iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Ben Heath

Oona Hathaway @oonahathaway.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

My statement today, in my role as President of the American Society of International Law, on the new U.S. sanctions on the International Criminal Court. Please read and share.

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Reposted by Ben Heath

Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

New working paper w/ @hannafolsz.bsky.social In 2025, Trump targeted US law firms for their political opposition Some firms resisted by suing Trump. Others folded by agreeing to support the administration w/ pro bono work Resisting firms took a short term financial hit but improved reputations

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Is Trump II where the United States reached peak Debord? Or were we already there?

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Reposted by Ben Heath

Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I can’t help but notice that ICE keeps claiming that people it shoots were trying to ram the agents with a car, and then video keeps proving that’s a lie.

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Charlotte Garden @charlottegarden.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I'd be interested in seeing the CBA, if anyone wants to send it to me!

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

State Making as Organized Crime

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

When I start doing stuff like that, and it proves to be equally, disastrously wrong, remind me that it's time for me to fade gently into irrelevance. I promise I will go willingly.

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Just your hammer and a sickle, i think

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Not the point, but now I have a cool new crust punk band called Skällar to check out this evening

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Aw that's a crap link. But I'll send you the chapter if you're interested in crossing over. It's not too late!

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Yeah that makes sense to me too

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

More seriously, Chimni's chapter in the MegaReg book has a more sophisticated take than what I can manage on here. It's not all that dissimilar to your diagnosis. But I do think Chimni makes it too easy by picking on IP & ISDS. academic-oup-com.libproxy.temple.edu/book/35309/c...

academic-oup-com.libproxy.temple.edu

Shibboleth Authentication Request

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

That's the stuff. See? It was a wild time!

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

You should commission a serialized edition for the blog.

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I think the thesis is that entrenched economic interests drive the content of the law, and that TPP was designed to benefit those entrenched economic interests. Similar to how (iirc, no time to look it up) the Abs-Shawcross convention was derided as a "bankers' treaty."

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I think "deliverism" bypassed me entirely as a phrase. (Given who coined it, I'm not sad about that at all.) But, yes, 100%.

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I mean, on your last point, so much would have happened if Obama folks had done things differently and been less slow. So no argument there.

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I think I agree with that. So, on that score, is "rediscovering embedded liberalism" trying to do for US trade politics what "popularism" was trying to do for US politics writ large?

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

So, when @timlmeyer.bsky.social writes a paper titled "Saving the Political Consensus in Favor of Free Trade" in 2017, what's he responding to? Is he really just a secret Stiglitz trying to make fetch happen? Is it just the Trump/Bannon/Lighthizer attack? Or is something else happening?

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I've got a pile of books on my desk whose very size says something seems to have happened to the academic discourse around 2016. Maybe a lot of it was Battle in Seattle rehash, but I'm skeptical about that.

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Bob Keohane—who also existed before 2016—said at an event at NYU in 2018/19 that "I'm not a Marxist, but if I were introduced to TPP in grad school, I would have become a Marxist." I've heard him say lots of colorful stuff, but this was new.

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

So you think the Discourse™️—involving Rodrik, Slobodian, Moyn, Stoller, Kuttner, Stiglitz, and in law, Shaffer, Meyer, Grewal, etc. (all of whom admittedly existed before 2016)—didn't change at all in 2016, except that Trump was on the scene now?

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Hard disagree here, but sounds like a fun paper

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It's more than that, though, right? What about all the 'post-neoliberal' progressives who came out of the woodwork? They're not *all* Trump stooges, though you and I may disagree about who is and who isn't.

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Funny, but that is, surprisingly, not the vibe shift as it was felt in the trade law and policy community, though I think some defenders of the old way of doing business might frame it that way. The bipartisan killing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a helluva thing to watch.

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Hi int'l trade, globalization, and neoliberalism folks. How would you explain the vibe shift that happened in trade law and policy circa 2016 to students who may well have been 13 years old when that happened?

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Not sure what to do with this generally, but I wonder if getting to the bimodality of it would help us understand our politics a little more deeply.

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Not your point, but it struck me recently that "what if Obama did this" is extremely bimodal. So, yes, but: I write about IEEPA, and "what if Obama just made up an emergency" actually happened, and the press mostly went "aw shucks." One of the few critical stories: www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...

usatoday.com

White House: States of emergency are just formalities

There are 32 states of national emergency, but the White House says they're just formalities.

