Jim Oleske

United States Onurt of Appeals FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT No. 26-5050 September Term, 2025 1:25-cv-02471-ACR Filed On: March 6, 2026 Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, et al., Appellees V. Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America, et al., Appellants BEFORE: Walker, Pan, and Garcia, Circuit Judges ORDER Upon consideration of the emergency motion for a stay pending appeal, the opposition thereto, the reply, the amicus briefs, and the Rule 28(i) letters, it is ORDERED that the motion for a stay be denied.

BREAKING: DC Circuit, on a 2-1 vote, keeps in place a lower court order blocking DHS Sec. Noem’s effort to end Haiti temporary protected status designation.

Judges Pan and Garcia deny DOJ’s request to stay the district court order. Judge Walker would have granted it.

Haiti TPS is safe for now.

Reverend Jesse Jackson called on each of us to be heralds of change, to be messengers of hope; to step forward and say “Send me” wherever we have a chance to make an impact.

How fortunate we were that Jesse Jackson answered that call. What a great debt we owe to him.

This matches my read of historical legal arguments: In the 18th century, courts and commentators were very attuned to the consequences of legal rules, and considered them as justifications for/against rules.
review.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/u...

Video:

From the end of the Mahmoud section:

A related data visualization, focused on the past 26 months:

Thread. You can’t trust the Trump/RFK/Bhattacharya regime, even when they make representations to courts.

Some Supreme Court Justices think that viewing the Fourth Amendment as a right to "privacy" is an illegitimate 1960s Warren Court policy invention. But it's not: That language goes back to the beginning, as I showed in this 2022 article. scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcont...

This.

"An Originalist Critique of Fetal Personhood" w Chip Carter is officially online (& forthcoming in U. Penn. L. Rev.)! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers..... We scour 19th cen. dictionaries & the context in which the 14A was ratified to discover the original public & legal meaning of "person" in 1868.

In the first line of his opinion for the Court in United States v. Skrmetti, Chief Justice Roberts writes that the issue in the case is “whether a Tennessee law banning certain medical care for transgender minors violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” That opening acknowledgment that the Tennessee law singles out transgender minors makes perfect sense given that the law only prohibits medical care when it has the purpose of “[e]nabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” In other words, as Justice Sotomayor puts it in her dissent, the law targets the very “definition” of being transgender. Yet, notwithstanding the Chief Justice’s seeming acknowledgment of this obvious point at the outset of his majority opinion in Skrmetti, he ends up concluding in a brief section towards the end of his opinion that the law “does not classify on the basis of transgender status.” The whiplash-inducing progression of the majority opinion in Skrmetti is reflective of a larger trend of credulity-straining decisions in constitutional cases dealing with the interests of LGBTQ people. In a trilogy of recent cases—303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, Mahmoud v. Taylor, and Skrmetti—the Court has issued opinions that are difficult to imagine being written in similar ways had the interests of LGBTQ people been replaced by those of other minority groups. In 303 Creative, the Court held for the very first time that a

New Draft Essay:
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Gas prices ⬆️
Unemployment ⬆️
Unnecessary warfare ⬆️

Are we winning yet?

On this day in 1923, Delaware belatedly ratified the 19th Amendment, which prohibits sex-based disenfranchisement. The Delaware Legislature had previously rejected the 19th Amendment on June 2, 1920. Mississippi became the last state to ratify the 19th Amendment on March 22, 1984. #WeTheMen

My God.

FWIW: This essay was not drafted with any assistance from AI, so blame me for any and all errors.

Former Ohio State law professor reflects on how SB 1 led to her early retirement It’s been nearly a year since Gov. Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 1 into law. Since the bill’s enactment on March 28, 2025, which became effective in June, Ohio public universities have been required ...

Powerful comments from my dear colleague @rcolker.bsky.social

www.thelantern.com/2026/03/form...

Honored to find out that I am on this list of top-cited legal scholars again this year: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers..... Lots of others on this list whose work I deeply admire, including @jessicaclarke.bsky.social @miriamseifter.bsky.social @jdmortenson.bsky.social and many others! Congrats, all!

"It is a tough road ahead."

Indeed.

In the first line of his opinion for the Court in United States v. Skrmetti, Chief Justice Roberts writes that the issue in the case is “whether a Tennessee law banning certain medical care for transgender minors violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” That opening acknowledgment that the Tennessee law singles out transgender minors makes perfect sense given that the law only prohibits medical care when it has the purpose of “[e]nabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” In other words, as Justice Sotomayor puts it in her dissent, the law targets the very “definition” of being transgender. Yet, notwithstanding the Chief Justice’s seeming acknowledgment of this obvious point at the outset of his majority opinion in Skrmetti, he ends up concluding in a brief section towards the end of his opinion that the law “does not classify on the basis of transgender status.” The whiplash-inducing progression of the majority opinion in Skrmetti is reflective of a larger trend of credulity-straining decisions in constitutional cases dealing with the interests of LGBTQ people. In a trilogy of recent cases—303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, Mahmoud v. Taylor, and Skrmetti—the Court has issued opinions that are difficult to imagine being written in similar ways had the interests of LGBTQ people been replaced by those of other minority groups. In 303 Creative, the Court held for the very first time that a

New Draft Essay:
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

(I think he was wrong and so does Kagan. But that’s not the point. The point is Scalia basically made up the Glucksberg approach before Glucksberg and thought that this right didn’t pass muster. And the Court has never affirmed it under Glucksberg.)

'UNIMAGINABLE CRUELTY': Judge Gary Brown, a Trump appointeee from NY, thrashes DHS' treatment of a man who came to the US at 9 as an abuse/neglect victim, has no criminal record and became a college grad.

"The laws of decency condemn such villainy." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Slavery and Birthright Citizenship All the Trump Administration's arguments for denying birthright ctizenshing to children of undocumented immigrants are at odds with the main purpose of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendme...

Every argument for Trump claim that children of illegal migrants can be denied birthright citizenship would also have denied it to numerous freed slaves and their children, thus going against main purpose of 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause. See my post for reasons why: reason.com/volokh/2026/...

Star Wars
Empire
Return of the Jedi
Force Awakens
Last Jedi

(I'm not including the prequels or IX because they're terrible. Yes, including Revenge of the Sith.)

Kagan correctly notes the contrast with how the Court treated the substantive due process rights of parents supporting their trans kids in Skrmetti

Here’s the #SCOTUS ruling in the California parents case:

www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

#SCOTUS just granted emergency relief in *both* the California teachers case (putting back on hold, at least in this case, California’s law barring teachers from outing transgender students to their parents) *and* the Malliotakis redistricting cases.

The Democratic appointees dissented in both.

The war against Iran is unconstitutional, as I explain on the blog. Trump has already missed the 48-hour deadline for a written report required by the War Powers Resolution. These illegalities compound the war's violation of international law.

Absolutely. And the administration lawyers who worked on these blatantly viewpoint-based EOs against law firms, or on similarly lawless retaliation measures against universities, should feel a permanent sense of shame. They won't. But they should.

As predicted Trump's Medicaid cuts are already starting to have a terrible effect on disabled people and their families.

Proud of this brief drafted in the Citizenship Case before the Supreme Court, highlighting the connection between the Government's supposedly-originalist arguments and Reconstruction-era racists trying to relitigate the Citizenship Clause through Chinese hate.

www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25...