Aw okay that helped

Why not? Because Trump appointees keep preventing it. A stamp on an piece of paper bereft of explanation and the one mechanism for minimal accountability goes away. Effortless, really.

Just really, truly feeling hollow at this one.

Contempt is the one tool judges have to confront executive lawlessness. The facts underlying Judge Boasberg's inquiry are harrowing. Now, there's no reason to think he'll ever be able to put officials under oath and ask, simply, why they secreted people away to be tortured in defiance of his order.

(This looks like an excellent and important intervention; very excited to read it.)

It's got a ring to it!

Is "dismantled" too technical? "Broke" to me connotes a kind of carelessness or clumsiness, whereas SCOTUS's undermining of the VRA is quite intentional.

(1)* alas

My one and only lifehack: pick up broken glass with the sticky side of duct tape. Works like a charm.

I see! I like "visionary" for that idea, but happy to procrastinate and float some other possibilities

proactive?

I think this instinct is a big reason we have any constitutional protections for academic freedom, formally or informally. This article does a wonderful job of tracing academic freedom's development, and a not insignificant part of that process involved courts saying "eh" when asked to intervene.

Totally understood! I just think the clarity with which one can define "viewpoint discrimination" as a jurisprudential concept is somewhat illusory given that courts are more reluctant to find it in a college classroom than, say, on the quad.

I'm basically a realist across the board (although we can table the five hour conversation necessary to get clear on what that means), but I think it's credible to say doctrinal malleability is *especially* pronounced in the free speech context. Formalism just doesn't work that well there!

Whatever the formal rules, courts do not apply doctrine the same way in every context *even if* there's little (or nothing) in the doctrine itself that supports such context differentiation. Doctrine in fact exists, and it is in fact rather protean.