iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I feel like there is a lot of performance art potential if those of us with traditional law deaning credentials apply and then do our best indignant Ilya Shapiro impressions when we don’t get an interview.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Agree with everything Steve says but we also learned that when the President and his advisors identify a pot of millions of votes that they know favor their opponents and design procedurally rules that will inevitably invalidate the bulk of those ballots not one Justice will say that out loud.

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Reposted by Andrew Siegel

Eric Columbus @ericcolumbus.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Happy 72nd Birthday to Ruby Bridges, who at the age of 6 desegregated the New Orleans public schools. She’s younger than 30 senators and our last two presidents—and only 7 years older than Barack Obama. The past isn’t past.

Ruby Bridges flanked by three U.S. Marshals on the steps of her school

Norman Rockwell’s painting depicting the event, “The Problem We All Live With,” originally published as a centerfold in the January 14, 1964 issue of Look magazine.

Ruby Bridges talking with President Obama as they look at Rockwell’s painting while it was temporarily displayed at the White House in 2011.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Not 100% sold but my working hypothesis is that under current doctrine the court will always find standing to challenge anything a Dem President does but will use standing to protect Republicans; maybe if we just have more expansive standing for these big moves it will be more evanhanded.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I’ll do you one better. There should be a “standing against dictatorship” or “autocracy” doctrine that allows citizen standing or something similar when the executive takes patently unauthorized actions that threaten to undercut basic checks and balances or undermine democratic accountability.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Help me understand. Even leaving aside everything else wrong with this argument, wouldn’t a group of people leaving societies generally “unfit for liberal democracy” to come to countries known for their commitment to liberal democracy be affirmatively selected for affinity for liberal democracy?

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Three true things: 1)There are six partisan Republicans on the Supreme Court; 2)some of them are more overtly MAGA than others; 3)the partisan makeup of the Court is historically disconnected from election results as the Dems won the popular vote 7 out of 8 times while the Reps built a ct majority.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

The official Democratic Party position should be: “Like so much else the Trump administration has done, this is a crime. The Supreme Court gave Donald Trump vast immunity but that doesn’t apply to his subordinates. We look forward to prosecuting all of you to the full extent of the law.”

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Sam Alito continuing to demonstrate that his primary identity is not “federal judge” but “random aggrieved 80-year-old white guy who has Fox News on all day.”

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

In exchange for opening the Straitnof Hormuz, President Trump offers to rename Kennedy Center the Trump Kennedy Center.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Thought experiment: if for whatever reason we used a first in, last counted system of announcing results and the Republicans gained every vote drop, would we hear one syllable about fraud?

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

I am in favor of court expansion but have always considered proposals like this to be a different conversation. Expansion is what we do immediately. This is what we do eventually (and perhaps bipartisanly) after the inevitable cycles of court expansion

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Even if you think “good behavior” means “life tenure,” a mechanism for defining different duties for different members of a court wouldn’t violate it. We do it all the time (senior judges hearing cases but not sitting en banc, retired justices riding circuit, chief judges of lower courts).

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

What if many of us believe the Larry Kramer story that the Constitution contains lots of intentional tools to fight back against judicial supremacy but that the courts have gaslit us about that aspect of the original design?

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

I think there are issues about limiting sitting Justices to 18 yrs but think it is perfectly consistent with logic and the Constitution to prospectively define a SCt made up of more than 9 justices with appointments every 2 years and the most recent 9 appointees having specialized duties

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

To me this is the second best argument against a cap. The best is one I don’t hear that often: owners make most of their money through the crazy appreciation of franchise value; any system that “shares” “revenue” but doesn’t share appreciation (at least when it is actualized) is literally a scam.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Also, it wasn’t judicial independence in the abstract but judicial independence in the context of a president who they were worried was otherwise positioned to become something of a dictator. Now things are flipped; adding seats is in the service of preventing a dictator.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Something that is consistently missed: Public opposition to FDR’s court-packing plan was galvanized by fear that he was in danger of becoming a dictator. In contrast, current support for adding Justices to the Court is motivated by a desire to prevent a right-wing dictator. Valences have flipped.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

So true. To be fair, the billionaires real complaint isn’t the short term loss in operating profits but the fact that no one is going to pay 6 billion dollars for a seat at the NBA table if you can pay $100 million for a division 2 team, spend $200 million on players, and get promoted.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Henry Friendly’s greatest flaw was that he had no qualms treating the products of his judicial imagination as if they were apolitical. William Rehnquist’s greatest flaw was that he was a segregationist. They were John Roberts’ mentors. You do the math.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

Every time he talks I can’t figure out whether he is really dumb or whether he thinks we are really dumb.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

We can argue about whether it is prudence or timidity that has prevented the broad use of jurisdiction stripping, but it is at minimum a break glass in case of emergency option and the building is on fire.

