Nicholas Serafin

Pleased to report that this article was a finalist in the AALS 2026 scholarly papers competition 🎉 (My previous work on the 13th amendment won an honorable mention)

The Mirabelli per curium reveals that parental rights doctrine is just family values politics by another name. Conservative justices embrace a traditionalist-authoritarian view of the family and vote accordingly. I explain in the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Folks have implored to assume good faith and engage in collegial ways. Spare me, friends. This is law office history in furtherance of stripping children who would otherwise be entitled to citizenship because the president doesn't like how they look. If this is acceptable to law profs, count me out.

Some powerful speeches from @nationalnurses.bsky.social members rallying the crowd at the SF #nokings rally 👊

Memo to Future Historians: This Is Fascism, and Millions of Us See It From Chicago to Portland, James Comey to Letitia James, and so much else—this is no longer America.

Great point from @mjtoma.bsky.social: Millions of us absolutely do see what's happening to the USA.

"We are horrified, shocked, enraged, and ashamed. We are acting, in a thousand ways, to oppose it. This cannot, and will not, be how the United States ends."

newrepublic.com/post/201625/...

Opinion | The Chicago raids send a worrying signal about the ideal ICE agents in Trump's America The agency is on a hiring spree. But we know what that kind of breakneck expansion of the workforce can result in because we’ve seen it before.

ICE is an armed gang, and they’re only going to get worse. www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

I fully understand how difficult it is to remain focused on any one particular atrocity but this really ought to be a serious scandal and people need to pay heavy prices for this

Constitution Day event

For Constitution Day, Santa Clara Law had a great discussion about the "Rule of Law"

Watch the video (which I think I unintentionally evaded): santaclarauniversity.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Page...

With @zahrsaid.bsky.social @nickserafin.bsky.social

We will have to hale people before truth and reconciliation commissions for these deeply unconscionable violations of human rights.

What is the point of law if honest compliance on one’s own volition means state retribution?

The illegitimate, lawless, and authoritarian regime in control of the government of the United States is at war with the people of the United States.

This piece also includes my personal favorite section heading of all time, to wit: "Monsters, Bastards, and Aliens"

What connects Trump's child separation policy at the border, felon disfranchisement, and the Roman law of infamy? Read and find out! shorturl.at/k7nvP

New piece in the Maryland Law Review on an under appreciated provision of the Constitution, the Corruption of Blood clause of Art 3 S3. The history of this clause is fascinating and touches on questions of race, disability, eugenics, immigration, sex, and much more...

I enthusiastically aid and abet terrorism.

They're not fascists, they just think we're in a state of exception due to the pollution of the polity and citizen body by undesirable racial elements whose removal is of such paramount importance that it transcends the dictates of the law, justified by their embodiment of the Will of the People.

If the courts lose jurisdiction because the government puts the prisoner in a black hole then there is no law.

Vichy collaboration

If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.

Every single member of the Columbia administration should step down.

Through their complicity and their cowardice, they've betrayed their faculty, their staff and most of all their students.

There's no way they can lead that university in any meaningful sense from this point on.

every person involved in this needs to be in prison

A five-alarm fire for academic freedom.

said this before and i wasn't exaggerating: RFK has the exact personality type of the kind of person that, in a different sort of regime, oversees mass starvation.

What these nihilistic vandals are doing to dismantle science & medicine—generations of expertise & public service & life improving benefits—is cultural revolution level national self harm. No foreign foe could inflict such brutal damage & senseless suffering on US so fast & effectively & unresisted.

in what meaningful way can we say that the constitution is in effect when an unelected and unaccountable billionaire is wielding state power to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations?

World's richest man ends America's modest aid to the world's poorest people.

I'm not a big believer in hell, but willing to make an exception

i keep saying these people hate the american system of government because it is true. “sovereign over the executive branch?” get the fuck outta here. he is a servant of the constitution and those “rogue judges” are doing their jobs!

No foreign power has ever posed as massive and immediate a threat to the United States as the current administration.

This is illegitimate and illegal. I don’t care how many people support it, and how many judges shrug at it. It is a crime against the post-Civil War constitutional order, a constitutional order that was paid for in the blood of Union soldiers.