1. I got an email from a @Salon reporter wanting to chat about “the prospects of a Special Counsel investigating Clarence Thomas.” I’m dealing with a travel snafu and other things so couldn’t talk, but I said there wasn’t much to discuss anyway and also gave this statement: 2. There’s zero chance of any special-counsel investigations, impeachment inquiries, or anything else of legitimate seriousness with regard to Justice Thomas or anyone else left-wing activists and media (but I repeat myself) target because they don’t like having lost control of the Supreme Court.

1. On presidential-immunity ruling: Although Trump supporters will crow and antagonists will wail, the Court’s presidential-immunity decision doesn’t absolve the former president or put anyone above the law. 2. Indeed, the ruling was both eminently predictable and, in any other context, utterly unremarkable: presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts but not for unofficial ones—and the devil of how that rule applies is in the details of lower-court evaluations of a president’s actions.

1. On Loper Bright, SCOTUS's overruling of Chevron, the deference that judges give agency interpretations of law:
Good for the Court to recognize that its 40-year-old experiment in rebalancing the relationship between administration and judicial review has failed. 2. Chevron led to agency overreach, haphazard results, the diminution of Congress. Although intended to empower Cong by limiting courts, Chevron instead empowered agencies to grow their own powers to the greatest extent plausible under their operative statutes, often beyond.

1. On the SCOTUS 2A case: Rahimi is interesting on three levels. First, its holding that person who has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the safety of another may be temporarily disarmed shows that the Court’s 2A jurisprudence is measured and reasonable. 2. Second, this is a big blow to Hunter Biden, whose hope for a Supreme Court lifeline on his gun charges is now extinguished.

1. Re SCOTUS ruling in bump stock case, Garland v Cargill:
This was an easy case that stands for the basic proposition that an executive agency can’t rewrite the law to make it say what it wants to say. 2. As Justice Alito wrote in concurrence, “there is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machineguns. Congress can amend the law—and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation.”

1. Last night I filed @ManhattanInst's brief in next term's big fishing-reg case that could upend the administrative state. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo, SCOTUS will consider whether to overturn judicial deference to admin agencies, known as "Chevron" after a 1984 precedent. 2. Family-run fishing businesses face a fraught environment even before the intrusion of burdensome regulations. Here, the National Marine Fisheries Service promulgated a rule for herring boats that sweeps in most such businesses, as portrayed in the Oscar-winning movie “CODA.”

1. On Haaland v Brackeen, this morning's big SCOTUS case on Indian law: This was a complicated case, both factually and legally, and it ends with a muddled and unfortunate decision. As Justice Barrett painstakingly explains in her majority opinion... 2. the Indian Child Welfare Act “requires a state court to place an Indian child with an Indian caretaker . . . even if the child is already living with a non-Indian family and the state court thinks it in the child’s best interest to stay there.”

1. On Thursday, the Supreme Court decided its most politically salient of the term thus far, Allen v. Milligan, a challenge to Alabama’s latest round of congressional redistricting.
supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf… 2. By a 5-4 vote, the justices agreed with a special three-judge district court that Alabama’s map likely “dilutes” minority votes, prevent black Alabamiams from electing the “candidate of their choice.”

1. @StanfordLaw Dean Martinez’s letter is really strong and deserves the accolades it’s gotten, especially this part I’ve previously shared. BUT the lack of consequences for the vile disrupters—and instead training for everyone—doesn’t sit well. 2. She says it's hard to identify which students crossed the line and which were protesting without disrupting. But there's video, and an Office of Community Standards investigation would turn up many names. Some would escape discipline, but that's no excuse to let everyone off.

1. An emerging issue in public ed is school officials’ secret “social transitioning” of children. A case now before the 1st Circuit, Foote v. Ludlow School Comm, presents the clearest opportunity yet to uphold parents’ rights and protect kids from serious risks. 2. During the 2020–21 school year in the Ludlow, Massachusetts, district, teachers and staff actively promoted children’s social transitioning—calling them by new names and pronouns, while hiding these changes from parents.

1. I deleted my tweet, apologized for its "inartful" phrasing, and sent a longer apology to the Georgetown faculty. Should I have said more? Less? 2. I launched this newsletter in June after @SubstackInc approached me and suggested that I take advantage of the moment both to shine a light on the rot in academia and use my unique voice to expound on public affairs.

1. After last term’s pronounced shift to the right, and the unprecedented leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs, attacks on the Court have spilled from the fever swamps of newsrooms and faculty lounges to reach the justices themselves. 2. Members of the high bench have taken to publicly “subtweeting” each other over whether recent decisions have harmed the institution’s credibility.

1. Short thread ahead of Monday’s SCOTUS arguments in the Harvard/UNC racial-preference cases:

The Supreme Court finally has the opportunity to end the system of racial spoils that affirmative action has become in higher education. 2. The whole modern edifice of racialist university bureaucracy germinated from the seed planted by Justice Lewis Powell in the 1978 Bakke case and it's time to end that failed experiment.

1. Nearly four months have passed since the leak of Justice Alito's Dobbs opinion and we're apparently no closer to knowing who did it and how. We also don't know why the leaker did it, though that's probably less important for repairing the damage done to the Supreme Court. 2. If the most likely explanation is true, that a left-wing clerk was trying to shame one of the majority to pull back from overturning Roe, then the gambit backfired spectacularly, instead steeling their spines—and could serve as an object lesson to disincentivize future leaks.

1. My last Shapiro's Gavel post, about what it was like the first few days of my Twitter “scandal,” garnered the biggest response since my very first post, which effectively announced my return to normal(ish) public life after the cancellation campaign I faced this winter-spring. 2. So clearly there’s a market for more about my “lived experience.” Great: you can certainly expect more narrative, as well as reflections on such issues as whether I should’ve apologized and how I conducted myself throughout the “investigation.”