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Marcia McCormick

@marciamccormick.bsky.social
2.7K followers 2.1K following 1.4K posts

Getting too old for this @#$%. SLU lawprof, cosplaying as a responsible adult temporarily: worklaw, conlaw, gender & sexuality. Kids say I'm a little bit chaotic. More at marciamccormick.com

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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
These are all state law claims, but the state statues have language similar to the Comstock Act. Hence (and maybe for other reasons) the threatened RICO. Jonathan Mitchell isn't on the complaint but he might as well be
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Anthony Michael Kreis @anthonymkreis.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
This is a human rights abuse worthy of prosecution under intentional law. Minimally, they should be impeached and removed for this alone.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
There are so many reasons to be embarrassed by Eric Schmitt and his staff, but here it seems both that they started from the premise he was in Atlanta and reasoned backwards from there and also that they assumed people only go to NBA games, and only men's.
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Ben Eidelson @beidelson.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
1/ The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights just released its report on campus antisemitism and Title VI. I testified at the hearing. The report is unanimous, bipartisan, & debunks the main legal theories behind recent attacks on universities for allegedly tolerating antisemitism. 🧵
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I am not sure what is up with Kevin right now. He seems overcome by melancholy.
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Matt Cameron @mattcameron.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
this is what true fascism looks like, running deep cover in a policy proposal so impossibly boring to read that hardly anyone notices that your primary goal is quite simply to regulate your friends and dynamite the administrative state into oblivion
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
This is why this was a question on my Con Law II exam post Skrmetti.
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🌬Breeze @cool-summer-breeze.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
This is the Stolen Neighbors Quilt. Each of the 11,000 squares represents a person taken by ICE in Minnesota.
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Roger Allan Ford (he/him) @rogerford.org · 24/09/2026
There are no words for how angry this story makes me. Academic freedom is dead in Texas public universities.
newyorker.com
The Fallout of a Charlie Kirk Campus Scandal
Students and faculty across the country were punished for their actions in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. A recent graduate of Texas Tech’s law school is still trying to clear her name.
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Eriq Gardner @eriqgardner.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Does Paramount support the decision by CNN, MSNow and Politico to challenge the Trump ban in court? Do they even stand behind CBS News’ own statement that “No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting”? I asked. They wouldn’t comment.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Oh. So we're heading for a Depression depression.
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Connor Ewing @cmewing.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Writing is fun. You endure hours of excruciating pain and self-doubt. But in the end, you’ve created something. And then you get to hate that thing.
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
This Missouri case is a perfect nesting doll of the consequences of the SCOTUS approach to its docket.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Kevin was having trouble committing this morning. But he feels better after some breakfast.
A one-eared squirrel splooting, half off a ledge.A one-eared squirrel splooting, with its head up near the detritus of a shelled nut.
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 10/09/2026
The thing liberals fundamentally don't understand is that trans people are losing rights they already had. We're not asking for more, we're asking not to lose what we already had for decades. Most sports leagues and the Olympics had inclusion criteria for decades without issue.
Screenshot of an X (formerly Twitter) exchange discussing political pragmatism and the Overton window.
The initial post by onion person (@CantEverDie) reads:
> "doesn't matter, this is about what the right is able to push with the overton window. first its democrats needing to disavow trans women in sports to get elected, next it'll be agreeing to ban access to HRT to get elected. we've seen how this plays out"
> 
A reply from Nick Pappas (@NickAPappas) reads:
> "Are you insane? The Overton window didn’t even include this discussion until recently. The public has never been in favor of desegregating the sports by sex.
> Personally I’m glad Barack Obama ran against gay marriage in 2008. Not because that was the right position, or one he even actually held, but because he knew the public wasn’t with him on it. If he hadn’t won he wouldn’t have been able to appoint 2 of the justices who ultimately voted in the majority for Obergefell.
> Lincoln in 1860 didn’t even run on abolishing slavery! He just wanted to stop its expansion. And thankfully he did that and won because a more extreme and morally correct position would have lost. As a result he was able to win the Civil War and push through the 13 amendment.
> Political practicality is the entire history of progress in America. There’s no other way."
>
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
UPDATE: The intervenors, People Not Politicians, have filed their opposition to Hoskins's request before Judge Clark for an order blocking the Missouri Supreme Court from holding him (Hoskins) in contempt: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT EASTERN DISTRICT OF MISSOURI
CONGRESSMAN ROBERT "BOB" ONDER, RICHARD "RICK" BRATTIN, PATRICIA "PAT" THOMAS, and DEBRA HAVENS,
