iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 12h

I’m a week or so behind, but I made Nigella’s Guinness cake

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Who wrote this, Judge Smails?

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Spent the morning at the 9/11 Museum and I easily could have stayed another hour or two. Highly recommend when you’re in town. (Splurge for the private tour before it opens to the public.)

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Top quality product, surely

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Prost! 🇩🇪🇩🇪🇩🇪

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

A classic Friday evening decision from the Fifth Circuit holding several parts of 18 USC 922 unconstitutional under the Second Amendment (and an even more classic Judge Haynes dissent)

There are three provisions within § 922 that regulate the sale and
receipt of firearms across state lines. The first, § 922(a)(3), states that “[i]t
shall be unlawful … for any person, other than a licensed importer, licensed
manufacturer, licensed dealer, or licensed collector to transport into or re
ceive in the State where he resides … any firearm purchased or otherwise
obtained by such person outside that State[.]” Likewise, the statute contains
a parallel prohibition against unlicensed individuals’ selling firearms into
another state, asserting that “[i]t shall be unlawful … for any [unlicensed]
person … to transfer, sell, trade, give, transport, or deliver any firearm to any
[unlicensed] person … who the transferor knows or has reasonable cause to
believe does not reside in … the State in which the transferor resides[.]”
§ 922(a)(5).
The third provision applies against licensed dealers of firearms and
decrees that “[i]t shall be unlawful for any licensed importer, licensed manu
facturer, licensed dealer, or licensed collector to sell or deliver … any firearm
to any person who the licensee knows or has reasonable cause to believe does
not reside in … the State in which the licensee’s place of business is
located[.]” § 922(b)(3). This third provision is subject to carve-outs author
izing “the sale or delivery of any rifle or shotgun to a resident of a State other
than a State in which the licensee’s place of business is located if the trans
feree meets in person with the transferor to accomplish the transfer, and the
sale, delivery, and receipt fully comply with the legal conditions of sale in
both such States” and “the loan or rental of a firearm to any person for tem

Haynes, Circuit Judge, dissenting:
I respect the majority opinion, but I respectfully dissent. I agree with
the district court’s decision that the several provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 922
discussed in this case are not unconstitutional under the Second
Amendment. That is all that is in play in this case, thus, I would affirm.

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

There is no good writing only good rewriting exhibit 7,835

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Yesterday, the CA3 vacated an opinion filed on Sept. 1 and issued an amended opinion, which contained the below footnote about Judge Mascott's views on the case. The case was argued over the summer, so perhaps she was distracted by her other job and didn't read the opinion before it was filed.

Judge Mascott joins in this opinion as setting forth governing Supreme Court precedent. She would note that, as the
officer’s behavior may not have been a mistake and, as the
opinion already points out, certainly was not “grossly negligent,” the “bitter pill” of the Court’s “last resort” exclusionary
rule doctrine, Davis v. United States, 564 U.S. 229, 231–32
(2011), is not triggered here. In her view, the officer’s good-

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Another mini en banc decision from the Second Circuit

After circulating this opinion to all active members of our Court
and receiving no objection, we overrule Aguayo’s holding with respect
to associational standing under § 1983. In its place, we adopt the rule
outlined by the Supreme Court in Hunt v. Washington State Apple
Advertising Commission, 432 U.S. 333, 343 (1977), and adopted by our
sister circuits, which provides: A membership organization has
standing to bring suit on behalf of its members under § 1983 when
(a) those members would otherwise have standing to sue in their own
right, (b) the interests protected are germane to that organization’s
purpose, and (c) the participation of individual members in the
lawsuit is not necessary for the claim asserted or the relief requested.
Accordingly, we REVERSE the judgment of the district court and
REMAND for further proceedings in accordance with this opinion

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Not very green of me, but there’s no substitute for working with hard copies

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I know it’s been a tough submission cycle, but I’m excited to share my forthcoming piece in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. I only submitted it 15 minutes ago but it was accepted almost immediately, and James Ho and Edith Jones are going to write a forward.

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

This team is bad and it makes me feel bad

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Cullen and McGimsey—both former Thomas clerks—are no surprise, but John Warden retired in 2008, so I assume he’s doing this for his own personal love of Trump.

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

How unusual: this Third Circuit appeal actually involved *four* circuit judges, but only two participated in the decision.

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The Third Circuit has granted en banc rehearing in this immigration case (Shwartz/Fisher v. Matey). Beginnings of the majority, concurring/dissenting, and dissenting panel opinions below.

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

My state SG project is coming together. I’ve built a dataset of 300+ SGs tracing their backgrounds, clerkships, and career paths. Early results show really interesting changes over time—and partisan differences in credentials and the pipeline from SG offices to the bench. More soon!

State solicitors general have become some of the most consequential lawyers in American public law. They argue cases involving abortion, guns, climate change, voting rights, LGBTQ+ rights, presidential power, and the administrative state; they shape multistate litigation strategies; and increasingly they serve as the public faces of state legal agendas before the Supreme Court and lower federal courts. Yet the rise of the state solicitor general remains a remarkably underexplored institutional development. Since the 1980s, the number of states with solicitors general has grown from just eight to nearly every state, with most of those offices created since 2000. Despite that transformation, remarkably little is known about how these offices emerged, how they operate, or, in particular, who occupies them.

