for years. Its approach came into particular focus in May, with Louisiana v. Callais, in which it determined that not allowing Louisiana’s government to dilute Black votes was racist. In that case, Alito insisted that forcing the state to draw a second majority-Black congressional district would be an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander” because Republicans were entitled to discriminate against Black voters if they argued that their purpose was partisan instead of racist. The Court reaffirmed that position in a subsequent case dealing with Alabama, after a lower court had found ample evidence of deliberate racial discrimination, as opposed to the discriminatory effect of the Louisiana map.

Mullin now sets up an even more impossible double standard. If the government wants to discriminate against Black people, any pretext will do. “As long as there is a plausible basis—any plausible articulable basis—for the government’s action, then the Court will look to that basis as sufficient,” Aderson Francois, a law professor at Georgetown University, told me, “even in the face of evidence that government actors were motivated by animus.” If a Black person wants to prove they’ve been discriminated against, however, no amount of evidence will suffice.

Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The Tea Party was (1) small protests which were (2) hyped by media & (3) led to the election of radical nut jobs who (4) badly broke US politics. What we have now are (1) huge protests that were (2) dismissed by media but (3) still got a few candidates in deep blue NYC who (4) will work to fix it.

Alanna Vagianos @alannavagianos.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Four years after the Dobbs decision, pregnant people in states with total abortion bans are now nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period.

Abortion Bans and Pregnancy-Related Care Across Physician Specialties

This qualitative study examines the association of abortion restrictions with abortion-adjacent care across medical specialties via interviews with US physicians who care for pregnant patients.

jamanetwork.com

Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

KBJ's dissent: "The court reduces some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements—federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more—to nothing more than the wheelings-and-dealings of an especially wealthy private party." www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

This severance of rights and remedies is a sleight of hand;
it comes by way of the majority’s full-throated endorsement
of a contract analogy even though what secures the rights
at issue is not a contract but a law. Today’s decision magically transforms a federal statute into an invitation to be
accepted or declined, deemed binding only if each particular
defendant has explicitly agreed to be penalized. No matter
that laws, as opposed to contracts, don’t ordinarily work
this way. The trick here is the majority’s effortless conflation of law making and agreement making—two different
sources of binding authority.
The majority’s analysis is spellbindingly straightforward:
Spending Clause statutes are contracts, and contracts bind
only those who consent. Ante, at 6–8. But pulling this rabbit out of the hat requires misconstruing the Spending
Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause, and ignoring
decades of precedent affirming Congress’s authority to use
the power of the purse to govern. In the end, the Court reduces some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements—federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental
stability, healthcare, and more—to nothing more than the
wheelings-and-dealings of an especially wealthy private
party. Because I would not so trivialize a federal statute or
the constitutional powers pursuant to which it was passed,
I respectfully dissent.

Leah Litman @leahlitman.bsky.social · 3mo ago

ugh-scotus guts individual liability under RLUIPA (&basically says all spending clause statutes don't provide for individual liability) so tally today: victims of human rights violations & beneficiaries of public benefits programs can't sue. oil companies can. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

supremecourt.gov

Zoe Robinson @zoerobinson.bsky.social · 4mo ago

@palesl.bsky.social outlines our empirical work of the past few years highlighting the ideological dimension of judicial selection and decision-making on the High Court of Australia.

Pat Leslie@palesl.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Good to see Jeremy Gans tentatively agreeing with conclusions we made three years ago about the interaction of appointments, ideology, and decisions on the High Court of Australia. 🧵 insidestory.org.au/the-notoriou...

Justin Wolfers @justinwolfers.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Economists call this diminishing marginal utility. The first dollars change your life. The billionth doesn't. So the argument stops being about consumption and starts being about power.

Alan Elrod @aselrod.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Use the map in Virginia. Then, if you get control of Congress, be ruthless. Block everything. Do impeachments. Run investigations. Then in 2029, expand the Supreme Court, make DC a state, expand the House.

Alan Elrod@aselrod.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Democrats need to understand we’re already in a revolutionary moment. The American republic built in the 60s and 70s is being swept away by Republicans and the Supreme Court. It’s up to us to fight for a liberal democratic future. My latest: www.liberalcurrents.com/democrats-ne...

Adam Bonica @adambonica.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The Trump-IRS settlement talks are blatant corruption being laundered through the legal system in broad daylight. A president suing his own government. Kleptocracy usually requires some effort to hide. Resist the temptation to normalize this. Authoritarians have routinely been overthrown for less.

Eddie Yang @eddieyang.bsky.social · 5mo ago

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

Rick Hasen @rickhasen.bsky.social · 4mo ago

My new one @slate.com: Why is John Roberts in a Rush All of a Sudden? slate.com/news-and-pol...

First, and most crassly, these decisions could have been motivated by partisanship. They almost certainly advantage Republicans in the race for control of Congress, because Republicans can do more gerrymandering than Democrats at this stage of the election season—and it’s easier for them to do the sort of gerrymandering the court blessed in Callais.

Second, even if not consciously biased in favor of Republicans, the conservative justices could be the victims of motivated reasoning: They see the risks of changing election rules at the last minute much more clearly when Republicans are hurt than when they are helped. Witness Alito, concurring in the shadow docket order to immediately issue its final judgment in Callais, noting that any delay would allow an unconstitutional map to be used in an upcoming election.

