Blake Emerson

Drug Scheduling as Institutional Design - Harvard Law Review The United States makes bad choices when it comes to psychoactive drugs. Under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), U.S. drug law has simultaneously fueled mass incarceration, inhibited needed access,...

Hot off the presses, Dave Pozen’s and my new piece in @HarvLRev on what is broken in how we regulate marijuana, kratom, opioids, and other drugs—and how to fix it. Admin law meets public health meets LPE meets drug law meets harm reduction. Check it out!
harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-13...

“If you don’t want to be called a fascist regime or secret police, stop acting like one.”

He messed up the stimulus, didn’t do a second new deal, and really beefed up the immigration enforcement apparatus. But the ACA and Dodd Frank were nothing to sneeze at. And his temperament and symbolic value were obviously extraordinary.

Is anyone else getting the Obama revivalism vibes these days? Conventional wisdom really soured on him over the past decade but I get the sense the dialectic is turning.

“None of these children should be used as pawns in Stephen Miller’s sick and twisted Great Replacement agenda.”

I don’t understand curling but from a Birds Eye view it looks a lot like an extended metaphor for constitutional interpretation?

🇺🇸

They do indeed. But the result in New McMahon v. New York and other cases doesn’t give me confidence that this Court will stop a politically aligned President from demolishing agencies he doesn’t like, legislative controls notwithstanding.

Bureau of Labor Statistics RIFs incoming.

Unfortunately, this is the second most likely result after the next Dems president not wanting to abolish ICE either.

A bad result of all this will be if Congress lacks the stones to abolish ICE, and then the next Dem president, building on Trump’s moves against regulatory agencies, does it by executive fiat. Then there will be a new constitutional settlement that presidents can rip up agencies made by law.

Time to write my book about executive power lol.

As expected, the famously measured and not at all corrupt Tom Homan has really turned down the temperature in Minneapolis.

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.

Hundreds of kids are still detained.

We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

209. The Modern Emergency Docket Turns Ten The February 2016 rulings blocking the Clean Power Plan were unprecedented; in retrospect, they were harbingers of a paradigm shift in the Supreme Court's role.

Ten years ago today, #SCOTUS issued five unsigned and unexplained 5-4 rulings granting emergency applications to block President Obama’s Clean Power Plan—a completely unprecedented move that helped to usher in the Court’s modern … (mis)adventures … with its shadow docket.

Me in today’s “One First”:

My paper, Habeas and the 1948 Judicial Code, is forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review (@stanlrev.bsky.social).

I argue that the 1948 Judicial Code, not the 1867 Habeas Corpus Act, should be the statutory focus for inquiry into the scope of habeas review.

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

Opinion | Libertarians Tried to Warn You About Trump

Quick question, how many “libertarians” became MAGA over the past decade?

Small plates, tapas style. We recommend 2-3 meats and 4-5 ferments per person.

Have you dined with us before at Meats and Ferments?

When you call an “Olympic skier” a “real loser.” 🤔

Just a quick update from the Twin Cities. (Please forgive the unsolicited message). THINGS ARE NOT BETTER IN MINNEAPOLIS. The media is mostly moving on, Trump is focused on other stuff, BUT NOTHING HAS CHANGED ON THE GROUND. More than 2,000 DHS thugs continue to roam the streets, abducting people 24/7, assaulting legal observers with impunity, and routinely denying 1st, 4th, and 5th amendment rights. Drones and helicopters are overhead every day. Hundreds and hundreds of terrified families have not left their homes since mid-December ... relying on the community to bring them food and help with rent and other necessities. (Those people are NOT violent drug cartel sex offending murderers, as DHS would tell you. Most are legal residents or citizens.) If anything, things have just become more stressful and intractable (think trench warfare as a suitable metaphor): The resistance is better organized and numerous, but DHS has become more clever and better at disguise... and the county sheriff's office is increasingly supporting them . Do not let anyone tell you that Homans (the new person in charge of the occupation) is making anything better. Do not let anyone tell you that 700 ICE agents leaving the city has made much of a difference; the remaining force (again, ~2,000) is still larger than the entire city's police force (which is legally unable to do anything). Please call your congressional reps ... especially if there is any chance the administration might listen to them.

A desperate plea sent to me by a Minneapolis resident who's been on the front lines since the beginning of the ICE occupation:

Detecting the early stages of an Obama-revivalism among progressives.

Trump's Schedule F Rule Finalized A bizarro rule formally justifies politicizing public services

The must-read piece on the death of the civil service. open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...

“They’re basically torturing people into signing off on their own deportation,” said one attorney.

Superb, deeply reported story, via @charpentier.bsky.social

But see Andor

Still can’t believe The Phantom Menace was what George Lucas came up with after decades of work on a new Star Wars.

AWFUL news tonight. This blesses the “mandatory” detention in the 5th Circuit without bond (and little chance at habeas) of every undocumented immigrant who originally entered across the border, no matter how many decades in the past.

It will fuel ICE’s push to transfer people to Texas immediately.

This is a very, very bad decision from one of the two Reagan judges left on the Fifth Circuit, joined by one of the two most extreme Trump appointees on the court.

And, it is about the issue I walked through at Law Dork earlier this week, in the context of Minnesota: www.lawdork.com/i/186796727/...

At least the Times is cleared-eyed about this. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/u...

Compassionate defiance?