Anya Bernstein

We only need to manage risks that are completely certain! Why would we want to manage risks that are at all ambiguous?

Yes, exactly. (Legal) analysis requires judgment along with all the other stuff; there are some issues that are need more nuance, others less, and in some sense part of what the test is testing is how well people can tell the difference.

Sometimes, but I often can't tell on exams -- and even on other written work!

I tell students that I care a lot less about whether they get the answer "right" (you could coin flip on "is there personal jurisdiction"), and a lot more about the reasoning -- and that I give points for good reasoning even if the end result is wrong. So, I'd give this answer a 1.

How would Johnson have known how common the usages were? Rev up the ole corpus machine and click some links?

The version of this I get is, "Nice findings and all, but would this convince Justice Alito?"

No. No, it would not.

This is my hope and my dream. Always the asterisks.

But who needs tradition when you have uniquely unmediated access to the original brainwave?

Yeah, this is *legal* corpus linguistics. Not at all the same thing. Corpus linguistics in linguistics is actually kind of awesome. A little primer with examples in Part I here (and an explanation of why the two things share a name but not a methodology):
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Also the claim is about what happens when "the people" as a term "appears in a text." So the corpus here is ... the sum of all English language texts? Ever? Everywhere?

If there's under a 2% chance that "foreigners" or "aliens" appears near "the people" in a text, then maybe "the people" simply encompasses foreigners and aliens, so there's no need to name them separately.

Counting things is fun, but it doesn't tell you what the things mean.

One relatively simple but important thing Congress can do to reassert Article I policymaking primacy is drastically reduce the number of presidential appointees, including both those that require Senate confirmation and those that don't

The Volcanic Eruption That Created a Monster

For the tween-to-teen set: A book about volcanoes, climate shocks, bicycles, Mary Shelley, and the Frankenstein's monster we live in.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/b...

This is all very helpful! Thank you. I’ve started handing out a little one pager called “how to read for this class,” about taking notes, making connections, etc. But I think many students don’t have the background to even recognize what I’m talking about. Seems like this might help!

I love peer review sessions. Just having students read each other’s writing is so helpful—when do they ever see what their peers are doing otherwise?

I’m so intrigued by this! (For a law school seminar.) Do they hand in the annotations for you to review?

It helps necessitate the purchasing of a new bluebook! Isn’t that enough?

Oh there's defintely precedent for it!
news.uga.edu/polish-unive...

Very excited that Rejecting the Unitary Executive is forthcoming in the Utah Law Review (Fall 2025)! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Here’s a 🧵outlining key arguments in the paper:

Ah yes the elusive TOE (theory of everything), which is necessarily also wrong.

I think what Evan is trying to foment is a response and ridicule that would dissuade others from taking that position in the first place. I’m on board with that project even though obviously people who like to build out bad theories might not be enthusiastic.

Over under theorized!

I think we’re both right!

Basically this phrase expresses a bad theory of theories.

I’m snarkily agreeing with Evan though that this is now actually how theorizing works. It doesn’t actually take a better theory to see that some theory is wrong. Eg, if your empirical claims don’t fit the empirical data, we don’t need to wait for another theory to see that and reject those claims.

Or I guess you could say: If your theory just doesn’t work, it kind of beats itself. (Eg doesn’t have the empirical foundations you ground it on, doesn’t have the normative payoff you claim…)

#SlavaUkraini

Well when you put that way...

Kate Andrias, “Separation of Wealth” (2015) 🔥 🔥 🔥 scholarship.law.upenn.edu/jcl/vol18/is...

This is a really nice point. If rules are being rewritten, who's to say who can be a writer?