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Reposted by Ben Heath

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

As the Trump admin is calling in thousands of people here for years who are protected from persecution in their home country, Tom Homan is on TV saying people who want to avoid being sent to Africa can just "self-deport." So it's accept persecution or be deported to a third country.

CBS News
@CBSNews
Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar, said people in the U.S. illegally can avoid being sent to “third countries” in Africa and other places around the world by self-deporting to their home countries.

“There’s your quick answer. If you self-deport … you're 100% likely to go to your home country,” Homan told CBS News’
@camiloreports
.

This past week, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to continue its third-country deportation effort.

Underneath is a video.

7:35 PM · Oct 4, 2026
·
169.6K
Views

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Reposted by Ben Heath

Rachel Rothschild @profrrothschild.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

After listening to oral arguments in Suncor v. Boulder just now, I hope someone will give Justice Kavanaugh my @yalelawjournal.bsky.social Essay on the case. It provides a detailed history of Ouellette & the other precedents invoked in Suncor. These cases do not say what Justice Kavanaugh asserted.

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

+1. Of course, converting "an avenue" into "the *sole* constitutionally permissible avenue" is a key alchemical move of the Roberts Court, especially Kavanaugh (see his opinions in PHH Corp.).

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Reposted by Ben Heath

Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

"The current level of political animosity is exactly what one would expect to see if an extremist faction attempted to rescind the hard-earned rights of the vast majority of the country’s citizens." There are not enough exclamation points to convey how I felt reading this paragraph

Screenshot of article which reads: From this perspective, the “both sides” frame falls apart. The prob-
lem is not that the parties are divided. The problem is the existential
threat that a reempowered ethnonationalist strain poses to pluralistic
U.S. democracy writ large. The current level of political animosity is
exactly what one would expect to see if an extremist faction attempted
to rescind the hard-earned rights of the vast majority of the country’s
citizens. The only way to re-oppress most of a country is to use anti-
democratic and authoritarian tactics. And the only way to oppose those
tactics is to push back as a population and clearly reject them. This is
the argument happening in the United States, and its pathology is not
anger—it is the movement to undermine a generation of rights.

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

For anyone who loves punk and metal, all roads lead back to those first two Venom albums. When Sunn O))) last played in Philly, they opened with a kind of conceptual art piece that stitched together Cronos's stage banter. It was both goofy and touching. Lay down your soul to the gods rock & roll!

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Reposted by Ben Heath

Michael Albertus @mikealbertus.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

My piece at @foreignaffairs.com on the global rush to control the oceans.

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Yes. I've been thinking about how neoliberalism valorizes "planning" in the same way as progressive-era thought, except it's corporate planning, not state planning, that's protected. I'm also far from the first to notice this. But that never stopped guys like Cass Sustein, so why should it stop us?

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Reposted by Ben Heath

Public Administration @journalpa.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"From Civic Tech to DOGE: The Role of Tech Movements in the American Administrative State," by Donald Moynihan argues that civic tech and DOGE represent contrasting approaches to technology-driven government reform. doi.org/10.1111%2Fpa...

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I can't recall an example off the top of my head, but I remember a vibe. There were also surely those—Laski, Dewey, Gompers—who called out the exact hypocrisy you identify above. Others advocated for a kind of symmetry: Brandeis debated Gompers over whether unions should have legal personality, etc.

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Is that historically right? I feel like, in dipping a toe into turn-of-the-century debates, there were some small-l liberals who purported to be equally concerned about combination of capitalist power under the corporate form and concentration of labor power. 1/2

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Reposted by Ben Heath

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This is the 59th death in ICE detention since Trump took office.

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Reposted by Ben Heath

David Kaye @davidakaye.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

reminder that we are talking about this

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Reposted by Ben Heath

Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

#BREAKING: Over dissents from the three Democratic appointees, #SCOTUS grants a stay in the third-country removals case; clears way for Trump admin. to continue removing non-citizens without a full chance to litigate the conditions in those countries (while also taking up the full merits appeal).

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I did the same thing. But, while I'm in no way an "audiophile," I strongly recommend listening to a CD in a way that isn't squeezed by headphone jacks or bluetooth connections. That usually means an RCA cable from a CD player into a preamp, or a good car stereo. You'll hear the difference.

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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Many of mine are watching it now, and are talking about it like they're discovering a classic. Like when I discovered Blue Note Records at age 23.

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