Chad Oldfather

Huh. I’ve been serving up healthy portions of realism, poli sci, psychology, and more for a couple decades now. Especially in con law classes. Didn’t realize I was an outlier…

A view of the small town of Kiester, MN from about a half mile away.

A soybean field.

A gravel road, with rolling hills in the distance.

The landscape of my youth, under a Canadian-wildfire-created haze.

YouTube video by Heartland Urbanist Milwaukee: America's Most Underrated Urbanist City?

"There may be no city with more urbanist strengths on offer but less attention than Milwaukee."

"Might be the most underrated urbanist gem in America."

A pretty fair overview of the situation here, I'd say. There's plenty of work still to be done, but this town's got some really good bones.

I'm talking to Milwaukee Public TV this morning about Chief Justice William Rehnquist. His boyhood home is just a few blocks from where I live, and I often walk the dogs down that street.

This is from a yard across the street and a few houses down. Definite vibe shift on Prospect Ave since the 40s.

Fun fact:

The phrase "torch wielding mob" yields 71 hits in Google Scholar.

And only two* in Westlaw's Law Reviews & Journals database.

*By the close of 2025 it'll be (at least) three.

20 Second Ad.

YouTube video by nnmvt videos James McMurtry and Betty Soo-Sons of the Second Sons-Ironhorse Northampton MA 20240911

"This is a song about feudalism and 18th-century European primogeniture and their combined effects on modern American redneck culture."

It's also a pretty good song.

Recently reminded of just how strongly positive an impression the brick sidewalks of Cambridge made on my young Midwestern soul several decades ago.

Glad I don’t have to shovel them, though.

We need to build some real social stigma around being afraid of cities. You don't have to like them or live there, but a politics built this strongly around watching TV and going "ewww" is embarrassing, and people should be embarrassed by it. It's like "fear of werewolves" being your top issue.

Lots of talk today about the demise of BlueSky. For whatever it's worth, it's been a boon to indie publishers like us. Twitter and Facebook have pretty much silenced us, so the engagement here has, and continues to be, wonderful.

Now that I’m all the way through it:

(1) This is one of the best articles on con law/theory (or anti-theory) I have ever read,

(2) could this be where Justice Douglas got the “penumbra” idea?, and

(3) damn you, Karl Llewellyn, for anticipating every single thought I have ever had.

Imagine Google’s surprise when I finished the query with “a Delta Sky Club member.”

I share a great many of Warner’s criticisms of elite educational institutions in general and Harvard in particular, even as I’m about to attend my [inconceivably large number]th reunion at the place that transformed my life in a way that few others could.

But yup—None of that justifies any of this.

“A man’s ethics are modeled on the conditions of his grandfather’s time.”

Llewellyn attributes this to Veblen, and it must be a paraphrase because I can find no other reference to it.

But I’m intrigued…

Reposting because see my pinned post about being annoying as hell.

A colleague once shared with me that the author of one of the letters supporting my promotion to full prof invoked Karl Llewellyn in describing my work.

I’m a dollar-store version at best, for sure, but one page into this piece (which I’d somehow missed) the shoe still seems to fit:

That Cup of Coffee May Have a Longer-Term Perk

Finally, some unqualifiedly good news:

“those who consumed the most caffeine (equivalent to nearly seven eight-ounce cups of coffee per day) had odds of healthy aging that were 13 percent higher than those who consumed the least caffeine (equivalent to less than one cup per day)”

As a hiring chair, I will be very happy if this works. There may be some schools that start earlier, but this seems early enough in the semester for that not to matter much. And with luck it will force candidates who aren’t serious about living in a highly underrated city to decline our invitation.

Update: I am apparently the sort of person who gets a little choked up at the end of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Amen to this.

Area professor stumbles on new metaphor for teaching law.

I aspire to this level of relaxation.

All I’m saying is:

(1) Yesterday at a conference two esteemed academics referred unprompted to the concept of “Chad Oldfather judges.”

(2) The preferred nomenclature is actually “Oldfatherian jurists.”

(3) You can still get your copy of my book for 20 percent off by using JJJ2024 here:

One question that has never been answered to my satisfaction is how the defendant agents in Bivens could be both unknown and named.

Not the most foundational, but the Jurisprudence of Sport is here for all your analogy needs.

Here, officials being consistent in their calls is pretty central to the whole endeavor.

Reminds me of when my broomball team—a bunch of 20-something lawyers who wore college sweatshirts as our jerseys—played a team from an auto parts store.

“You guys must be smarter than us,” one of them said.

“That would be ‘smarter than we,’” a teammate replied.

(They then kicked our asses.)

It’s an *outstanding* book.

I still think the best idea for progressive donors is to just revive every alt-weekly in the country and staff them with 10 reporters each.

🧵 When authoritarian leaders attack judges as "enemies," history shows us exactly where this leads. Trump's assault on "USA HATING JUDGES" isn't just inflammatory rhetoric—it's following a script written by strongmen worldwide. But other countries show us how to fight back.

I spent about 34 hours behind the wheel this week* and it’s given me a renewed appreciation for those who drive for a living. It ain’t easy.

* Charlottesville to Milwaukee, Milwaukee to Blue Earth, MN, BE to New York Mills, MN, and NYM back to Milwaukee, plus various interspersed side trips.