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Saturday, January 31, 2026

New and Improved Government Shutdowns

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        The news about the Department of Homeland Security’s war on peaceful communities and the craven politicization of the Department of ...
Friday, January 30, 2026

Felon Disenfranchisement and Reconstruction

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I want to flag an important new opinion from Virginia. A Federal District Court there held that the state's disenfranchisement of felon...
Tuesday, January 27, 2026

The Locus of the Law: Loper-Bright and Qualified Immunity

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I find myself thinking about a potential tension between two impulses in the jurisprudence of the Roberts Court.  Roughly, it's a tensio...

Principled Resignation: The Lawyers’ Dilemma

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Steven Lubet In 2004, The Clash’s iconic “ Should I Stay or Should I Go ” (with no question mark in the title) was ranked 228 on Rolling ...
Wednesday, January 21, 2026

A Greenland Round Robin

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When Governor Huey Long of Louisiana was impeached in 1929, he hit on a clever strategy to avoid conviction and removal. Before the trial be...
Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Balkinization Symposium on Maxwell Stearns, Parliamentary America-- Collected Posts

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Here are the collected posts for our Balkinization symposium on Maxwell Stearns, Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radical...
Monday, January 19, 2026

Balkinization Symposium on Ruti Teitel, Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice-- Collected Posts

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Here are the collected posts for our Balkinization symposium on Ruti Teitel, Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice: An American Leg...
Sunday, January 18, 2026

A Faint-Hearted Parliamentarian’s Response to Commenters

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For the Balkinization symposium on Maxwell Stearns,  Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democr...
Saturday, January 17, 2026

Homage to the Once and Future Government Shutdown

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      At the insistence of vocal elements of their base, Democrats shut down the federal government October I, demanding action on health ca...
Friday, January 16, 2026

Wrapping Up Loose Ends After The Trump v. Slaughter Oral Argument That Left The Conservative Justices Tangled In Knots

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Simon Lazarus A deluge of ink, digital and otherwise, has been spilt over the case, Trump v. Slaughter , argued before the Supreme Court on ...
Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Self-Foot Shooting Is Not a Crime, but . . .

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I was puzzled when I learned that the Fed Chair was served with a criminal subpoena a week before the Court hears argument in Trump v. Cook ...

Evaluating Stearns' "Parliamentary America"

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For the Balkinization symposium on Maxwell Stearns,  Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democr...
Sunday, January 11, 2026

Rewiring Our Civics Brain

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For the Balkinization symposium on Maxwell Stearns,  Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democr...
Saturday, January 10, 2026

Audacity Within Limits: On Maxwell Stearns’ Parliamentary America

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For the Balkinization symposium on Maxwell Stearns,  Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democr...
Friday, January 09, 2026

Changing the Rules of the Game Requires Defending Government By, For, and Of the People

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For the Balkinization symposium on Maxwell Stearns,  Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democr...

Reponse to the Balkinization Symposium on Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice

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For the Balkinization Symposium on Ruti G. Teitel,  Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice: An American Legacy of Responsibility and R...
Thursday, January 08, 2026

An Admiring, But Skeptical Response to Professor Stearns

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For the Balkinization symposium on Maxwell Stearns,  Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democr...

Greenland is the new Santa Domingo

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Anyone who's read Ron Chernow's terrific biography of Ulysses S. Grant will remember Grant's bizarre obsession with annexing San...
Wednesday, January 07, 2026

How the US Digs Out of Constitutional Failure

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For the Balkinization symposium on Maxwell Stearns,  Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democr...

Balkinization Symposium on Maxwell Stearns, Parliamentary America

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This week at Balkinization we are hosting a symposium on Maxwell Stearns's new book, Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of...
Monday, December 29, 2025

The Constitution Against the People: Rethinking Law, Markets, and Democracy

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Bojan Bugaric Contemporary debates about populism in constitutional theory are often framed from a centrist perspective that treats populi...
Wednesday, December 24, 2025

The Supreme Court’s Gay Rights-Religious Liberty Contortions

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Newly published in the Chicago-Kent Law Review (replacing an earlier draft that's been on SSRN for a while). Here is the abstract: The...
Friday, December 19, 2025

Presidential Visions of Transitional Injustice

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For the Balkinization Symposium on Ruti G. Teitel,  Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice: An American Legacy of Responsibility and R...
Thursday, December 18, 2025

A Tradition Interrupted? Transitional Justice and the Presidency in Contemporary Politics

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For the Balkinization Symposium on Ruti G. Teitel,  Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice: An American Legacy of Responsibility and R...
Wednesday, December 17, 2025

Exceptional Apologies

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For the Balkinization Symposium on Ruti G. Teitel,  Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice: An American Legacy of Responsibility and R...

Balkinization Symposium on Ruti Teitel, Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice

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This week at Balkinization we are hosting a symposium on Ruti Teitel's new book, Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice: An Amer...
Tuesday, December 16, 2025

Balkinization Symposium on David Sloss, People v. The Court-- Collected Posts

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Here are the collected posts for our Balkinization symposium on David Sloss, People v. The Court: The Next Revolution in Constitutional La...
Monday, December 15, 2025

Judicial Review and Democratic Renewal

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For the Balkinization Symposium on David Sloss,  People v. The Court: The Next Revolution in Constitutional Law  (Cambridge University Press...
Wednesday, December 10, 2025

Implied Rights of Action and the Broader Problem of Methodoloigcal Change

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We were once purposivists, we are now textualists. Yada yada yada. It’s widely accepted that the Court has shifted over the past decades fro...
Monday, December 08, 2025

The Judicial Restoration(?) of Democracy

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For the Balkinization Symposium on David Sloss,  People v. The Court: The Next Revolution in Constitutional Law  (Cambridge University Press...
Sunday, December 07, 2025

Is the Supreme Court Legitimate?

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"Is the Supreme Court Legitimate?," a recent panel discussion between me, Gerard Bradley (Notre Dame), and Richard Epstein (Chicag...

The Radical Center in Contemporary Legal Thought

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For the Balkinization Symposium on David Sloss,  People v. The Court: The Next Revolution in Constitutional Law  (Cambridge University Press...
Saturday, December 06, 2025

The Roberts Court’s Unprecedented Abuse of Precedent

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Now on SSRN: The Roberts Court’s Unprecedented Abuse of Precedent – A Fundamentally Revised Version of My Earlier Essay on SSRN   Abstract: ...

Critics of liberalism in Budapest

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  An interesting conversation , on the Danube Institute's podcast from Budapest, with Philip Pilkington and Jacob Williams, delightful i...

Is the Constitutional Revolution Yearned For Within Reach?

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For the Balkinization Symposium on David Sloss,  People v. The Court: The Next Revolution in Constitutional Law  (Cambridge University Press...