Plaintiffs,
V.
Case No. 4:26-ev-01424-SRC
STATE OF MISSOURI and DENNY HOSKINS, in his official capacity as Missouri Secretary of State,
Defendants.
INTERVENOR-DEFENDANTS' RESPONSE TO DEFENDANT HOSKINS' MOTION TO ENJOIN THE MISSOURI SUPREME COURT UNDER THE ALL WRITS ACT
On September 9, this Court ordered Intervenor-Defendants to respond to Defendant Denny Hoskins's Motion to Enjoin the Supreme Court of Missouri under the All-Writs Act (the "Motion"). As an initial matter, Intervenor-Defendants do not represent the Supreme Court of Missouri and are not aware that the Court has been served with process. Setting that issue aside, the Court should deny the Motion for myriad reasons. First, the Anti-Injunction Act forbids this Court from enjoining the Supreme Court of Missouri's contempt proceedings. Second, this Court does not have jurisdiction over the Supreme Court of Missouri. Third, Defendant will not suffer irreparable harm absent an injunction, and an injunction would damage the integrity of the state courts.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Kevin is back at it this evening.
A one-eared squirrel splooting on a ledge.
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
UPDATE: Dueling rulings cause chaos over Missouri maps, as case returns to the U.S. Supreme Court Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins faces a contempt hearing at the Missouri Supreme Court, as the U.S. Supreme Court gets a new request to stop the chaos. Law Dork:
lawdork.com
Dueling rulings cause chaos over Missouri maps
Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins faces a contempt hearing at the Missouri Supreme Court, as the U.S. Supreme Court gets a new request to stop the chaos.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Rooker-Feldman!
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
We woke up thinking about the long shadow of all the workers’ wins and even their losses. We made it free to watch the short documentary that dominated my life this year. Happy Labor Day. vimeo.com/1224659811/7...
vimeo.com
Power to the People, Y'all [Happy Labor Day]
Power to the People, Y’all is a character-driven documentary that explores aging, legacy, and resistance through interviews with five founding members of the Winston-Salem Chapter of the Black Panther...
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 05/09/2026
Got my American statutory database up and running with multiple layers. It has vector embedding for semantic search, 8gram shingles for statutory diffusion, and FTS5 for exact searches. 20k+ volumes over 400 years of state and local statutes. This is one of the coolest things I've ever done.
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 30/08/2026
Anti cross dressing ordinances over time in the US. What's remarkable is how much of this nucleated around St Louis and the Mississippi River in the mid 19th century. There's a story there to find.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Meet Kevin, our local wildlife buddy. He makes my kids mad because "he just sits around the house doing nothing, and that's our job." He does literally sit on every ledge of our house he can find, preferably close to a window.
A one-eared school just chilling on a canvas chair, looking in the window.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Playground logic strikes again. If-you-love-it-so-much-why-don't-you-marry-it-ass reasoning . . . .
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
You know this is a vague memory based on the swine flu mass vaccinations in the 1970s . . . There is no way this man has ever taken a child to the doctor.
A picture of a "jet injector" which uses air instead of a needle to vaccinate. These were used for mass vaccination campaigns but according to Wikipedia are not recommended by the WHO any more because they might spread disease.
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Asha Rangappa @asharangappa.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Things like genocide and even lesser evils happen bc the sociopaths at the top give ordinary people a permission structure. They have a “moral code,” but it only applies to a select group of people. Those not in that group are beyond the realm of human or moral obligation. 2/
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
This is a lot like the comment on one of my course evaluations for Employment Discrimination that there was too much of a focus in the class on employment discrimination.
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 09/07/2026
I just created www.lgbtqlegislation.com which builds on the work of the LegiAlerts team to provide an interactive data dashboard to look at 20+ years of anti-LGBTQ legislation and especially anti-trans legislation. It also includes an overview of pro-LGBTQ legislation. Check it out!
lgbtqlegislation.com
LGBTQ+ Legislation Tracking Project
Two decades of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, documented bill by bill — 10,000+ bills tracked across every state and Congress by the LegiAlerts team.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
This is a really nuanced and careful way of talking about the harm and violation of stealthing and the blunt instrument that criminal law is. It gave me a lot to think about and some good things to add to my unit on sexual violence the next time I teach criminal law or sexuality and the law.
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
BREAKING: Eleventh Circuit, on a 2-1 vote, upholds injunction blocking Florida from enforcing its 2022 Stop WOKE Act in the university context. The majority opinion is from Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Before GRANT, LAGOA, and WILSON, Circuit Judges.
GRANT, Circuit Judge:
