Several years ago, in a post on this faculty blog, I extolled the writing prowess of Justice Elena Kagan. Regardless of whether you agree with her on the merits of any given case, you have to admit that her writing is clean, forceful, and—above all—readable. It has earned her considerable respect from legal writers…

            Civil procedure has the reputation of being—how do I put this delicately?—the least interesting of the first year required law school courses. I cannot tell you how many times students have told me, “I heard civpro was going to be boring.” And that doesn’t count what students don’t say to my face. To be…

            The Supreme Court’s 1984 Chevron decision generally allows administrative agencies leeway when interpreting ambiguous statutes.  It has had its critics over the years, including some of the current members of the Supreme Court.  The Court typically hears a number of cases each term that implicate Chevron, and this term is no exception.  One has…

Few federal statutes have vexed the Supreme Court as much as the Armed Career Criminal Act (hereinafter “ACCA”). The ACCA is a federal recidivist sentencing enhancement, which imposes a fifteen-year mandatory minimum sentence for a defendant convicted of knowingly possessing a firearm if that defendant has three previous convictions for offenses that qualify as a…

            When I teach, I make frequent use of the Supreme Court’s oral argument audios. I find them a nice supplement to the cases themselves, a way for students to understand the stakes and challenges the lawyers confronted. And they can make the Justices come alive in ways their writing sometimes cannot: Justice Kagan’s temperate…

This semester I taught Climate Change Law & Policy for the first time, and learned a ton. I didn’t expect that. After all, I did not come into the course a stranger to the policies and laws addressing climate disruption. Nor am I a stranger to the organized resistance that climate science has encountered through…

Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg achieved national folk-hero status for their writing styles. Most palpably so when in dissent, the Justices’ opinions unleashed acerbic wit in support of their respective principles. Their stylistic idiosyncrasies earned the Justices pop culture cachet and, I can attest, the eternal gratitude of 1Ls attempting to…

It is more than an understatement to say that, when Joe Biden takes office, he will face an array of national security challenges. And there is no question that many of these challenges have been made worse by the bungling and outright incompetence of the outgoing Trump Administration. Further complicating efforts by the Biden administration…

When the pandemic shuttered classrooms, most professors lacked the digital fluency to make online education work and the familiarity to make it work well. Universities and law schools tried to shoehorn years of resource development and skill building into a few frantic weeks. No surprise, students had bad experiences. Everyone did. But many mistook the…