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Reposted by Andrew Siegel

Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 30/04/2026

I have spent my entire career listening to FedSoc types complain about liberal “activist judges” who “legislate from the bench,” and none of them are going to say a single blessed thing about Sam Alito rewriting the Voting Rights Act to say what he thinks Congress ought to have said

ballsandstrikes.org

Six Conservative Activists Killed the Voting Rights Act

The Supreme Court's conservatives have spent their careers working to kill the Voting Rights Act. They just did it.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

There are different kinds of Supreme Court dissents with different objectives: cataloging errors, demonstrating an alternative path, laying bare hidden motives, explainig the stakes, calling the public to battle. Justice Kagan just set a new benchmark for hitting all the bases in one opinion.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Two questions: (1) Does this letter violate the rules of professional conduct? (2) If not, how can we edit the rules to fix that oversight?

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Having now read your full argument, I think the point of disconnect is your claim that balancing of the equities has no role in stay applications. (1) I’m not sure that is a fair reading of the cases. (2) If it is, they are inconsistent with the history, doctrine, and purposes of equity courts.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

The harm to the govt of having its policies blocked is identical in both situations. I can understand that it plays a dual role (also establishing irreparable injury) when the govt is on top but it needs to play an equal part in weighing the equities in both situations. And JGR doesn’t do that.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

The definition of “gossip” is itself a tool of control. I remember being accused of “gossip” and silenced at a meeting my first year teaching for relaying third-party concerns about one Dean candidate’s record on race/gender after an hour of discussion of third-party concerns about everything else.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

For the many students, relatives, colleagues, and softball team parents who asked “WTF is going on here,” @jamellebouie.net has got you covered.

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Reposted by Andrew Siegel

Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 31/03/2026

It’s genuinely a challenge for legal journalists to cover the birthright citizenship case, because one side’s argument is “the Fourteenth’s Amendment intent and text and a century of uninterrupted Supreme Court precedent all support birthright citizenship,” and the other side’s argument is “nuh-UH”

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Well, you can also shoot for an middle ground. You can respond to their nonsense arguments in a couple of sentences of firm and snarky legal argument and then move on to what you want to talk about. Mock the unitary executive, the Bruen test, the illiteracy of this citizenship reading.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Just read the Future of Another Time

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

I co-sign all the procedural, jurisdictional, and hypocrisy points, but the most galling thing in these opinions is the way Alito and crew justify it all by dressing themselves up as civil rights crusaders while running roughshod over the rights and dignity of minorities and trans youth.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

The idea that the federal government through its military brought its coercive weight down upon a famously independent private association because the President and the Secretary of Defense didn’t like its values is one of the most totalitarian things I have heard in awhile.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Notice also that they are living in a fictional factual universe. No one was locked inside their homes, immigration policy oscillated back to merely harsh, and the government constantly compromised with vaccine skeptics despite a century of precedents giving them even broader public health powers.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

Still remember my then-fiance and I walking out of The English Patient both incredibly nervous that the other one might have liked the movie. Not saying it would have been a deal breaker. But not saying it wouldn’t have either.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

3 (Feldman, O’Connell, Wheaton)

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

We are doing the Stand By Me version of this event and prices are comparable.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

This must be weird news to see if you’re one of the literally hundreds or even thousands of university administrators who preemptively censored faculty, scrubbed websites, changed the names of centers, etc.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

@atg.wa.gov, if the facts check out this looks like the easiest prosecution of ICE agents you will ever find. Can’t imagine a remotely plausible argument for any immunity doctrine.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

This has been one of my biggest worries for awhile. Given their propensity to lie about basic facts and the courts’ invention of absurd deference, immunity, and remedial doctrines, it is not clear we could stop a cynical illegal push to indiscriminately deport citizens.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Brilliant? Sure. Kind? More than you will ever know. But what made him special was the quiet confidence that motivated him to stand up against cheats, bullies, and bigots who threatened fairness, justice, and the rule of law. I hope his spirit lives on among his many Article III admirers.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

Birthright citizenship is a policy choice so central to our values and identity as a nation that we chose to amend the Constitution to protect it against the passions and prejudices of temporary majorities.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

The core arguments around many of the right’s pet theories are not serious but instead of dismissing them as such we relied on logical argument and voting to defeat them. The latter didn’t work, as consistent popular vote victories didn’t flip the court, and the former only legitimized them.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

And (2) we end up with a constitutional system selected because it favors the political right AND a right-wing judiciary convinced of its own neutrality and innocence.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

We mostly agree, but (1) around the margins you favor right-wing presidents and disfavor left-wing presidents because results are under-determined and things like loan forgiveness just seem so unfair to you

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

But for 95% of its adherents the explanation for that is purely psychological: once you figure out the cheat card for your side to win, your need to think of yourself as a good person makes you embrace allegedly neutral reasons to adopt the winning rule.

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Andrew Siegel @amsprof.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

But the entire Republican embrace of the unitary executive stems from an era where Nixon/Reagan/Bush were winning landslides and the Dems had held the House for 50 years. They believe in their bones that unleashing the President is right-wing gold.

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