The Volokh Conspiracy Archive

From Mediaite (Zachary Leeman) yesterday:

"Original Sin" co-author Alex Thompson revealed a Democratic insider told him they were "amazed" at how "easily" the media swallowed "spin" about former President Joe Biden's health….

It goes on to quote Thompson:

The media fell short, and the biggest example of that is, if the media was on top of this, then Biden's debate performance should not have been such a shock to so many people ….

I had one conversation with someone, this was after the election, while we were reporting this book, and this person said, "Listen, yes, we deserve blame for X, Y, Z. We were hiding him. We were." But this person also sort of got in my face, and they said, "Listen, the media deserves some blame, too." Like we were sort of amazed at some of the stuff we were able to spin and get on….

They're just like, "You guys should not have believed us so easily." And I thought that was like a really interesting, but I also think that's true. I think the media, … in a lot of ways, was not skeptical enough and did not remember the less[on] that, they do it to different degrees, but every White House lies.

This reminds me of the essay I prepared for the Free Speech in Crisis & the Limits of the First Amendment in March; I was invited to participate on the Media Environment panel, for which the description was:

It is widely believed that a profoundly broken media system is responsible for bringing the current administration into power, and for critics, the political crisis it has unleashed. Is this correct? And if so, what is to be done about it? How can public opinion be harnessed to serve constitutional purposes in the new media landscape? How can and should the media system be reformed? And what can free speech law do about any of this?

Just two weeks ago, my Free Speech Unmuted co-host Prof. Jane Bambauer (Florida) and I discussed Garcia v. Character Technologies. (Besides being a leading First Amendment scholar, Jane also teaches and writes about tort law.) I'm therefore especially delighted to pass along some thoughts from her on yesterday's decision in the case:

AI, Free Speech, and Duty [by Jane Bambauer]

The case against Character.AI, based on the suicide of a teenager who had become obsessed with his Daenerys Targaryen chatbot, produced an important opinion yesterday. Judge Conway of the U.S. District Court in Orlando declined to dismiss almost all of the plaintiffs' claims, and also refused "at this stage in the litigation" to treat AI or chatbot output as speech under the First Amendment. I think the opinion has problems.

Eugene has already laid out some of the reasons that the court's First Amendment analysis is flawed. (E.g., could the Florida legislature really pass a law banning ChatGPT from producing content critical of Governor DeSantis? Of course not.) I want to pile on a little bit—I can't help myself—and then connect the free speech issues to the analysis of tort duty.

Is Chatbot Output "Speech"?

The defendants (Google and Character AI) argued that chatbot output is protected speech, much like computer-generated characters in video games. The defendants made analogies to other expressive technologies that were once new as well. But the court found that these arguments "do not meaningfully advance their analogies" because the defendants didn't explain how chatbot output is expressive.

In the court's opinion, with an assist from Justice Barrett, chatbot output is not expressive because it is designed to give listeners the expression that they are looking for rather than choosing for them:

Our peer-reviewed Journal of Free Speech Law, which is now four years old, has published over 100 articles, including by Jack Balkin (Yale), Mark Lemley (Stanford), Jane Ginsburg (Columbia), Philip Hamburger (Columbia), Christopher Yoo (Penn), and many others—both prominent figures in the field and emerging young scholars, including ones who didn't have a tenure-track academic appointment. (This list doesn't include our reprinting others' symposia, which have also included many other top scholars, such as Robert Post, Mark Tushnet, Geoffrey Stone, Lee Bollinger, Jeremy Waldron, Danielle Citron, Genevieve Lakier, and more.) The articles have been cited so far in 11 court cases, over 325 articles, and at least 100 briefs. And note that all the articles have only had four years or less to attract these citations.

I expect that many authors are planning to submit articles on free speech to the usual law reviews when the submission cycle restarts in August. But if you submit exclusively to us before that, we will give you an answer within 14 days; and then if you'd like to have it published quickly, we can publish it in within several weeks, if it's sufficiently clean and cite-checked by your research assistant. This means your article can be published by us, if it's accepted, almost a year (or more) before it would be published by the law journals.

Of course, also please pass this along to friends or colleagues who you think might be interested. Note that the submissions don't compete for a limited number of slots in an issue or volume; we'll publish articles that satisfy our quality standards whenever we get them.

