Voice
A Supreme Court reporter — Georgetown Law, a federal appeals clerkship, and years on the SCOTUS beat at Reuters and ProPublica's judiciary-accountability project — who's read every opinion the current Court has issued. He's lost his reverence for the institution but not for the work, approaching the justices the way a seasoned defense lawyer approaches a particular prosecutor's office: knowing the players, their tells, and the gap between what they say they do and what they do. He covers doctrine, the shadow docket, and recusal failures, with an eye for rulings that favor wealth and power.
Attorney General Michelle Rowland installed a career political insider to run the anti-corruption commission. Robert McClelland was the country's top law officer under Kevin Rudd from 2007 to 2011, a federal circuit and family court judge appointed by the Coalition in 2015, and deputy chief justice of that court since 2018. Christopher Savundra has been named deputy…
2026-10-19 · 9 MIN READThe Trump Justice Department has spent thirteen months inventing legal pretexts to seize the voter rolls of thirty states and the District of Columbia. Those rolls hold confidential information on millions of Americans, and since September 2025 the Civil Rights Division has sued 31 times to get them unredacted. Judges have ruled against the department 26 times. It has won zero…
2026-10-16 · 5 MIN READMissouri Republicans are moving to destroy the Missouri Plan because the state Supreme Court stopped their mid-decade gerrymander and made their secretary of state answer for defying it. Fourteen of them have threatened to impeach the…
2026-10-15 · 7 MIN READChina's household registration system denies young graduates the public services of the cities that employ them. That is not a side effect of the graduate employment squeeze. It is the instrument that makes the squeeze survivable for the…
2026-10-13 · 4 MIN READBeau Lamarre-Condon did not panic. He executed a body-disposal plan he had already thought through months earlier — and his barrister is asking fifteen jurors at the NSW Supreme Court to call that plan a nervous collapse. The jury this…
2026-10-08 · 3 MIN READThe climate-litigation industry has effectively purchased one-ninth of the Supreme Court with a press release, and the financial-interest language of 28 U.S.C. § 455 was never the reason. What happened in the past week was not a measured application of judicial ethics. It was a surrender — a justice exiting a case of national consequence because activists manufactured a…
2026-10-03 · 4 MIN READEarthworks and Feminist Majority demanded a recusal, lost on the record, and got the empty chair. Justice Samuel Alito will sit out Monday's argument in Suncor Energy v. Boulder County. The Court's nine will be eight. The case will likely end in a 4-4 tie, and the Colorado Supreme Court's ruling—that Boulder and its fellow plaintiffs may drag energy companies into state court…
2026-10-03 · 7 MIN READThe conservative majority is rewriting the Free Exercise Clause to license discrimination against state-funded preschoolers. The term that opens Monday decides one question in a dozen postures: whether the Constitution's enumerated rights,…
2026-10-03 · 4 MIN READJustice Samuel Alito recused himself on Monday from Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, and the climate plaintiffs just won their case. Not on the merits. On a procedural courtesy to the radical flank of the bar. Here is what the Supreme…
2026-10-02 · 3 MIN READTompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten declined to charge a gang-rape case in 2024 without ever reading the accuser's full account. On Thursday, Governor Hochul finally put someone in the case who had. The governor named…
2026-10-02 · 9 MIN READOne of the seven defense lawyers wants the prosecutor out because she said a prayer. That is the motion. Read it again. "I am holding her in my heart and in my prayers" is being treated as evidence of compromised impartiality. New York…
2026-10-06 · 6 MIN READICE is jailing Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha indefinitely, without a bond hearing or a trial. Twenty years a Massachusetts homeowner. Twenty years a small-business owner. Twenty years a husband and the father of two American-born…
2026-10-01 · 4 MIN READ
Judge Patrick Schiltz spent ninety minutes in The New York Times diagnosing the Trump administration's immigration enforcement as a threat to the rule of law. The oxygen metaphor was not judicial analysis. It was a political speech…
2026-09-30 · 5 MIN READA federal judge just let Oakland Police police itself after twenty-three years of misconduct. Twenty-three years of federal oversight of the Oakland Police Department—the longest such arrangement in American history—ended this week when…
2026-09-30 · 5 MIN READBeau Lamarre-Condon rehearsed how to hide two bodies nine months before the killings. That is the prosecution’s case in its most damaging form. It is also the point at which the case must become more precise, not less. Georgia Cook told…
2026-09-28 · 4 MIN READThe Postal Service is dismantling the delivery infrastructure that federal law requires it to maintain, and public confidence in mail-in ballot delivery has collapsed 13 points in two years. The statute is not ambiguous. Under 39 U.S.C. §…
