Jeffrey Redfern

@LeslieRR1995 @RealTheoWold @MarkDavis We already do that. You can't escape deportation just because your minor children are citizens. 99% of the time the parents take the kids with them because they don't want them becoming wards of the state.

@RealTheoWold @MarkDavis It’s absurd. If/when we lose this case, among other things, we will have to figure out how to get people comfortable with “separating families” by deporting illegals with children that are “citizens.”

Chief Justice Roberts' casual dismissal of birth tourism illustrates everything wrong with the Supreme Court. Americans understand that the United States is a homeland— not a hotel. But the court has become so detached from the realities confronting everyday people.

@KelseyTuoc I love Waymos and this data is convincing, but I am curious how Waymos compare to the median driver. I suspect that a relatively small percentage of human drivers are responsible for a huge portion of the risk.

Cool project: the DC Waymo delay dashboard tracks how many DC residents are dead because the mayor and city council keep demanding studies instead of allowing Waymo: tbhochman.github.io/dc-waymo-dashb…

@HannahDCox @vrexec Everyone has their own standard for what counts as comfort, security, and luxury, but I agree that you can live an extremely comfortable and secure life on a moderate income if you're only supporting yourself.

@vrexec This is thought provoking but I think you underestimate most people’s hardwired desire for security and luxury. Most people would not enjoy a nomadic lifestyle with no assets and no future plan for old age.

I ask this question from time to time and it’s not one of those judgmental “why are you not having kids” posts. I could not care less if someone decides to have kids or not, or their reasons. What I genuinely don’t understand is… if you’ve decided not to have children… why are you working a traditional career? Why are you interacting with a computer all day? Why do you care at all about how much money you make? It literally makes no sense. There are only a few tiny exceptions… like you’re a caregiver for a family member or you have significant health issues. Go join the Peace Corps or the military. Go volunteer somewhere in the world. Become an EMT or a paramedic or a firefighter or a police officer. Go find a shack in the woods somewhere and write fiction for five straight years and don’t talk to anyone. Literally walk across the country. Bike around the world. Move to Greece and work on a boat ferrying tourists around the islands. Go to Switzerland and become a mountain guide. Dedicate yourself to fitness and adventure. Literally anything. You have this incredible gift of a life with no dependents. Why are you still career coded and money coded? One of the great mysteries of our time.

@alexthechick Why would you care about whether government even has branches if this is how you think government is supposed to work?

THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE SUPREME COURT IS TO CARE ONLY ABOUT CONSTITUTIONALITY! CONSTITIONAL BUT STUPID IS, IN FACT, A PROPER RULING! I am going to go bleach a whole forest of people's oxygen trees.

@Geiger_Capital That's laughably untrue. "Legal domicile" is where the law views you as residing. It doesn't mean your presence is lawful. Domicile tells you what jurisdiction can tax you, where you can be sued, etc.

Justice Alito brings in a key point… You can’t establish a legal permanent domicile somewhere you are illegally present and subject to removal at any time.

@AmySwearer @RandyEBarnett That's not a cheap shot. It's absolutely standard discourse to set a trap for counsel. Prepared advocates with a coherent theory will escape the trap. I can't recall an oral argument in my life where a judge didn't try to do this.

Chief Justice Roberts is getting a lot of praise for his "it's the same Constitution" quip, but it's thoroughly undeserved and the hits against Sauer's comments are nothing but cheap shots. It's obvious to anyone listening in good faith that Sauer wasn't making some living constitution argument or implying judges/the executive can unilaterally update its meaning as society changes. The exchange started with Roberts, unprompted, asking Sauer about specifics on the birth tourism industry. Sauer answered with some data about Chinese companies. Roberts then asked whether Sauer agreed that the widespread nature of birth tourism he just described "has no impact on the legal analysis." Sauer pointed to Scalia's Hamdan dissent and its line of reasoning about how the messy/absurd nature of ensuing consequences is a powerful indication that the Court has butchered its interpretation. Roberts then said "well, [birth tourism] certainly wasn't a problem in the 19th century." THIS is when Sauer makes his "we're in a new world now" comment. And it's perfectly reasonable in the context.

@ASFleischman It's a great way of highlighting that someone is about to back into a conclusion using whatever reasoning might conceivably support it.

In legal reasoning, saying that something is clear or obvious is often a way to avoid making the argument. If you want to say that it is obviously bad policy, fine. It is probably also obviously bad policy to make guns inexpensive and widely available. Still a right, though.

@georgelemental @JacobALinker @SwannMarcus89 Reading about the Rwandan genocide, I was struck by how much the Tutsi stereotypes overlapped with anti-semitic ones. Tutsis were described as "crafty" or "cunning."