All submissions must be exclusive to us, but, again, you'll have an answer within 14 days, so you'll be able to submit elsewhere if we say no. Please submit an anonymized draft, together with at https://freespeechlaw.scholasticahq.com/. A few guidelines:

A new episode of the Academic Freedom Podcast has been released. The podcast is sponsored by the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech at Yale Law School.

This episode features a conversation with Daniel Hemel on President Donald Trump's threat to rescind the tax exempt status of Harvard University. Hemel is a professor of law at New York University Law School, with an expertise in taxation, nonprofit organizations, and constitutional law.

On the podcast we discuss how private universities fit into the federal tax code, the legalities of altering the tax exempt status of a university, the implications for the future of a university subjected to such an action, the risks to other nonprofits beyond higher education if the administration were to take such a step, and the intricacies of the controversy over Bob Jones University and the legacy of Bob Jones University v. United States.

Shortly after the Court granted cert in St. Isidore of Seville v. Drummond, I wrote two posts about Justice Barrett's recusal. Before the case was even argued, I made a crude prediction to several reporters that the Chief would take the easy-out, and just vote to 4-4 affirm. There would be no opinion, and the Court could focus on more important issues. The children of Oklahoma really didn't matter.

And so it has come to pass. The Court affirmed the Oklahoma Supreme Court with a 4-4 decision. I am reasonably confident that Justice Kavanaugh voted with the conservatives. And Chief Justice Roberts was with his progressive colleagues. Roberts cast his vote in Carson v. Maikin, but I doubt he would go much further.

Regrettably, we still do not know why Justice Barrett recused. Was it because Notre Dame University was involved? The Notre Dame religious liberty clinic? Or was this because of Nicole Garnett's involvement? If this concerns her friendship with Garnett, the recusal can directly affect some of the allegations against Justice Thomas. Who knows.

I am not aware that any other state has a similar school in the pipeline, so this issue will remain unresolved for some to come.

Update: A colleague flags that Barrett did not recuse in another case brought by the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Clinic. It doesn't seem that Garnett had any involvement with this case. As a general matter, a recusal is triggered at all stages--cert and merits. So if she did not recuse here, the clinic, standing by itself is not the cause of the recusal. Still, it is unclear to me whether Barrett's recusal in St. Isidore was due to the Justice's friendship with Nicole Garnett, or Barrett's connection with clinic through Garnett. Ultimately, I am not certain the cause of Barrett's recusal, but the clinic, standing apart from Garnett should not trigger a recusal.

5/22/1807: Aaron Burr is indicted on charges of treason. Chief Justice John Marshall would preside over Burr's trial.

A lawyer flagged a new standing order from the District of Maryland. It provides, in part:

ORDERED by the United States District Court for the District of Maryland that upon the filing of a Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2241 on behalf of an alien detainee, the Government/Respondents, including all those acting for them or on their behalf, are ENJOINED and RESTRAINED from removing Petitioners in such cases from the continental United States or altering their legal status, provided that Petitioner's full name and A# have been provided to the Court, either in the Petition or in a separate sealed filing.

Am I reading this right? If a lawyer files a conforming habeas petition, an injunction is automatically entered blocking the removal of the alien. The merits are irrelevant. And this injunction applies to the government, writ large. Has anyone ever seen an order like this before?

This order is pretty clearly designed to thwart the Trump Administration's immigration policies. I can't imagine this order would remain in effect if a different President is in the White House.

Earlier today, Forbes interviewed me about developments in the case challenging Donald Trump's massive "Liberation Day" tariffs brought by the Liberty Justice Center and myself on behalf of five US businesses harmed by the tariffs. We also discussed today's oral argument in the similar case brought by twelve states led by Oregon. I may have more to say about the Oregon argument later. For now, I will note (as I also indicated in the Forbes interview), that I tentatively think that argument went well for the states plaintiffs. As in the argument in our case last week, the judges seemed highly skeptical of the government's claim that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) gives the president virtually unlimited power to impose tariffs. Here is the video of the interview:

I should perhaps note I was not the one who came up with the title of the Forbes video. I'm not actually "the lawyer behind [the] lawsuit." I am just one part of a team.

I have gone over the legal issues raised by Trump's IEEPA tariffs in greater detail in my Lawfare article, "The Constitutional Case Against Trump's Trade War." See also my post on why these tariffs threaten the rule of law.