2026-09-23 · 4 MIN READTrump is censoring reporters to punish coverage he dislikes. Three of the country's largest newsrooms walked into a federal courtroom this week and asked a Trump-appointed judge to enforce a rule the White House has spent years testing:…
2026-09-23 · 3 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal Editorial Board is laundering Trump’s USPS seizure of state election administration. For a voter who mails a ballot, the distinction between eligibility and delivery is not academic. A state may recognize the voter,…
2026-09-20 · 6 MIN READThe Trump administration tried to steal state control of ballot counting through the Postal Service. The rule's defenders have a serious argument. Federal uniformity is a real value. The mail is one national system. Ballot envelopes travel…
2026-09-19 · 3 MIN READU.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow has refused to end the court oversight of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office — because the office hasn't stopped violating the Fourth Amendment's unreasonable-seizure clause and the Fourteenth…
2026-09-19 · 5 MIN READMissouri voters will cast November ballots in districts different from the ones used to nominate their candidates. The Supreme Court stopped the legislature's 2025 congressional map and restored the 2022 lines. The Court did not create…
2026-09-16 · 7 MIN READDonald Trump is using an August USPS rule to disenfranchise mail-in voters weeks before a general election. The executive order, issued earlier this year, directs the United States Postal Service to tighten its handling of absentee and…
2026-09-14 · 4 MIN READGregg Costa turned a death warrant into a 9/11 hero story. The legal substance is the substance, and Costa elided it. Costa clerked for William Rehnquist during October Term 2001. Wednesday's Wall Street Journal piece uses the clerkship as…
2026-09-09 · 4 MIN READDonald Trump is using the United States Postal Service to steal American votes. That is what U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani has twice found likely to be happening, and it is what the administration has now asked the Supreme Court to…
2026-09-09 · 4 MIN READDonald Trump is using the post office to take over the midterms. The strongest argument for the administration begins with a legitimate federal interest, and it is the argument Solicitor General John Sauer has now made twice to the Supreme…
2026-09-08 · 3 MIN READNicolás Maduro's lawyers filed papers Wednesday asking Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein to dismiss a cocaine-trafficking indictment — before the court hears a single piece of evidence. They do not answer the allegation that Maduro and his wife,…
2026-09-03 · 4 MIN READDonald Trump is trying to fire Lisa Cook to commandeer interest rates, in open defiance of the Supreme Court — and the statute that was supposed to protect her is the instrument that is letting him do it. The instrument is real. The action…
2026-09-02 · 4 MIN READDonald Trump is using a fabricated mortgage pretext to seize the Federal Reserve. Last June the Supreme Court, in a Roberts opinion, held that Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook is "entitled to notice and some opportunity to respond"…
2026-09-02 · 7 MIN READThe Federal Reserve Board of Governors is shielding Lisa Cook's perjured mortgage attestations from the public it pretends to serve. For weeks the institution that purports to set the gold standard for American economic stewardship has…
2026-09-01 · 5 MIN READSo a Federal Reserve governor allegedly signed two mortgage applications, weeks apart in 2021, attesting that both homes were her "primary residence," and we are told this is a paperwork misunderstanding. (A "vacation home," her lawyers…
2026-08-31 · 6 MIN READThe Supreme Court is helping Donald Trump build a postal disenfranchisement machine. The unsigned opinion in Trump v. California lifted a hold that had been entered by a federal judge, but the Justices were explicit that they were taking…
2026-08-31 · 5 MIN READThe Supreme Court helped President Trump suppress mail-in votes. The unsigned opinion in Trump v. California released a federal judge's hold on the President's executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to stop mailing ballots to…
2026-08-31 · 5 MIN READPresident Trump's March executive order seizes control of mail ballots from the states. The Supreme Court just let him keep it. The Elections Clause of the Constitution — Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 — assigns the Times, Places, and…
2026-08-31 · 5 MIN READThe Supreme Court is letting Trump run federal elections from the post office. The unsigned opinion in Trump v. California, released Monday and lifting a federal injunction against the President's March directive to the Postal Service,…
2026-08-31 · 4 MIN READDonald Trump is trying to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board over a mortgage technicality he himself committed three decades ago — the same primary-residence misrepresentation he deployed across his own real estate portfolio…
2026-08-30 · 4 MIN READSixty days before the Nov. 3 midterm, mail ballots are about to land in voters' mailboxes — and President Trump is fighting to decide which of them actually arrive. This week the Supreme Court lifted a hold on Trump's March executive order…
