@jschrinerbriggs.bsky.social
Visiting Assistant Professor, Chicago-Kent College of Law. Previously Yale Law & ISP. Working on the First Amendment / constitutional law issues.
“The Radical Center in Contemporary Legal Thought” - my latest balkin.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...
07.12.2025 17:16 — 👍 7 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 2Empirically, the claim that “[i]f a government official had probable cause to take an action (say a search), it’s much less likely that First Amendment retaliation was its but-for cause” seems totally divorced from reality.
05.12.2025 20:17 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0This is a great conversation at the heart of my current preoccupations. Is 1A doctrine capable of protecting basic democratic processes? Are there plausible ways to improve it or alternative traditions to be reconstructed? And is it desirable to entrust courts with democratic oversight in any event?
05.12.2025 19:00 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0For my current work in progress, I'm trying to track (a representative sample of) litigation against the Trump administration that features First Amendment claims or otherwise implicates free speech. To that end, this tracker from @lawfaremedia.org has been incredibly helpful:
05.12.2025 03:23 — 👍 2 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0
Image of a newspaper stand. To the right, a quote from authors Bilal Baydoun, Victor Pickard, and Shahrzad Shams: "Market supremacy has shrunk both our understanding of what a civic information economy ought to provide in a democracy, and our imagination about how to better guarantee the public access to reliable, diverse information.”
NEW📰: Democracy requires both an informed citizenry and a free press. But how do these ideals show up in public policy?
Today, we have a paper out that looks at how media has become highly concentrated, commercialized, and drained of its public interest potential.
Legal Realism Now
05.12.2025 00:53 — 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0I think this instinct is a big reason we have any constitutional protections for academic freedom, formally or informally. This article does a wonderful job of tracing academic freedom's development, and a not insignificant part of that process involved courts saying "eh" when asked to intervene.
01.12.2025 18:49 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Totally understood! I just think the clarity with which one can define "viewpoint discrimination" as a jurisprudential concept is somewhat illusory given that courts are more reluctant to find it in a college classroom than, say, on the quad.
01.12.2025 18:19 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0I'm basically a realist across the board (although we can table the five hour conversation necessary to get clear on what that means), but I think it's credible to say doctrinal malleability is *especially* pronounced in the free speech context. Formalism just doesn't work that well there!
01.12.2025 18:17 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Whatever the formal rules, courts do not apply doctrine the same way in every context *even if* there's little (or nothing) in the doctrine itself that supports such context differentiation. Doctrine in fact exists, and it is in fact rather protean.
01.12.2025 18:11 — 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0