The idea of due process can be a difficult legal concept for a lot of non-lawyers. But you can get the basic idea from Monty Python's classic movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. You just need to watch a single scene, the "she's a witch!" scene, which is here:

You probably remember the scene, at least if you're of a certain age. To recap: The mob has found a witch, and they're very excited to burn her. They come to Bedevere and ask for his permission to do it. Bedevere pauses and asks, "How do you know she's a witch?" The crowd can't come up with a good reason. Bedevere then insists that there are ways of telling if she's a witch, and he leads the mob to a scientific test of that proposition.

The method Bedevere devises is absurd. Witches and wood both burn, the medieval logic goes, so witches must be made of wood. And wood and ducks both float, so if she weighs the same as a duck, she must be a witch! They get a big scale and weigh her and a duck; the scale being even proves she's a witch. It's all exceedingly silly, of course. But it impresses a watching King Arthur, who knights Bedevere and invites him to join the Round Table.

At one level, the scene is a hilarious spoof of the bizarre ways they tried to identify who was a witch in medieval England. Those methods weren't all that different from weighing the accused against a duck. In particular, the scene echoes the medieval practice of swimming a witch, where they would submerge a suspected witch under water to see if they sunk to the bottom or floated. (Innocent people would sink to the bottom, but witches would float above the water, they thought.)

But more importantly, the scene is also about due process. The mob is positive the woman is a witch. Bedevere asks the key question, but how do you know she is one? The crowd first invokes the fake nose and the hat they put on her to make her look like a witch. Bedevere is unimpressed. He then introduces the basic idea of due process: Before taking the action of burning the woman as a witch, there should be a process for developing and evaluating evidence that she is one.

The absurdity of the process Bedevere proposes makes the same point. In the unenlightened medieval times, the script writers are telling us, they didn't understand how to test what is true. The process Bedevere came up with was silly. It had no ability to help a fact finder discover if she was a witch or not. And it seems to have been fixed, too, with the woman clearly not weighing the same as a duck but the two coming out the same weight. The accused even breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the camera about it. She sarcastically comments: "It's a fair cop," British slang for "that's a fair process; yeah, you got me." Of course, it was not a fair process at all. It was a process, but not a fair one.

The lawyerly idea of due process, it seems to me, is all about Bedevere stopping the crowd and asking how they know she's a witch. And then it's a matter of figuring out what procedures should be in place to tell if the crowd's belief is true. (Of course, they're stacking the deck because we know today that witches don't exist in the first place. But it's only a model, er, a movie.)

I have been remiss this semester in failing to post my usual list of upcoming speaking engagements. However, I do have some coming up in the next several weeks that I would like to list for interested readers. Unless otherwise noted, all are in person and open to the public. I may update this post with additional events. Below, I also note some information on earlier engagements for which video or audio is available.

May 27, 12-1:00 PM, Cato Institute, Washington, DC: "Tariffs, Emergencies, and Presidential Power." (panel with Cato Institute scholar Walter Olson). Virtual event. Free registration available here.

May 31, 3-4 PM, Pruyne Lecture Hall, Fayerweather Hall, Amherst College, Amherst, MA: "Challenges Facing American Democracy." This event is primarily for Amherst College alumni, students, and employees (part of Amherst's 2025 alumni reunion activities). But I think members of the general public can come if space allows. See here for more details about my talk, and other events that day.

June 13, 10:15-12:15 AM, Connecticut Legal Conference (annual conference of the Connecticut Bar Association), Connecticut Convention Center, 100 Columbus Blvd., Hartford, CT: Panel on "SCOTUS: What's Next" (covering recent and upcoming Supreme Court decisions). Other participants are G. Eric Brunstad, Jr. (Yale Law School, Dechert, LLP), and former Connecticut Supreme Court Justice Joette Katz (moderator). More detailed information here. This event is restricted to attendees of the Connecticut Legal Conference.

June 13, 2-3:30 PM, Connecticut Legal Conference (annual conference of the Connecticut Bar Association), Connecticut Convention Center, 100 Columbus Blvd., Hartford, CT: Panel on "Kelo v. City of New London 20th Anniversary: Views from the Bench, Bar and Academia." Other participants are Wesley Horton (counsel for New London in the Kelo case); Justice Peter Zarella (retired Justice, Connecticut Supreme Court); and Justice Joette Katz (retired Justice, Connecticut Supreme Court, serving as the moderator). This event is restricted to attendees of the Connecticut Legal Conference.

Audio and/or video of some of my previous speaking engagements and podcasts for the last several months is available at the Cato Institute website here, and also at the National Constitution Center site here.

