Anya Bernstein

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?

Every headline that does not say “illegal” or “unconstitutional” is a failure to convey to the public the stakes of what is going on.

Just talking about this at dinner! The ultimate. We happened upon the "outtakes" one year; a worthy follow-up for when you can't get enough.

The Mona Lisa Vanishes by Nicholas Day: 9780593643846 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books A “witty thriller” (The New York Times) for middle-grade readers about how the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, how the robbery made the portrait the most famous artwork in the...

If you're looking for a page turner for the 10-and-up set, this is some narrative nonfiction that will grip your kid through the gift overwhelm.
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/714730...

When I started clerking, I found a list on my office bulletin board with asylum grant rates by IJ in our circuit. They ranged from 2% to 98%.

This looks really important & interesting. Also sounds like herculean effort -- congrats!

Nothing by Nicholas Day: 9780823454099 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books What does nothing sound like? An offbeat history of John Cage’s 4’33”, a musical composition of blank bars, illustrated by Caldecott Medalist Chris Raschka. One night in 1952, master...

Perhaps you (or some youngish human you know) would enjoy this Nothing of beauty.

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/737998...

Constitutional theory studies the birth and death of normative universes. Constitutions originate in “hot” universes, from fiery constituent power which forges institutions and norms that come to be seen as fixed and unchanging. Even in the “cooled down” universe, constituent heat is capable of transfiguring, transforming, and even consuming constituted power. No constitution which derives its legitimacy from popular sovereignty can long survive the estrangement of the living from what is perceived as a cold, dead legal order. Jack Balkin’s Memory and Authority tries to navigate between fire and ice, fixity and flux. Since Balkin’s conversion to originalism, he has been a steadfast defender of faith in the basic legitimacy of the Constitution of the United States and a keen critic of interpretive approaches which tend to undermine its legitimacy. His Constitution is a framework which has some fixed, “hard-wired” features but which also provides considerable space for politics. Popular multitudes in the present can join multitudes past in an intergenerational democratic project committed to the realization of enduring constitutional principles. Through faithful construction, an imperfect Constitution borne of sin can be redeemed and become our law. Memory and Authority maintains that originalist arguments play an important role in this democratic project. Balkin considers them to be a particularly effective means of harnessing the power of cultural memory. Balkin counsels everyone to use them. He specifically urges left-liberals to set aside their misgivings about a mode of argument that is primarily deployed by political conservatives, both for the sake of achieving left-liberal political goals and for the sake of democracy. I contend that Balkin’s map of the U.S. constitutional universe is neither cold nor hot enough to be complete or convincing. It’s not cold enough because the framework Constitution and durable political-economic structures which it presupp…

Wrote a thing about progressive originalism, cosmology, democracy, Elden Ring, and Jack Balkin, forthcoming in the Penn Law Review. Check it out! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Justice Abandoned — Harvard University Press An influential legal scholar argues that the Supreme Court played a pivotal role in the rise of mass incarceration in America.With less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost a quarter of...

I'm happy to announce my new book on the Supreme Court's role in fostering mass incarceration will go on sale March 4. I hope you'll check it out!
You can preorder here: www.amazon.com/gp/product/0...
And read more details here: www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

“Shelve =\= endorse”

Even though I guess you are, in a literal sense, platforming him. To the extent that a shelf is a platform.

Yes, and you knew who your friends were — you depended on each other both materially and ideologically.

Yes I remember going to Moscow in 1992 and riding a city bus next to a middle aged/elderly woman who was holding a picture of Stalin in the style of a Greek Orthodox icon. 1992! She had clearly experienced the Stalin years. And yet.