If you're looking at this website, it's probably because I sent you the link directly and asked you to check out my new thing. Thanks for looking! But if you somehow just found this thing by accident, I'm sorry. Something has gone horribly wrong in the world if any of this is getting shared.

But since you're here already, I'll give you a rough overview of what to expect.

  1. I'm fascinated with the Supreme Court. I have been for about 20 years. I've followed the Court closely in that time, and I have deep respect for it. I will get into how and why I'm fascinated with it in future posts. My idea of a really great Friday night is catching up on SCOTUS oral argument transcripts.
  2. I'm left-leaning on a lot of topics, but I'm extremely frustrated with "the left." I read a lot of legal blogs and listen to a lot of legal podcasts. But I don't really see much rigorous legal analysis from the left.
  3. What I mostly see from the is a lot of outcome-based arguments. I.e., there is a morally acceptable outcome from a set of facts, and any other outcome is EVIL! or ILLEGITIMATE! or some shit like that.
  4. There's a common conflict between the concept of procedural and substantive outcomes, but that's more of a legal thing that I'm neither an expert in nor particularly interested in.
  5. It's my opinion that you can't only be correct about a thing, you also have to have correct and valid logic to support your correctness. So yeah, courts can deal with process and outcome, and that's fine. But you also have to evaluate the quality of the arguments that support your claim.
  6. Why? Because law isn't religion. It's not enough that you have a strong moral conviction about the way things should work. Feeling very strongly about a thing is a terrible way to make law. Because then anyone can come along with strong feelings and make really terrible laws.

There's too much shouting among the people I tend to agree with. Too many people who make moral assertions with no serious legal or even logical support and declare anyone who disagrees to be an evil fascist.

This is a problem because yelling about fascism doesn't persuade courts, and we're losing in court on a lot of very important issues. What I'm hoping to do with my writing here is to pick a few cases that I have time to care about, understand the arguments before the courts, and rigorously think through the arguments that support our positions as well as how to frame them to courts in a persuasive manner.

But we all know that blogs never stick to what people start out wanting to do, so this will probably devolve into a bunch of crazy niche tangents that no one but me finds interesting.