Matthew Schafer

Matthew Schafer

@matthewschafer.bsky.social

Adjunct law prof Fordham Law; Scholar focusing on the intellectual history of press freedom: http://shorturl.at/bhsv7; rare book collector

5,529 Followers 766 Following 298 Posts Joined Jul 2023
2 days ago

Impeach him.

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1 week ago

Kavanaugh Kidnappings...

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1 week ago
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214. The Court's (Selective) Impatience is a Vice The only theme uniting Monday night's twin grants of emergency relief is the Republican appointees' willingness to upend long-settled limits on the Court's power when, but only when, they *want* to.

9/9: This may seem hypertechnical, but it underscores the broader point I made in "One First" about *both* of the Court's grants of emergency relief last night—that the Republican appointees' impatience is leading them to run over settled legal constraints to reach the merits in these cases.

/end

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2 weeks ago

-Zero Congressional consultation or approval.
-Zero preparation of public for need/consequences of war.
-Zero evidence of thought about "OK, what might the other side do?" Next month. Next year.
-Zero mention of anti-nuke agreement Trump voided, or Trump claim last year that nukes "obliterated."

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2 weeks ago

[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; . . .

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2 weeks ago

Impeach him.

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2 weeks ago
A Third Possibility: The Press Clause at the Founding With the rise of history and tradition at the Supreme Court, scholarship purporting to define historical fact is likely to have outsized influence on the development of constitutional law. Underdevelo...

Did the Court in Citizens United and, later, Professor Volokh get the historical meaning of the Press Clause wrong?

In a just published article, I challenge their view as without evidentiary support and misguided.

A Third Possibility: The Press Clause at the Founding share.google/ufWAxr4JjNF6...

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3 weeks ago

So SCOTUS, with its fabricated-out-of-thin-air immunity doctrine, has actually made American presidents less accountable than LITERAL royalty.

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3 weeks ago

“False herring” is stupid, but the most dishonest & manipulative word here is “now.” As if this is some novelty. But warrants for entering homes, like cops who show their faces & badges, is how we’ve done things for 250 years. The radical novelty is suggesting we STOP doing these things.

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3 weeks ago
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Students Across the U.S. Are Protesting ICE. Texas Wants to Punish Their Schools.

Threatening to remove state funding from public schools because students are protesting is...

THE MOST TEXAS THING YET.

The schools are clearly failing to coerce young Texans into believing his Abbott's white, Christian nationalist view of their state.

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1 month ago
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Criticizing our country is a right afforded to us by the constitution.

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1 month ago

Context: this speech is from SIR THOMAS MORE, a history written, as near as scholars can tell, in the early 1600s by 6 or 7 people including Dekker, Heywood, Chettle, Shakespeare, and Munday.

It was never performed, because Jacobean England was a police state and it was banned by the censor.

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1 month ago

This is very good

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4 months ago

What a terrible day to know how to read

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1 month ago

Laughably incredible and cartoonish, but also very dangerous.

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1 month ago
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BREAKING:

GOP Rep. Mike Lawler held a town hall tonight in Rockland County…and proceeded to have VETERANS thrown out of the venue.

#NY17

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1 month ago

For the avoidance of doubt, releasing the names of federal officers who shot and killed an American citizen is not in any way shape or form doxing.

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1 month ago
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Press-related prosecutions under the Espionage Act

For people interested in Espionage Act prosecutions of the press or their sources --

This is a great tool that I hadn't come across before. It's a database of legal filings in such cases since 1971 (Ellsberg). Thanks to the @knightcolumbia.org

knightcolumbia.org/reading-room...

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1 month ago
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My first remarks since being arrested last night.

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1 month ago

Stop arresting journalists for covering newsworthy events

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1 month ago
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Georgia Fort, an independent journalist and vice president of the Minnesota NABJ chapter, was also arrested by federal agents this morning

I was sent this video of agents at her door:

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1 month ago
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Knight Institute Condemns Arrest of Journalists Reporting on Minneapolis Protests, warns of tightening vise on #pressfreedom.
knightcolumbia.org/content/knig...

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1 month ago
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Federal Agents Arrest Don Lemon Over Minnesota Church Protest

A truly unacceptable assault on the First Amendment.

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1 month ago

Protected speech made my agents murder these people, says federal official

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1 month ago

"in theater". "Draw down". Hard to blame people for calling it a military occupation when leaders describe it that way. It's your own damn country, act like it.

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1 month ago

Law enforcement officers have always been unmasked in this country until ICE started wearing them last year.

*That* is the departure from norms. *That* is the step too far.

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1 month ago
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Raskin: ICE and CBP — these are not law enforcement entities, and at this point they’re completely lawless. They’re outside of the Constitution.

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1 month ago

Also... *More harm

Here's Jefferson: Blackstone has "done more towards the suppression of the liberties of man, than all the million of men in arms of Bonaparte and the millions of human lives with the sacrifice of which he will stand loaded before the judgment seat of his maker."

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1 month ago

I've written at length about the rejection of Blackstone in the speech and press context: share.google/JLkzGN14Mxdx...

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1 month ago

The strange obsession with Blackstone, a monarchist who hated the colonists and their fight for independence, has long been a focus of mine.

Jefferson said that Blackstone did now harm than the armies of Bonaparte!

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