Do You Want to Get Paid to Write About the World’s Worst People? I Have Terrific News
There is so much news to cover. Please let me pay you to help me do it!
Summer used to be the slow time of year for the Supreme Court and everyone in its orbit. The justices were typically off gallivanting around Europe, occasionally cashing checks from law schools willing to pay them to spend a few hours with roomfuls of hungover twentysomethings. In their absence, constitutional law professors would update their syllabi to reflect whatever civil rights the Court most recently decided no longer exist; big-name legal journalists would put the finishing touches on their next proposal for a book with SUPREME in the title; and outgoing clerks would spend their last weeks on the job showing their replacements the ropes, and sitting around thinking about which BigLaw firm’s half-million-dollar signing bonus to accept.
The advent of the second Trump administration, however, has more or less ruined these hallowed traditions of the legal profession. This is because Trump is, to use a technical term, always doing illegal shit, which means that normal people are constantly suing to try and stop him, which means that the members of this Court’s six-justice conservative supermajority have to stay near the office with their phones on, to make themselves available to resolve emergency docket cases in ways that give their favorite president everything he wants.
Most people in most jobs are annoyed by having to do extra work. For Sam Alito, the joy of getting to enshrine casual homophobia in the pages of the Supreme Court reporter probably makes the burden a bit more bearable.
What I am saying here is that as much as I, too, would love to log off until September and possibly forever, Balls & Strikes will have a lot to publish this summer. We’ll continue to cover the fallout from the term that wrapped last month, when the Court declared that federal judges can’t stop Trump from breaking the law, but that America’s most obnoxious parents have an inviolate First Amendment right to veto public school curriculum they don’t like. We’ll follow along with the embarrassing bootlickers and conspiracy-curious weirdos whom Trump is nominating and the Senate is confirming to life-tenured federal judgeships. And we will be there to recap every additional shadow docket decision rubber-stamping some monstrous aspect of Trump’s agenda, because if this Court is going to continue to roll over and show its belly to an aspiriting autocrat, literally the least we can do is blog about it.
Since the workload isn’t getting any lighter, I would like to extend an occasional invitation and/or plea to you to take some of it on: If there is a case you want to unpack, a trend you want to highlight, a nominee you want to scrutinize, or just something happening in the law-adjacent world that makes you upset, you can send Balls & Strikes your pitches anytime at—you’ll want to write this down, it’s complicated—pitches@ballsandstrikes.org. You can find more detailed submissions guidelines here, but I will spoil the most important part: For essays of about 1,000 words, we typically pay $500. Why go outside and enjoy the beautiful weather this summer when you can get paid to write about the worst people on earth instead?
As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.
This Week In Balls & Strikes
Trump Is Suing an Entire Federal District Court Because He Wants to Disappear People Faster, Madiba Dennie
Judges on yet another court have incurred the White House’s wrath for the crime of doing their job.
Ketanji Brown Jackson Is Telling the Truth About the Supreme Court, Jay Willis
The task of interpreting the law is inherently “political.” But no justice has been this comfortable saying so in public.
The Supreme Court Didn’t Bother Telling Federal Workers Why It’s Helping Trump Fire Them, Madiba Dennie
Federal district court judges keep temporarily blocking Trump policies from taking effect. The Court’s six-justice conservative supermajority keeps riding gallantly to his rescue.
Trump Keeps Putting Federal Judges In Danger. So Why Is He In Charge of Keeping Them Safe?, Molly Coleman
Proposed legislation would ensure that the federal agency that provides security to judges answers to judges, not to Donald Trump.
Trump Judges Find No First Amendment Problem With Florida Forcing Teachers to Misgender Themselves, Madiba Dennie
For transgender teachers in Florida, writing their names on the blackboard is now considered a fireable offense
This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated
The Moral Panic Exception to the Constitution, Peter Shamshiri, String In a Maze
How the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence is bending to the shape of far-right politics.
Collective Political Activity: Reclaiming the First Amendment, Rhiannon Hamam, The Drift
“The freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment mean so much more outside of the confines of abstracted legal debates about what kind of speech, from what kind of speaker, is legally protected.”
The Past Four Years at the Supreme Court Did Not Need to Be This Way, me, Slate
Sorry for cheating here, but I wrote about how the Democrats who wanted to expand the Court in 2021 were objectively right, and about how the party cannot miss its next opportunity to act.
This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images