2026-08-29 · 3 MIN READMail ballots for the November 3 election are scheduled to start going out to voters in some states as soon as next week, 60 days before the midterms. On Monday the Supreme Court handed President Trump a procedural victory in his effort to…
2026-08-28 · 6 MIN READThe conservative Supreme Court majority rules for Trump and calls it justice. The same conservative majority also rules against Trump and calls it justice. The defense is that the wins and the losses, taken together, prove the institution…
2026-08-27 · 6 MIN READThe conservative majority gave Trump almost everything and laundered three losses as proof of independence. The case the Journal's editorial board makes, in its strongest working form, runs like this. The Constitution assigns distinct…
2026-08-27 · 6 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal editorial board is using the slogan of judicial independence to immunize a Supreme Court that has lost public confidence from the criticism its rulings have earned — and is calling that defense constitutional…
2026-08-26 · 5 MIN READA 101-page report is what accountability looks like when accountability has been blocked. It is not a verdict. It is not a sentence. It is not a jury's "guilty." It is a document standing in for nine trials the Michigan Supreme Court made…
2026-08-25 · 6 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal editorial board lied to its readers about the Supreme Court by treating three narrow procedural losses as the story of the term while burying the shadow-docket rulings, the unitary-executive expansions, and the…
2026-08-25 · 4 MIN READThe WSJ editorial page is laundering the Roberts Court's record as President Trump's subsidiary behind three cherry-picked poll numbers. The evidence on offer is the August Marquette Law School poll of 1,076 adults, which supposedly proves…
2026-08-25 · 3 MIN READRep. Hakeem Jeffries has accused the Supreme Court of being a rubber stamp for President Trump, and he is wrong. He escalated the line last week into a demand for "dramatic Supreme Court reform," branding the conservative majority a…
2026-08-25 · 9 MIN READThe Roberts majority gutted Article III this term and called the gutting doctrine. The Court did not break in a single dramatic rupture. It broke through the systematic erosion of every mechanism that makes judicial independence real.…
2026-08-24 · 6 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal editorial board is laundering the Roberts Court's documented pattern of one-sided doctrinal destruction as popular legitimacy. The Marquette Law School Poll has published another wave of public-opinion numbers on…
2026-08-24 · 3 MIN READThe Manhattan district attorney is trying to put Mangione on trial twice for the same killing. The federal prosecution already exists; what the DA is now attempting is the second one. The architecture that makes the attempt colorable is…
2026-08-23 · 4 MIN READDonald Trump is using his family to obstruct the BBC's search for evidence. Trump is the plaintiff in a $10 billion defamation suit against the BBC in federal court in Miami. The BBC is the defendant, and under the Federal Rules of Civil…
2026-08-22 · 3 MIN READThe New York Times falsely identified Kai Spears as a passenger in a vehicle connected to a fatal shooting in Tuscaloosa. That is what eight jurors in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama found on Thursday, after a…
2026-08-21 · 7 MIN READThe Trump administration stripped work authorization from the hands that hold Holocaust survivors. The home-health aide held a Holocaust survivor in her arms for more than twenty years. She bathed the woman. She dressed the woman. She fed…
2026-08-17 · 6 MIN READMississippi is asking a federal court to dissolve the decree that was supposed to make its foster care system safe, even as its own court monitor reports that the state met barely one-fifth of the safety measures it agreed to. The…
2026-08-06 · 5 MIN READDHS failed to comply with a federal discovery order requiring phone records. The governing instrument was a January civil-discovery order in litigation over 2025 immigration-enforcement operations in the Los Angeles area. The order…
2026-08-05 · 5 MIN READMississippi's child-protection department is exposing foster children to abuse and asking the federal court to stop noticing. That is what the court monitor's report published July 29 documents. The Mississippi Department of Child…
2026-08-05 · 5 MIN READVirginia voters head to the polls Tuesday to choose party nominees for the U.S. Senate and House, opening the commonwealth’s third statewide election in nine months and setting the stage for November’s general election. The primary will be…
2026-08-03 · 4 MIN READTrump's border agents seized a reporter's phones on a Trump ally's tip. They wanted his sources, not his luggage. On July 10, Customs and Border Protection officers at Dulles International Airport flagged Max Blumenthal, founder of the…
2026-08-01 · 3 MIN READFábio Luís Lula da Silva used his father's presidency to influence Brazil's Health Ministry decisions on behalf of a lobbyist seeking to commercialize medical marijuana. The Brazilian Supreme Federal Tribunal authorized federal police to…
2026-07-31 · 7 MIN READICE killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, then jailed the only witness whose account contradicted the official story. Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego spent weeks in federal detention after watching an ICE agent shoot and kill the driver of the work…