On Tuesday, May 27, 12-1 PM, the Cato Institute will hold a virtual event on "Tariffs, Emergencies, and Presidential Power." Registration is free and available here. We will, among other things, discuss the case challenging Donald Trump's massive "Liberation Day" tariffs brought by the Liberty Justice Center and myself on behalf five US businesses harmed by the tariffs. I have gone over the legal issues rasied by Trump's IEEPA tariffs in greater detail in my Lawfare article, "The Constitutional Case Against Trump's Trade War." See also my post on why these tariffs threaten the rule of law.

Here is a description of the upcoming Cato event:

Can the president unilaterally impose tariffs under his emergency powers? In this webinar, legal scholars Ilya Somin, a professor at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University who is co-counsel in the pending tariffs case VOS Selections v. Trump, and Walter Olson explore the constitutional and statutory limits of presidential authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and other statutes. They'll discuss President Trump's recent efforts to justify sweeping trade measures under IEEPA, examine the historical role of Congress in setting tariffs, and consider broader stakes for the separation of powers. Whether you're a lawyer, policymaker, or interested observer, this conversation will shed light on one of the most important trade and constitutional questions of our time.

Vice President J.D. Vance sat down for an interview with Ross Douthat. They cover much ground, but I wanted to flag this exchange concerning Chief Justice Roberts:

Let me just make one final philosophical point here. I worry that unless the Supreme Court steps in here, or unless the District Courts exercise a little bit more discretion, we are running into a real conflict between two important principles in the United States.

Principle 1 of course is that courts interpret the law. Principle 2 is that the American people decide how they're governed. That's the fundamental small-d democratic principle that's at the heart of the American project. I think that you are seeing, and I know this is inflammatory, but I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally overturn the will of the American people. To be clear, it's not most courts. But I saw an interview with Chief Justice Roberts recently where he said the role of the court is to check the excesses of the executive. I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That's one-half of his job. The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch. You cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they're not allowed to have what they voted for. That's where we are right now.

We're going to keep working it through the immigration court process, through the Supreme Court as much as possible.

Vance is exactly right.

I think the Chief Justice largely lives in a bubble where everyone is afraid to challenge him. He sees himself as a singular force of good to save the rule of law. In Roberts's mind, he can take a shot at the incoming Vice President in his end-of-year address, and everyone will simply submit to his will. No. Vance is fighting back. Roberts thinks he can lecture the President that no judge, even members of the Supreme Court can be impeached; we the people simply have to take it. No. Vance is fighting back.

And, I think, lower court judges are starting to fight back as well. Judge Ho made this same point in his concurrence yesterday, which subtly responded to Chief Justice Roberts:

It is not the role of the judiciary to check the excesses of the other branches, any more than it's our role to check the excesses of any other American citizen. Judges do not roam the countryside looking for opportunities to chastise government officials for their mistakes.

Yet Roberts does exactly that. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

There is a storm brewing on the horizon, and I don't think the Chief quite sees it. As I will explain in a forthcoming essay, Roberts's two decades on the bench have rendered him utterly unqualified to deal with what lies ahead. The arc from NFIB to AARP does not bode well for the future. Here is a preview:

It is often repeated that we have three, co-equal branches of government. But that simply isn't true. Alexander Hamilton described the judiciary as the "least dangerous branch." Unlike the Congress, which has the power of the "purse," and the President who wields the power of the "sword," the courts have "merely judgment." Yet, it has been deeply ingrained in our national consciousness that the foundational role of the courts is to balance the power of the elected branches. Indeed, Chief Justice John Roberts boasted that the courts must "check the excesses of Congress or the executive." But who will check the excesses of the judiciary? The greatest check on the courts can only be the widely held belief that the Court is not ruling based on politics. But if people believe the judiciary is simply a mediator that weighs political compromise, then the courts cannot long endure.

Roberts's colleagues should, sooner rather than later, cut the tether and listen to Justices Alito and Thomas. These national treasures should not retire, as they are the only ones speaking sense.

In Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc., the mother of a 14-year-old, who killed himself after having many conversations with a Game-of-Thrones-based AI character (with whom he seems to have become obsessed), is suing Character for, among other things, negligence and negligence-based product liability. Today's decision by Judge Anne Conway (M.D. Fla.) allowed the claim to go forward; I plan to blog separately about those negligence claims, but in this post I want to focus on the court's rejection, at least for now, of Character.AI's First Amendment defense.