Third, perhaps John Roberts sees the court as running out of time, and he wants to get many rulings in the books that change American politics in his preferred direction and forestall the move toward a multiracial democracy. He’s a 71-year-old chief justice now, not a 26-year-old staffer. The Supreme Court’s rulings in cases ranging from abortion to presidential immunity to the power of the government to fight climate change are growing increasingly unpopular. In the most important cases, the court is now splitting along not just ideological lines but party lines: All the conservative justices on the court have been appointed by Republican presidents, and all the liberals by Democrats.

Roberts well knows that Democrats and progressives are mobilizing against the court. The chief justice has complained about the public viewing the justices as political actors, but that is exactly what they are. People, including me, who had resisted Supreme Court reform, increasingly see it as the only way to save American democracy….

Jamal Greene @jamalgreene.bsky.social · 5mo ago

As Justice Sotomayor's dissent notes, the district court's finding of unconstitutional discrimination is unaffected by Callais. But if the dist. ct. now reinstates that finding on remand, the state will run to SCOTUS and say Purcell forbids the court to do so. You can guess what happens next.

Steve Vladeck@stevevladeck.bsky.social · 5mo ago

#BREAKING: Over dissents from the three Democratic appointees, #SCOTUS issues “GVRs” in the Alabama cases—vacating district court injunctions & remanding for further proceedings in light of Callais. In practice, this means Alabama can now redraw its congressional districts in time for the midterms:

Tyler McBrien @tylermcbrien.com · 5mo ago

🚨 NEW TOOL for U.S. legal journalists ⚖️ I turned @allyjar.bsky.social's incredible crowdsourced Google doc on accessing state court records into an interactive map. Check it out and let me know about any errors, missing information, or ways I can improve this thing (link below)

Maggie Blackhawk @maggieblackhawk.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I dream of a day when the legal academy spends as much attention to congressional and other legislative reform, than they spend debating whom among us is properly critical of the Supreme Court. Reforming Congress is equally (or more) important than rethinking Supreme Court practice and authority.

Waldo Jaquith@waldo.net · 5mo ago

I wrote a paper about this in 2010, for the Richmond Journal of Law and Public Interest. Basically, low-paying, part-time legislatures serve to enshrine conflicts of interest as a best practice. We should raise pay by 10x.

G Elliott Morris @gelliottmorris.com · 5mo ago

A very Strength In Numbers-coded article today: It looks like Republican Supreme Court justices made a very rudimentary, but willful, statistical error in their effective invalidating of the VRA in the Callais decision. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-05-08...

The simple statistical error Republican Supreme Court justices used to gut the VRA

The Court says vote dilution can be proven only after "controlling" racial polarization for partisan polarization. This is a nonsensical and impossible test

gelliottmorris.com

Chad Oldfather @oldfatherc.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Motivated reasoning, naive realism, and the resulting bias blind spot are powerful, powerful drugs.

Lawrence Hurley@lawrencehurley.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Roberts: "I think at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, we’re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides. I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do."

Zoe Robinson @zoerobinson.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Pre-ordered this, looking forward to reading!

Rachel Shelden@rachelshelden.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Y’all, the preorder links for The Political Supreme Court are here! Direct from UNC Press: uncpress.org/978146969713... Bookshop: bookshop.org/p/books/the-... Amazon: a.co/d/08lXOMa7 Barnes & Noble: www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-politi...

Liberal Currents @liberalcurrents.com · 5mo ago

"Our screens are two-way, yes, but we can easily forget that the people on the other end exist as more than characters for our enjoyment. The degradation and humiliation rituals of reality television now play out across our social media feeds." www.liberalcurrents.com/the-parasoci...

The Parasocial Style in American Politics

Our screens are two-way but we can easily forget that the people on the other end exist as more than characters for our enjoyment.

liberalcurrents.com

Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 5mo ago

We live in a time dominated by deeply unserious people making deeply unserious arguments in support of tragically serious results that serious people would have both avoided and known to avoid.

Rick Hasen @rickhasen.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Jamelle Bouie: “John Roberts Believes in an America That Doesn’t Exist” electionlawblog.org?p=155957

Jamelle Bouie: "John Roberts Believes in an America That Doesn’t Exist" #ELB

NYT column: For the Roberts court, however, these districts are little more than a “racial entitlement,” to borrow a phrase from Justice Antonin Scalia. In the court’s view, you may have the right to ...

electionlawblog.org

Rick Hasen @rickhasen.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Hardline Conservatives Including Justice Alito Really Do Not Like Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson Speaking Truth to Power electionlawblog.org?p=155951 Count me as all the way with KBJ.

Hardline Conservatives Including Justice Alito Really Do Not Like Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson Speaking Truth to Power #ELB

Witness the recent attacks. Count me as all the way with KBJ.

electionlawblog.org

Adventurism Time @flow.blacksky.app · 5mo ago

Can't fix racist maps because the election is only a year away, but you can stop an election after voting starts to make the maps more racist. Good thing racism is over. 🤬

Rick Hasen @rickhasen.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Norm Ornstein: “SCOTUS’s Brazen Power Grab Guts Voting Rights” electionlawblog.org?p=155877

Norm Ornstein: "SCOTUS's Brazen Power Grab Guts Voting Rights" #ELB

Norm at The Contrarian: Now to Article III. The Framers did not expect that the judiciary would usurp the powers of the first branch. They created a Supreme Court and gave Congress power to establish ...

electionlawblog.org