"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." U.S. Const. amend I. The First Amendment, incorporated against the States in 1868, is this country's written commitment to the idea that freedom of speech is essential to freedom of thought, and that both are essential to maintaining our liberty. The Supreme Court has long been clear that teaching and scholarship are due some measure of protection under the Amendment. But how much? And in what contexts? That Court has not had to say, but this one is now put to the test. The State of Florida legislated a broad set of speech restrictions banning certain viewpoints relating to race, color, sex, and national origin in various settings. The provision at issue here bars Florida's educators from promoting or endorsing those distavored ideas when instructing students. Its prohibition applies not only in primary and secondary education, where states traditionally exercise a great deal of control, but also in public colleges and universities, where the state government's role has been far more limited.
When several groups of professors challenged Florida's new restrictions, the State cast about for an existing case or doctrine that could support its speech ban in the university setting. Finding none, it tried to marry public-employee speech cases with government speech doctrine, resulting in a new rule: if thegovernment pays a professor's salary, it has total control over her classroom speech.
That is not a blessed union. Florida's salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State's own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry-classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth. This new rule also runs headlong into the Supreme Court's repeated, if imprecise, endorsements of academic freedom. If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.
Nor does this Court's leading academic speech precedent,
Bishop v. Aronov, demand the outcome Florida seeks. 926 F.2d 1066 (11th Cir. 1991). In fact, it counsels the opposite. The restriction in that case was imposed by one university, against one professor, relating to speech about one thing— personal religious views that got in the way of the course's well-understood parameters.That precedent makes clear that universities and even other government entities have crucial authority to shape curricular content, discipline teachers, and take other steps to guide and govern postsecondary education. But the speech ban Florida's political leaders seek to impose here is different in both nature and degree from these ordinary concerns. The rule Florida developed for this case does not withstand scrutiny.
11 Case: 22-13992
Document: 156-1 Date Filed: 07/07/2026 Page:
22-13992
Opinion of the Court
5
The ideas Florida targets may well be noxious. Or maybe
not.
Either way, in this context the First Amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves. We affirm the district court's preliminary injunction.
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etienne toussaint @etiennetoussaint.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Legal education trains people to argue within the rules. It doesn’t really train people to imagine different rules. That gap keeps coming up for me in teaching. I say that as someone who is part of the system that does the training.
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Miranda Yaver @mirandayaver.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
In my latest piece for The Conversation, I wrote on how ERISA constitutes the legal underpinnings of so many health insurance barriers that occupy our attention, undercutting health insurer accountability. This is the subject of my next book, The Health Care Trap theconversation.com/how-health-i...
theconversation.com
How health insurers get a free pass to deny coverage from a 52-year-old law meant to protect worker pensions
A little-known law called ERISA bars millions of patients from suing for damages when health insurers wrongly deny claims.
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Olivia Waite @oliviawaite.com · 30/06/2026
Per last repost, I do think that in the US a lot of people, like a LOT of people, do not realize that if a birth certificate is no longer proof of citizenship then most of us have no proof of citizenship. At all.
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Nancy Armour @nrarmour.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
The ban is heinous for what it does to transgender athletes. But if you think cisgender girls and young women won’t be caught up in the fallout, too, you are woefully ignorant
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
And to be clear, everyone born in the United States is a "birthright citizen." This isn't some well established legal label for children of immigrants. It's a label designed to call into question the validity of their citizenship, but not limited in any meaningful way.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
My record of being terrible at predicting Supreme Court stuff remains unbroken! I seriously thought he was going to stick it out for at least next term's religion cases.
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Leah Litman @leahlitman.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
SAM ALITO IS RETIRING: www.npr.org/2026/06/30/n...
npr.org
Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, retires
Although not well known outside the court, Alito played a key role in leading the conservative charge, not just on abortion, but on a host of other issues.
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Devin Thomas O’Shea @devintoshea.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
THIS SUNDAY — in STL — come to Tower Grove for the Anti-VP Picnic at the Sons of Rest Pavilion — 4 PM!! 🌹 @stldsa.org 🌹 act.stldsa.org/anti-veiled-...
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Quinn Yeargain @yeargain.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
The right-wing takeover of Florida’s public universities continues apace, and has now reached the FIU College of Law, where the Vice President of America First Legal has been named the interim Dean. God fucking help us.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
I guess it's a little humid here this morning.
A picture of a door with a window at the top and a narrow, vertical window on each side. The windows are completely blurred, fogged up with moisture on the outside.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
I don't know why I should expect better, but I was struck by this framing of the DOJ's anti-civil-rights campaign as actually a pro-civil rights campaign in the Bloomberg Law Brief from Friday. See alt text for the whole summary.
Brief story under the headline, "DOJ Widens Civil Rights Footprint"