The court recognized that "Defendants can assert the First Amendment rights of the Character A.I. users," which is to say that Character can argue that imposing liability on it for its output may deprive other users—the great bulk of whom will find it valuable and not harmful—of access to it. An analogy might be a website arguing that, for instance, requiring it to remove a copy of Romeo and Juliet won't affect Shakespeare's First Amendment rights (since he's dead) or even the website's own rights to distribute what it chooses, but the rights of readers to freely access this material. The court also noted that "Plaintiff endeavors to restrict Character A.I. users' access to Character A.I. and to its LLM's output," since Garcia argues that it was negligent for Character to provide the output that it did, and that it therefore had a duty to reasonably restrict or modify that output.

But the court wasn't convinced that the output was "speech" for First Amendment purposes:

I've just published an article in Constitutional Commentary entitled "The Volokh Briefs: Drawing the Line Against Compelled Speech in Public Accommodations," 39 Const. Comm. 143 (2024) (available on SSRN here). Here's the abstract:

In a series of important amicus briefs (the "Volokh Briefs") filed over the course of about a decade, Professor Eugene Volokh was the principal architect of an argument for protecting expressive goods and services offered for sale in the commercial marketplace. This free speech protection would override certain applications of state antidiscrimination law.

The argument bore fruit in 303 Creative v. Elenis (2023), which held that under the First Amendment's Free Speech Clause the state could not force a designer to fashion websites incorporating the designer's customized text and graphics for the celebration of same-sex weddings. As Volokh and others urged, the Court's holding applied even though the business was classified as a "public accommodation" under Colorado's anti-discrimination law, which protects customers from discrimination based on certain characteristics like race, sex, and sexual orientation. The state had argued that refusing to create websites for same-sex weddings, while offering to create them for opposite-sex weddings, would be an act of discrimination based on sexual orientation. But as Volokh had argued, the Court held that the website designer would instead be refusing only to produce certain speech (not discriminating based on a customer's status), and her right against compelled speech must prevail under the First Amendment.

Consistent with Volokh's view, the speech protection in 303 Creative was limited to goods and services that were customized and expressive. Just as Volokh had urged, the Court reassured skeptics that its holding would have no application to the innumerable non-expressive goods and services in the marketplace. Much of Volokh's reasoning echoed in Justice Gorsuch's majority opinion.

This Article outlines the legal position developed in the Volokh Briefs. It focuses on the briefs in three key cases: Elane Photography (2013), Masterpiece Cakeshop (2018), and 303 Creative (2023) itself. As part of tracing this intellectual journey, the Article shows how the Volokh Briefs evolved and matured over time and how they were distinct from others taking the side of the objecting service providers. Volokh's view of compelled speech gave breathing room for individuals' vital speech interests while leaving plenty of space for government to protect people from discrimination. The Article shows how the methodology in the Volokh Briefs provides a roadmap for drawing and navigating the lines necessary to preserve the core interests on both sides, although the Supreme Court stopped short of fully adopting it. Finally, critics of the Volokh Briefs abound among progressive civil rights organizations and academics. The Article responds to some of them.

As noted in the Article introduction, I was among the professors and lawyers who had the privilege of working with Eugene on the briefs, although they were mostly his brainchild. He and his UCLA First Amendment clinic took the laboring oar on them.

The occasion for the Article was Eugene's decision to leave UCLA and join the Hoover Institution last year. In April 2024, I joined several scholars in a roundtable discussion and celebration of his contributions to scholarship and law.

I also noted in the introduction that I'm not a dispassionate observer of Eugene's work:

I consider him both a friend and an intellectual role model. He is as good-natured and big-hearted, and yet as principled and rigorous, as any scholar I've known.

Eugene Volokh's premature and publicly underexplained decision to leave academia was a loss for viewpoint diversity in American law schools. It is partly in the service of such diversity that he has devoted an extraordinary body of work, including the small slice of it that I discuss here.

I'd like to thank my research assistant Caroline Hoch (SMU Law '25) for her estimable help in producing the Article.

Nearly thirteen years after it was announced, DACA will come to an end--in Texas. In March 2025, the Fifth Circuit ruled that DACA was unlawful, but the ruling was limited to the only state found to have standing: Texas. The deadline for MALDEF and other groups to file a cert petition and come and gone. The organization announced that they did not seek cert, in an effort to limit any ruling to Texas and avoid a national ruling.

