The Birthright citizenship ruling should be a wake up call to any Dem who is still on the fence about court reform. We are essentially one seat change away from the Court undoing Reconstruction by fiat.
Dorna Mohaghegh
@dmohaghegh.bsky.social
Berkeley Law PhD Candidate • Epistemic rights, free expression, IP, Law & Tech • Fellow, Kavli Center for Ethics, Science & the Public • Former IP lawyer, Frankfurt Kurnit and Willkie Farr 🎓 NYU Law & Penn Daughter of immigrants, raised in WV
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 · 2mo agoI 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.
the swing i have swung on court reform…
Julian Sanchez@normative.bsky.social · 2mo agoI can’t bring myself to be too celebratory. This should have been a 9-0 slam dunk. My main takeaway is that there are currently 4 votes to undo a longstanding constitutional guarantee that 15 years ago seemed beyond any serious question.
It's going to end up being a surveillance state that requires severe privacy risks for girls to participate in sports going forward including invasive genetic testing and physical examinations.
I am a one issue voter in 2028 for president: reform and expand the Supreme Court along with the rest of the federal judiciary. If you cannot equivocally say yes, even if you need to abolish the filibuster to do it, I will not support you.
NEW: The Supreme Court will decide next term whether the Second Amendment guarantees the right to own assault rifles.
Second apparently this was a close case for this Court. As it stands the decision is 6-3. In 1898 the Court’s decision protecting birthright citizenship, Won Kim Ark v. U.S., was 6-2. That means this SCOTUS is either on par w/or to the right of the 1898 Court - the same SCOTUS that decided Plessy!
I genuinely believed it would be 6-3 at worst, and likely 7-2. It seems I gave Kavanaugh and Gorsuch too much credit.
Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc.bsky.social · 2mo agoI 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.
There's no sugar-coating Slaughter. It's an enormously important ruling (far more important than the other three decisions #SCOTUS handed down today). It's a huge win for Trump/the executive. And it's going to have massive ramifications for the functioning of the government long after Trump is gone.
Justice Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench. It reads in part: "Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong."
Kyle Griffin@kylegriffin1.bsky.social · 2mo agoThe Supreme Court just overturned 90 years of precedent to transfer unprecedented new powers to the executive:
in their forthcoming book, @nikobowie.bsky.social and Daphna Renan make a very persuasive case that Lost Cause-ism was a powerful influence on Taft’s views of judicial and executive power. It was important, IOW, to push back on the radical Reconstruction congresses.
Leah Litman@leahlitman.bsky.social · 2mo agoOMFG. 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...
Chief Justice Roberts just announced from the bench that *tomorrow* (Tuesday) will be the last day for opinion hand-downs this term. So we'll get birthright citizenship, the two transgender discrimination cases, and the big campaign finance case in some order at 10 ET tomorrow.
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...
Our Director @evangreer.bsky.social explains what we aim to accomplish with our Massachusetts social media bill. We want your feedback! Read the working draft of our bill here: www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2026-05...
"When using technology, including artificial intelligence, a lawyer must independently review, verify, and exercise professional judgment regarding any output generated by the technology."
Christina Ayiotis@christinaayiotis.bsky.social · 4mo ago“The State Bar seeks public input on proposed amendments to the Rules of Professional Conduct addressing the use of artificial intelligence. Deadline: May 4, 2026, 11:59 p.m. (45 days)” www.calbar.ca.gov/public/publi...
What if you had a field guide to federal data — the way a naturalist has a field guide to birds? Our Executive Fellow Denice Ross and her former White House colleague just launched a free, plain-language resource covering more than 80 datasets across 50+ federal agencies.
New Federal Data Field Guide Helps Americans Navigate the Rich Diversity of Our Federal Data Ecosystem
Denice Ross, who served as the nation’s second U.S. Chief Data Scientist, and her former White House colleague Christopher Marcum have launched the Federal Data Field Guide.
ischool.berkeley.edu
If the Voting Rights Act is rightly seen by many of us as the real beginning of American democracy, then it is fitting that a Court hell-bent on undoing democratic rule, including granting the president king-like powers, would seek to dismantle it.
It is worth, I think, emphasizing that in trampling congressional attempts to protect the rights of Black people, the Court is basically doing what it has always done, with the exception of a couple decades in the mid-20th century when it often worked with Congress to protect the rights of Black ppl
BREAKING: DOJ announces charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center based on allegations of paid informants in an indictment in the Middle District of Alabama. "This investigation is very much ongoing," FBI Director Kash Patel said.
🧵 The arguments behind landmark Supreme Court rulings have never been freely available… until now. More than 125,000 #SCOTUS records & briefs (1830–2019) are now open on the Internet Archive. Full announcement ⤵️ blog.archive.org/2026/04/20/u... @wolflawlibrary.bsky.social
This is thanks to a gift from the Wolf Law Library at William & Mary Law School. These records reveal the arguments that shaped America, including cases like Brown v. Board of Education & Loving v. Virginia.
A federal judge in Illinois today ruled that the Trump administration improperly coerced Facebook and Apple to remove ICE-tracking apps in violation of the First Amendment. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
As an editor and publisher, I'm very disturbed by the trend of putting submitter's work into AI detectors without their consent or knowledge. I can tell you this is happening at a lot of major magazines. I don't care if the detector is supposedly not using data put into it. you must gain consent.
Since this article won't bother to fucking tell you or link to it so that they can instead claim to have an eXcLuSiVe about a lawsuit filed in open court, the case citation is Doe v. OpenAI Foundation et al., No. CGC-26-635725, in San Francisco Superior Court.
TechCrunch@techcrunch.com · 5mo agoOpenAI ignored three warnings that a ChatGPT user was dangerous — including its own mass casualty flag — while he stalked and harassed his ex-girlfriend, a new lawsuit alleges.
Well, at least we'll have one less Dem running for governor. That's one way to thin the herd.
The letter fragment I've seen from Swalwell's attorney threatening defamation bears several things that, in my experience in this area, makes me immediately suspicious of Swalwell and his attorney and reflect meritless thuggery. /1
OpenAI's "industrial policy" doc is a helpful roadmap for the tropes they are about to flood the zone with (including via "research" grants) to influence law and policy. Look out for stuff like the "Right to AI," "democratization," "public-private collaboration," "open economy,"... 1/
Industrial policy for the Intelligence Age
Explore our ambitious, people-first industrial policy ideas for the AI era—focused on expanding opportunity, sharing prosperity, and building resilient institutions as advanced intelligence evolves.
openai.com
NASA isn't why the US doesn't have universal healthcare, or a social safety net. The US doesn't have those things because politicians with the power to provide them choose specifically not to (with varying levels of support from voters). Enthusiasm for human spaceflight doesn't drive that choice.
T-5 minutes now! #Artemis
Katie Mack@astrokatie.com · 5mo agoIf you'd like to follow along with the #Artemis II launch, NASA has a live blog here: www.nasa.gov/blogs/missio... and you can watch the official broadcast on the NASA site here: plus.nasa.gov/scheduled-vi... or on YouTube here: www.youtube.com/live/Tf_UjBM...