DOJ Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon can extend the anti-DEI approach she’s championed under President Donald Trump after a deal with the Education Department gave her office authority to handle complaints of discrimination in schools, Celine Castronuovo and Tiana Headley report.

Under Dhillon, we can expect an even more “aggressive, proactive” approach to civil rights enforcement in the nation’s schools—one that stokes the fear of ending up in court, said Kenneth Marcus, who led the Education Department’s civil rights office under the first Trump administration.

Dhillon has reoriented the DOJ division to focus on rooting out DEI programs in schools and other federal funding recipients. Her willingness to advance DOJ investigations and lawsuits that promote Trump’s political priorities shows she could use the partnership to further sway how federal laws are enforced at educational institutions, former government attorneys said.

Dhillon’s division may face some challenges and strain with the new responsibilities, including losing at least 75% of career attorneys. Education’s civil rights office is required by law to review every complaint it receives from the public, while DOJ has wide discretion in selecting cases.

It’s unclear how DOJ and Education will allocate resources, staff, and workloads—details senior Education officials say will be worked out over the coming weeks.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
I have managed to lose an earbud somewhere in my house while I was sleeping, if you are wondering how things are going.
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Susan Rinkunas @susanrinkunas.com · 05/06/2026
Mitchell has an agenda, which includes reviving the Comstock Act. Plus, Texas activists used this woman's story to lobby for a new bounty on abortion pills (HB 7). Once the bill passed, he amended a suit against a California doctor to say he violated that law, too www.autonomynews.co/woman-accuse...
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 03/06/2026
roberts and alito have concocted a jurisprudence in which constitutional amendments explicitly ratified to secure the right of black americans to vote now restrain congress from securing the right of black americans to vote.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Not gonna lie, I am stoked for this summer reading.
Book cover for "The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis" by Devin Thomas O'Shea.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Ugh, but of course. news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-...
news.bloomberglaw.com
EEOC Seeks to Revoke Rule Shielding Affirmative Action Plans (1)
The EEOC submitted a proposal to the White House regulatory office that would remove a decades-old rule that helps protect companies seeking to implement affirmative action plans voluntarily.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
I'm in the depths of grading and taking small comforts by reminding myself that students coming to totally opposite conclusions (from each other), but saying the answer is obvious, is actually a sign of a well balanced problem.
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Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 20/05/2026
Being involved with faculty governance right now feels like trying to hold the line while you're under constant siege. These initiatives to chip away at (or sometimes smash) the basic functions of a university *just keep coming*.
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Marcia McCormick @marciamccormick.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
Hey employment and labor friends!
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