1. Some legal-writing advice meant esp for first-gen law students.
College taught me that the key to good writing was originality. 1L-year exams taught me that sounding like a lawyer was about spotting every issue.
To become a good legal writer, I had to unlearn both lessons.
2. Good legal writing isn't about coming up with clever new ideas or expressing them in a unique new way. And it's nothing at all like an issue-spotting final exam.
Good legal writing is about clarity.
3. Once you figure out what your most important points are, your job—your only job, more or less—is to state them as clearly as possible.
When McConnell does things like demand Ds honor R circuit blue slips in 2009 or demand Ds honor R filibusters in 2021, despite not doing those things for Ds when he was in power, the problem isn't hypocrisy. It's worse.
McConnell isn't failing to honor his own principles. McConnell's only guiding principle is "If the rules don't prevent it and it adds to GOP power, we'll do it." He's quite consistent about following it.
So when McConnell demands that Ds do this or that, he's simply try to keep Ds from using their power the way he uses his. And why not? It's always worked for him before.
A strong opinion that many of my fellow progressives may strongly disagree with: Biden should put Orin Kerr, a fairly conservative Republican, on the Ninth Circuit.
Look, I anticipate spending the next 4 years mad at the Biden admin for being too timid with judicial nominations. I firmly believe Biden needs to play by the new rules, not the old ones. The days of Ds slowly nominating a bunch of mid-50s moderate prosecutors are over.
Big-picture, Biden's job is to unskew our Trump/Leo-skewed courts. In my view that means putting a lot of brilliant, dynamic, solidly progressive 30- and 40-something black women in circuit seats.
There's growing willingness to acknowledge the ways in which Trump's work of building and clinging to power resemble Hitler's. Good.
But this week the history that keeps flashing in my mind isn't Nazi Germany, it's pre-WWII Japan's May 15 Incident.
A thread. 1/
Japan after WWI was a two-party parliamentary constitutional democracy. The government functioned reasonably well into the 30s, weathering the depression better than its peers in the US and Europe. 2/
But a right-wing anti-democratic cancer took root in the lower ranks of the Japanese military. This cancer led to Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the assassination of a former cabinet minister in 1932. 3/