"Yesterday was the extended deadline for any party to file with the United States Supreme Court seeking discretionary review of the Fifth Circuit's January 17 decision in Texas v. United States, the longstanding Texas-driven challenge to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA. None of the parties – the state of Texas and other plaintiff states, the United States, the intervenor state of New Jersey, and the intervenor DACA recipients, who have been represented by MALDEF throughout the case – filed a petition seeking Supreme Court review. Thus, the Fifth Circuit decision of January 17 is now final.

"As a reminder, that decision held that DACA's protection from removal or deportation is a lawful exercise of presidential discretion, and therefore may be granted in response to new and renewal applications throughout the entire country. The Fifth Circuit panel also concluded — erroneously in MALDEF's view — that work authorization granted through the DACA process is not permissible; however, the court limited the implementation of that decision solely to the state of Texas. The result is that, following implementation of the Fifth Circuit decision, DACA and work authorization should be available to those renewing and those newly applying for DACA in the 49 states other than Texas.

"The district court in the Texas case will initially determine how to implement the Fifth Circuit decision. That determination should begin soon through a process of consultation and debate among all the parties before the district court. With respect to the issue of work authorization for DACA holders residing in Texas, MALDEF will be advocating for an extended period of implementation that is respectful, to the maximum extent possible, of the important reliance interests identified by the Supreme Court in its 2020 decision rejecting the first Trump administration's rescission of DACA. In any event, the implementation is likely to be phased in over a significant period of time. Thus, no DACA holder in Texas should be in danger of losing work authorization imminently."

Contrary to what some critics may think, the Fifth Circuit has been trending towards limiting relief to plaintiff states. Other circuits should take note.

President Trump has shown no interest in terminating DACA, so this policy likely will remain in effect in 49 states.

From a filing Monday in Johnson v. Dunn (N.D. Ala.), responding to an order from Judge Anna Manasco demanding an explanation for what she described as apparently "fabricated citations":

What happened here is unacceptable. Tempted by the convenience of artificial intelligence, counsel improperly used generative AI to supplement two motions and did not verify the citations that AI provided. Those citations turned out to be "hallucinations" by the AI system. Although done without intent to mislead the Court or counsel opposite, counsel do not defend or condone this complete lapse in judgment. They apologize—both for failing to uphold their own standards and for wasting counsel opposite's and this Court's time and resources.

Butler Snow [the law firm involved -EV] joins in counsels' apology to the Court, parties and all counsel, and respectfully requests if the Court decides in its discretion to impose sanctions, that any sanctions be proportionate to the wrong and commensurate with each attorney's role in these events. Butler Snow also requests that its client not be sanctioned, and for counsel to have the opportunity to file an amended motion with correct citations….

There are no excuses for counsel's behavior, only explanations. As set forth in the separately filed declarations …, here is what happened: …

5/21/2007: Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly decided.

The Volokh Conspiracy

"Listen, the Media Deserves Some Blame, Too": "You Guys Should Not Have Believed Us So Easily"

"AI, Free Speech, and Duty"

Submit Your Articles to the Journal of Free Speech Law, Before You Circulate Them to the Law Reviews

Academic Freedom Podcast on Rescinding Harvard's Tax Exempt Status

As I Expected, SCOTUS 4-4's St. Isidore's Case With Barrett Recused (Updated)

Today in Supreme Court History: May 22, 1807

District of Maryland Standing Order: Any Filed Habeas Petition Will Automatically Block Removal Of Alien

Forbes Interview on Developments in Our Case and Other Litigation Against Trump's "Liberation Day" Tariffs

Monty Python, The Holy Grail, and the Idea of Due Process

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Upcoming Cato Institute Virtual Event on "Tariffs, Emergencies, and Presidential Power"

J.D. Vance to Chief Justice Roberts: The Judiciary Must Check Its Own Excesses

Court Allows Lawsuit Over Character.AI Conversations That Allegedly Caused 14-Year-Old's Suicide

MALDEF Chooses Not To Seek Cert in DACA Case, But The Injunction Will Be Limited To Texas

AI-Hallucinated Citation Case Involving Prominent Alabama Firm (with Over 350 Lawyers Nationwide)

Today in Supreme Court History: May 21, 2007

Wednesday Open Thread

Recent Volokh Posts

Volokh Conspiracy Daily E-mail

The All-Argentina Issue is Here