Beau Baumann 🍎

DEMOCRATIC BACKSLIDING AND THE LIMITS OF FIRST AMENDMENT LEGALISM 17 U.C. IRVINE L. REV. ___ (forthcoming) Jacob M. Schriner-Briggs* The second Trump administration has unleashed a wave of repressive activity targeting civil society’s most prominent institutions: news media, universities, law firms, and more. Political scientists have responded to these episodes with warnings of “democratic backsliding” while legal scholars invoke the same phenomena as proof that the freedom of speech is in “crisis.” This Article begins by bridging these diagnoses, arguing that the United States’s crisis of free speech is best understood as but one important dimension of its ongoing crisis of democracy. Given this understanding, the Article’s primary contribution is to assess whether the First Amendment, interpreted and implemented by courts, can secure free speech against an executive branch intent on suppressing it. While the First Amendment has supported important rulings against the administration, the Article’s basic conclusion is that reformers seeking to unwind the speech crisis must ultimately look beyond it. Though First Amendment doctrine can slow down an overtly censorious government, it suffers from major blind spots the second Trump administration has routinely exploited. Moreover, even when litigants are able to press First Amendment claims, the administration has engaged in “legalistic noncompliance,” strategies that frustrate lower court proceedings and which have frequently been countenanced by the Roberts Court. The legalism of doctrine and courts can serve speech-protective functions. Yet the crisis at hand, itself downstream from an anti-democratic politics, must be met with responses forged through democratic processes and implemented by democratic institutions. The best long-term hopes for free speech, in other words, lie more in democratic politics than constitutional law.

"Democratic Backsliding and the Limits of First Amendment Legalism" is forthcoming in the U.C. Irvine Law Review. I hope to have it SSRN-ready by the end of April. If you'd like to take a look beforehand, let me know. Comments welcome!

That’s an interesting dude

Guys, the phrase “agency independence” does not mean anything. It has been assailed within admin since the 1930s. It’s descriptively dubious, normatively undesirable, and theoretically perplexing. Let’s just let this one go gang.

The car franchise was kind of a wild ride.

“Yeah, so we’re going to do Days of Thunder for kids. Then each sequel is going to be an homage to a film we love.”

“What? They don’t care about Lightning McQueen? They only care about the hick truck we added to the first movie as a gag? Great.”

“Brett Kavanaugh: yes his mommy loved him very much and always told him so, why do you ask?”

I’m not playing this game with CT cause that’s gonna get out of pocket real quick.

“Brett Kavanaugh: yes his mommy loved him very much and always told him so, why do you ask?”

I dunno how his opponents in the "ideas primary" are gonna match ideas like job training for military veterans this guy is working on another level

a man with glasses is surrounded by a glowing circle and the website pmitf.com is displayed below him ALT: a man with glasses is surrounded by a glowing circle and the website pmitf.com is displayed below him

Next he’s gonna do opportunity zones, watch

“Yeah, sure, it was Alito who reshaped the Court.”

I’m sorry, if you catch me writing a book that’s bad therapy for a juristocrat with an inferiority complex, time to shuffle me off the board y’all.

So is this book just trying to occlude Alito’s second-child syndrome with Scalia? Is that . . . what we’re doing now?

Another mind lost to juristocracy

??????

Watching smart people get criticized for doing ✨nuance✨ on here tees up the perennial question: “why am I still here?”

The play dumb games win dumb prizes of it all, RE Noem, is just not nearly as satisfying of a villain arc

There’s this guy on instagram doing this reoccurring bit where he’s Cheney in hell talking shit about Trump’s incompetence and the war, and it’s the only good thing left on social media.

Something to be unpacked about the world-historic irony that the international solidarity that's at the center of fascism as a reoccurring phenomenon (e.g. Trump-Netanyahu-Orban seeing themselves in convo like Hitler-Mussolini-Franco) is crazily reinforcing antisemitism in the 21st cent.

+1

I would murder for those

Allen’s contribution to that symposium and Robert Post’s were both characteristically excellent

Whenever I see a woman who has tapped into trad/ivy, it just strikes me as such a cheat code. Especially where it’s involves some measure of androgyny. The dance between tradition and subversion is just chief’s kiss.

Last year also was the 100th anniversary of the Judiciary Act of 1925, which was the Notre Dame Law Review’s stated justification for doing its symposium on that topic. It naturally featured a lot of Taft.

“What if this delusional reactionary who daydreamed about firing on unarmed labor protestors was really a rule of law icon?”

Jesus Christ that guy who ran the national constitution center was so in this genre it was a painful read

I’ve had enough Taft hagiography for a lifetime

@lawprofblawg.bsky.social are we . . . the same????

As one does