The Good Stories Are Always Worth It
We’re looking for new contributors to Balls & Strikes. Here’s how to pitch us.
One of the more frustrating aspects of working in media in 2026 is that it is impossible to solicit pitches anymore without getting inundated with the laziest, most obvious AI-generated dreck you have ever laid eyes on. When I tried back in November, for example, I received an email in the familiar uncanny cadence of ChatGPT from a person who (1) does not appear to exist and (2) described themselves as “built for turning Byzantine law into human lightning,” a turn of phrase that misunderstands Balls & Strikes’s coverage areas as badly as it does the general concept of writing on the internet.
Sprinkled throughout the literally hundreds of emails like this one that I received, though, were some cool ideas from real people. Among them were this story from the journalist Sophia Laurenzi, about Tennessee’s crusade to execute Harold Wayne Nichols over the strenuous objections of both the sitting prosecutor and the jurors who voted to convict him, and this one from former immigration lawyer Auden Perino, about how ICE uses so-called gang databases—notoriously unreliable resources that occasionally label literal infants as “verified gang members”—in order to keep people in immigration detention. This is the best part of working in media in 2026, or anytime, really: meeting smart, thoughtful writers with compelling stories to tell, and working with them to make it happen.
Thus, with preemptive apologies to my overworked spam filters but also with excitement for the good stuff that will make it through, I am once again inviting you (or anyone you know) to pitch Balls & Strikes. If you have a story idea in our wheelhouse—the Supreme Court, the legal profession, the federal judiciary, the last batch of election-denying freaks whom Senate Republicans are trying to ram through the judicial confirmation process before the midterms, and so on—please email me at pitches@ballsandstrikes.org so that I can pay you money to write it.
Our submissions guidelines are here, but in this space I want to reiterate that you do not have to have a long, bullet-pointed list of clips from prestigious publications in order to write for Balls & Strikes. One of the reasons this website exists is that so many legacy outlets are spectacularly bad at legal journalism, and have little interest in publishing people who would be better at it. We at Balls & Strikes want to include new and more insightful voices in The Discourse, which has way too many “it’s actually a 3-3-3 Court” dead-enders already.
So if you have clips, great, send them. But if you don’t, please rest assured that you will not be penalized for it, unless your email wraps with a weird analogy about turning a long-dead civilization’s legal system into “human lightning,” in which case I am filing your email straight to the trash, and challenging you to mutual combat if I ever see you in public.
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
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Yet another reason for states to move beyond the legal profession’s annual hazing ritual.
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The FBI director’s case against a blogger who called him a “blatantly incompetent chud” and a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch” is no match for International Shoe.
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This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated
The Real Logic Behind the GOP’S New Push For Judicial Elections, Steve Kennedy, TPM
“Once judges enter the electoral arena, the question of who chooses them can quickly become inseparable from the question of which party has the best chance of winning.”
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“None of this means that the Supreme Court is actually more liberal than it appears. Trump and his Justice Department team simply seem to have a good read on what the high court will and won’t allow.”
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Thank you again Jay Willis for the good laugh…even your submission requests are hilarious while making their points…
Does Madiba Dennie write her own headlines? Either way, they are hilarious and I love your newsletter. I am a relatively old person (55) with a relatively new law degree (2022) and the recognition of absurdity keeps me a loyal reader of Balls & Strikes.