This Article provides the first comprehensive account. Drawing on a new, original dataset of nearly 300 current and former state solicitors general, supplemented by more than twenty interviews, it reconstructs the growth of the office and offers the first systematic empirical portrait of the lawyers who have held it: their age, education, clerkships, demographic characteristics, professional backgrounds, tenure, and post-service careers.

The data reveals an office transformed. State solicitors general are increasingly drawn from a national market for elite legal talent: they are often young, exceptionally credentialed, and disproportionately graduates of elite law schools and former federal appellate clerks. But that transformation has not occurred uniformly across political parties. Republican attorneys general increasingly recruit younger lawyers from an unusually concentrated network of Republican-appointed federal judges, while Democratic attorneys general draw from many of the same elite educational institutions but appoint a substantially more diverse group of lawyers. And for many officeholders, the solicitor generalship is not a career endpoint b…

institution within the hierarchy of elite American law—one that connects legal education and judicial clerkships to nationally consequential litigation and, for a substantial number of its occupants, judicial office. State solicitors general do not merely wield significant legal power. Their offices have increasingly become part of the machinery through which that power is acquired, exercised, and reproduced.

INTRODUCTION
In 1995, Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery appointed a 34 year-old lawyer named Jeffrey Sutton as the state’s solicitor general. Sutton’s resume had many of the traditional hallmarks of an elite legal mind. He had graduated first in his class at Ohio State and clerked for two Supreme Court Justices, Lewis Powell and Antonin Scalia. And as solicitor general, his assignment was unusually narrow for such a young lawyer in an otherwise senior state position: focus almost exclusively on the Supreme Court.
In short order, Sutton made a bold move. Ohio was not a party to City of Boerne v. Flores, the Supreme Court case challenging Congress’s power to enact the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. But it had filed an amicus brief challenging Congress’s authority to impose RFRA on the states. Although it seemed like a long shot, Sutton nevertheless asked the Supreme Court to let him argue on the states’ behalf. His rationale was straightforward: the dispute in Boerne was fundamentally about the allocation of power between the federal government and the states. Because of the important federalism issues at play and because the U.S. Solicitor General would get to give the federal government’s view, Sutton argued that the states deserved a place at the argument table, too. Remarkably, the Supreme Court agreed. Not only did Sutton get to argue, but the Court ultimately adopted his position, as well.

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Also, before he quit, he basically stopped doing his job and had one of the biggest case backlogs in the Fifth Circuit.

In the last month, three district judges—Alan Albright of the Western District of Texas, Thomas Rice of the Eastern District of Washington, and Josephine Staton of the Central District of California—have decided to either retire or assume senior status, a form of semi-retirement that allows the president to select a full-time replacement. Albright was appointed by Trump just eight years ago in 2018, and apparently dislikes the job so much that he’s stepping down in August. As reported by Bloomberg, Albright has also largely stopped doing the job in the meantime: His docket accounts for 70 percent of civil cases pending in his district for the last three years, as well as 63 percent of undecided civil motions in the last six months—more than twice the number of outstanding civil motions of any other district judge within the Fifth Circuit. Best of luck to Albright’s colleagues in cleaning up his mess.

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Ed at admitted students day:

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

He’s doing the meme but in an even more divorced way

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

The little lad’s first trip to the pub

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I love when a conservative judge refers to a "growing body of authority" and then cites almost exclusively dissenting opinions

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I've seen this note on a lot of recent Third Circuit opinions assigned to Judge Scirica. Hopefully he's ok!

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

As a longtime Cape Verde fan, I will wear this with pride

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

The Third Circuit (Bove), before issuing an opinion deciding a challenge to a removal, vacates the stay of removal proceedings and orders the petitioner removed "to end the unwarranted intrusion on the Executive Branch in this case." www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/251...

BOVE, Circuit Judge. Petitioner Jose Arcenio AristyRosa filed a Petition For Review challenging the BIA’s refusal
to revisit a final order of removal that was entered on consent
in 2011. Petitioner’s removal is stayed pending resolution of
the Petition. Our work is not complete. After soliciting the
parties’ views on the removal stay, however, we have
determined that the record does not merit continuing the stay.
Mindful of the ongoing harms that such stays impose on the
Executive Branch, and respectful of the impact of our
operations on coordinate Branches of this tripartite
2
government, we write precedentially to explain (I) our decision
to vacate the stay, and (II) our previous denial of Petitioner’s
motion to hold the proceedings in abeyance. See 3d Cir. IOP
5.2.

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

I thought it was boogityman

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

The local brewery down here has a Blue Sky lager. It’s brewed in an echo chamber with a rare strain of self righteous hops. It’s insufferable from the first sip but I can’t stop drinking it.

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Trump, who is represented by S&C partner Bob Giuffra, has made S&C partner Jay Clayton the DNI, put S&C partner Matt Schwartz on the Second Circuit, and put S&C partner Jamie McDonald as the top SDNY prosecutor.

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Senate Rs are full steam ahead on confirming as many of Trump’s judges as possible before the August recess

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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Me stepping outside this morning:

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