The incredible part, as always, is not that Trump did this. It's who he is and has always been. Rather, the incredible part is how many Americans will think this is totally fine, if not pretty awesome. washingtonpost.com/politics/trump…
Law school is more interesting if you find line-drawing important than if you don't.
A lot of learning about legal rules is learning about where a decisionmaker drew a line, and why. There were some competing values or interests, and a line had to be drawn somewhere: The question is where to draw the line, and if it was drawn in the right place.
To some, this is a really interesting problem. It is about how to address conflicts among competing values. It is about how to operationalize that conflict into legal rules. Super interesting.
If you're a Supreme Court Justice, do you want to get rid of the Texas case without any comment or do you want to say something about this strange creature that has appeared before you?
My own instinct would be to get rid of it without comment, except I would worry that this is rewarding a political strategy you're likely to see again. (If a state AG can file crazy lawsuits for the base, being news story #1, and face no pushback, this will def happen again.)
Although it's fun to ponder the suits that might come in future years if the Court just quietly says no. Will Texas sue Delaware for not criminally prosecuting Hunter Biden for being a Chinese spy? The possibilities are endless.
Still annoyed by my loss in the 1988 high school class President election. Thinking of filing a cert petition.
Or at least setting up a GoFundMe or something, which will go to my personal bank account, or, if I decide to file, help defray my very high legal costs.
BTW, the responses to this so far are brilliant. Well done, everyone.
Everyone wants to start with, okay, who will win? I think the telephonic arguments make that harder to tell than in person arguments. On the phone, it's more structured, so there's less discussion that gives you insights on that.
My sense is that there were only two Justices who seemed clearly disposed to one side: Both Sotomayor and Gorsuch seemed on Van Buren's side. I don't think anyone stood out as clearly on the government's side.
Here's my thread live-tweeting the Van Buren argument on the meaning of the CFAA.
Although C-SPAN is saying it starts at 11 eastern (now), that's wrong: It's not starting for at least 20 minutes, b/c the prior case was scheduled for 80 minutes, not 60 minutes. So stay tuned.
When Van Buren starts, probably in about 25 minutes, it will be available live here. c-span.org/video/?477429-…