@JacobALinker @SwannMarcus89 This is just prejudice against market-dominant minorities in general. In the West, Jews are the most prominent such minority, but similar prejudices arise against other groups—e.g. ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, Koreans in LA, Black History Museum “Aspects of Whiteness”

It’s kind of funny how often anti-Semitism is weirdly complimentary towards Jews “I cannot believe this insidious, rat-like, grotesque race of goblins inevitably becomes rich and successful no matter how many of them we kill”

@dilanesper I'll be interested to read the thread. My colleagues have recently written about the issue: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

@JeffreyHRedfern That's not true. I'll have to do a thread on that but libertarians are just BS'ing about that. Lawyers' speech has a centuries old pedigree of professional speech regulation, and all those medical licensing laws of the late 19th Century were about speech regulation.

Quick thread on why I think the Supreme Court didn't think things through on the "conversion therapy" case yesterday (and maybe why I was surprised it was 8-1). There's a libertarian theory that all state regulation of quack medicine conveyed through words is unconstitutional.

I promise you, you're wrong about this. It's in every occupational speech brief we file. One of the reasons we win these cases is because we point out that the state could simply replace mandatory "licensure" with voluntary "certification," allowing people to practice without obtaining the state credential, but maintaining whatever standards for the credential they want.

@TJH314 I get it but since we aren't doing that, I'm entitled to talk about what libertarians are saying in the real world.

@dilanesper I'm not aware of anyone making that argument, and I litigate these cases.

@JeffreyHRedfern At any rate, the notion that we just have to let people die or get maimed and then allow them to received capped malpractice or wrongful death damages rather than restring licensees from promoting quack treatments is the worst sort of libertarian rejection of the public good.

@dilanesper That's definitely true, but it's also true that professional speech regulation little historical pedigree, so there wasn't necessarily a reason to think hard about it. Most of our First Amendment doctrine was in place before the first state regulated talk therapy.

@JeffreyHRedfern I think existing First Amendment doctrine was developed without thinking about what the professional speech category is and what the states are really doing here.

@dilanesper The things that satisfy it are things that don't get litigated because they're obvious and uncontroversial. I'm just curious what other path through existing First Amendment doctrine would allow these examples of "obviously constitutional" speech burdens to survive.

@JeffreyHRedfern You're the second person who says "easily satisfy strict scrutiny" and I'm wondering if you guys are thinking of the same strict scrutiny as I am. Very little "easily" satisfies it. Further, though, if the government can't define "false" medical speech if people debate it....

This is precisely the difference between modern licensing and most 19th Century "licensing." Back then, a license wasn't required to practice; it was functionally a state certification, and the state itself has the right to tell people who it thinks they should patronize. That's not the same as making it a crime to talk to people with whom the state disagrees, which is what modern licensing does.

There's literally no treatment based on talking that the state can say "we don't want to license anyone who does this"? And again-- THAT's the key question here. Not whether some rando might do this, but whether the state has to tell the public "this person is legit".

Props to the legal commentators who are capable of saying that decisions are correct, even when they dislike the outcome. Hopefully we'll see some comparable responses from the right when SCOTUS reaffirms that birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

@Alexand16730477 @KevinSabellico @JamesSurowiecki I contend that tons of speech restrictions would survive strict scrutiny, but they're never actually challenged because they're so uncontroversial. Which is pretty much how you'd hope things would play out when the doctrine is well calibrated.

@JeffreyHRedfern @KevinSabellico @JamesSurowiecki But my back up was it 100% passes strict scrutiny even if we went there, so it almost doesn't matter. You're absolutely right about doing the analysis properly in its constituent parts. I plead with James but to no avail!

Lots of commentary on KBJ’s dissent, but nobody seems to have picked up on how batshit insane and dumb this analogy is. It really makes Dilan Esper’s job a lot harder - No, KBJ isn’t stupid at all, but she’s not close to the smartest within the group currently on SCOTUS.

@dilanesper It's very weird hearing "originalist" arguments start from the premise that "obviously it would be insane for the undocumented immigrants' children to be citizens." That, plus textual ambiguity, is the argument in a nutshell.

At the very least, if that's what you are doing, have a little shame and back off the smearing of Lefties who, on this one, are much closer to what the text says.

There's obviously so much wrong with the anti-birthright position but one obvious BS aspect of it is if you just think "what does 'subject to the jurisdiction" means, you'd never say it means "their parents didn't cross the border". But it's the only words available to them.

I'm skeptical that it falls into one of the Stevens categories of historically unprotected speech, but it obviously satisfies strict scrutiny. That's the problem with the structure of these arguments. If you reason backwards from "X is clearly constitutional," you end up conflating the two steps of the analysis: (1) Is it speech? (2) Does it withstand constitutional scrutiny?

@KevinSabellico @JamesSurowiecki The actual answer is no, speech encouraging suicide is not protected because there’s a long historical pedigree of banning it specifically, consistent with other categories like fighting words and incitement, and even if there weren’t, such bans satisfy strict scrutiny.

@JamesSurowiecki @Alexand16730477 Because Holder doesn't need to be "translated." It is exactly the case she's describing, and the result was strict scrutiny.

@Alexand16730477 Why is the analogy dumb? If you imagine a world where one could commit an act of terrorism by speaking - just as a talk therapist administers medical treatment by speaking - many people would say the 1A would not protect the speaker's right to commit terrorism.