Josh Chafetz

Opinion | You Beat Trumpism by Banding Together. It’s as Hard and as Simple as That.

"It wanted to signal strength. Instead, it’s revealing its weakness. The administration’s need to break the academy is forcing it to make a desperately risky gamble." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o...

AALS needs to just accept that its role in the process at this point is maintaining the FAR database and nothing more.

*me* wake up buddy, the game has gotten exciting!

*stubbs*

darth that’s when you say, ‘mong me, cheesemonger. mong me.’

(to be fair, we claimed that basically everything she did was Canadian …)

As one of my college friends used to implausibly insist, “It’s not a Canadian thing, dammit!”

First Monday in October is the beginning of the postseason.

I see it.

(cackling because I know he’d have an aneurysm if anyone referred to him as a mere “judge”)

*crotchety old man* baseball is better when there‘s more small ball and less power, dammit!

I get that folks are disappointed with Judge’s lack of power in the postseason, but I really respect that he’s going with the pitches he gets, playing small ball, and getting on base. The fault lies with the hitters behind him, not with Judge.

Starting to think that Guerrero might be locked in

This is personalism. It's the Charles I scenario -- the king rules without the a legislature and simply taxes and spends in whatever way he feels like.

Impeach, remove, disqualify.

ICYMI

D.C. MARRIAGES, SAVED! The D.C. Council just passed an emergency bill to let the city to issue marriage licenses. Because of the federal shutdown, D.C. Superior Court's Marriage Bureau has been unable to process marriage licenses since last week. (The court is federally funded.)

About 1 in 3 US Nobel prize winners are immigrants.
About 1 in 4 were government employees at some point.
About 44% of all Nobel prize winners were educated in US higher education.
As Trump demands a Nobel prize, he is destroying the means by which America came to dominate the prizes.

Sources below

Rebuilding State Authority In A Post-Trump America In the ruins of the administrative state after Trump, many on the left see an opportunity to design a New Deal-type reconstruction agenda. But building state capacity requires a government that is…

ICYMI, I did a blog post today at @lpeproject.bsky.social that’s really about the death of a 20 c mode of liberal/progressive politics. It’s about the need, as a first-order objective, to relegitimize the state around a representational legitimacy.

i'm disappointed in all of you

Timely and important piece on "The Appellate Void" by my colleague, Andy Coan, now up on SSRN.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

ironically the question has never been more frequently asked

someone shared this on the strength in numbers discord. kimmel is polling-pilled now!

I wonder if history has any lessons about what happens when large concentrations of armed soldiery stop getting paid.

New on MSNBC: Trump's new acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan has recruited prosecutors from outside her office to take James Comey to trial, after being unable to find any federal prosecutors in her own office willing to pursue the charges, according to two people familiar with the selections.

Feel free to attribute the following to a former OMB General Counsel: The supposed "new legal analysis" is, to use a technical legal term, horseshit. What the law actually says is that when Congress enacts a law ending a lapse, furloughed employees get paid at the earliest date possible. Period.

ICYMI

Opinion | No, Trump Can’t Deploy Troops to Wherever He Wants

Very nice piece from my colleague @stevevladeck.bsky.social in today's Times on the illegality of Trump's troop deployments to American cities. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/o...

Even in countries that chose *not* to impose retaliatory tariffs on US spirits, our spirits exports have plummeted. Exports to UK and Japan declined >23% YoY, while exports to the EU were down 12%.
Canada did retaliate - and US exports there fell 85%.
www.distilledspirits.org/wp-content/u...

Just phenomenal earwork

Law review article, symposium piece, book

TNG, DS9, TOS