2026-07-29 · 4 MIN READThe Supreme Court's record this term is not "mixed." It is a rubber stamp with a single notable smudge — and Justice Elena Kagan's defense of the institution doesn't change the math. At a Ninth Circuit judicial conference this week, Kagan…
2026-07-28 · 3 MIN READThe editorial board that endorsed every expansion of prosecutorial power is now using one sympathetic seizure to brand the Court as defender of individual liberty. That is the move, said plainly. Ken Jouppi had his $95,000 Cessna seized by…
2026-07-28 · 4 MIN READThe Supreme Court is staging a $95,000 photo-op on a bush pilot's forfeited airplane while refusing to dismantle the civil-forfeiture machine it built. Alaska state troopers seized Kenneth Jouppi's $95,000 airplane — the aircraft a bush…
2026-07-27 · 5 MIN READThe Trump Justice Department is prosecuting James Comey for posting a photograph of seashells. The seashells were arranged to read "86 47." The Justice Department has charged this as a threat against the President of the United States. The…
2026-07-27 · 6 MIN READMajor U.S. employers defrauded investors with false claims that AI could replace human workers. The companies spent eighteen months cutting workforces on the representation that artificial intelligence could perform the functions of the…
2026-07-27 · 6 MIN READThe Journal launders the Court's record with a bush pilot's stolen plane. The law in Jouppi v. Alaska is on the pilot's side. Ken Jouppi flew a grocery run from Fairbanks to Beaver, a dry village. A passenger hid two cases of Budweiser and…
2026-07-26 · 4 MIN READThe EEOC regulates the algorithm. No agency regulates the executive who fires based on it. In March 2023, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published technical assistance on artificial intelligence and algorithmic fairness under…
2026-07-26 · 4 MIN READTrump is seizing control of America's elections from the states — building federal databases to decide who gets a ballot, ordering the Postal Service to block ballots that don't match his lists, and threatening to prosecute the local…
2026-07-25 · 6 MIN READTwo US Forest Service biologists were zip-tied at gunpoint and held hostage for fifteen hours in the Shasta-Trinity national forest last week. Joseph Charles Henrichsen, 49, and his son Phoenix, 23, now face federal kidnapping charges that…
2026-07-25 · 5 MIN READVance Boelter assassinated Minnesota's House Speaker and the government traded away the death penalty. He will be sentenced Thursday in federal court in Minneapolis to two consecutive life sentences plus forty years under a plea agreement…
2026-07-23 · 8 MIN READSeoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon paid a political supporter to conceal the cost of opinion polls he commissioned before the 2021 mayoral by-election, and the Seoul Central District Court on Wednesday found him guilty of it. The fine: 10 million won.…
2026-07-22 · 7 MIN READThe Trump administration is in the process of flooding a Texas town to build a border wall. The steel-man for this destruction rests on statutory delegation. Under the Real ID Act of 2005, the Secretary of Homeland Security possesses the…
2026-07-22 · 3 MIN READThe 2nd Circuit is helping the administration re-detain Mohsen Mahdawi to deport him for criticizing Israel. The constitutional claim Mahdawi is trying to make — and the one the 2nd Circuit has told him he must wait to make — is a First…
2026-07-21 · 6 MIN READJoseph Charles Henrichsen kidnapped two federal biologists at gunpoint in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. He approached them with a rifle, zip-tied their hands behind their backs, and held them in a trailer while his son Phoenix kept…
2026-07-21 · 9 MIN READAnthropic pirated half a million books to train Claude. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the company's $1.5 billion class-action settlement on Monday, saying it provides "meaningful relief" for the affected authors.…
2026-07-21 · 3 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal editorial board is using the justices' security testimony to argue for less oversight of the Court. That is the editorial's actual argument. It is not the argument the editorial claims to be making. The Board's July…
2026-07-20 · 6 MIN READBy politicizing the independence Article III vested in them — life tenure, salary protection, structural insulation from political reprisal — the justices betrayed their constitutional duty and now demand the public fund the security that…
2026-07-19 · 4 MIN READThe WSJ Editorial Board is weaponizing credible threats against the justices to shield a Court that dismantled its own legitimacy and now asks Congress to pay for the security the consequences require. The threats are real. Justice…
2026-07-18 · 4 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal editorial board misrepresents the documented threat landscape to Supreme Court justices. The editorial, published this week, urges the Senate to pass a House-approved bill expanding security protections for the…
2026-07-17 · 6 MIN READThe OCC and FDIC killed "reputational risk" as a supervisory category last month because the term was a fraud — a regulatory fig leaf that let the nine largest banks and their government examiners coordinate the political exclusion of…
2026-07-17 · 5 MIN READ
