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yeargain.bsky.social
1855 Professor of the Law of Democracy at Michigan State. Contributor to The Downballot. I teach, write, and post about state constitutional law, institutional development, and criminal law. I write (infrequently) at guaranteedrepublics.substack.com.
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law firms representing defendants in medical malpractice, products liability, and toxic tort cases shouldn’t proudly post their wins on LinkedIn. it’s tacky, gross, and deeply disrespectful.

submitted 3 hours ago • 1 comment

this is an extremely important point. “everything is up for debate” is moral rot. I am emphatic about telling my students that there are not always two defensible sides to an issue. sometimes there are! but sometimes there are more than two. and sometimes there’s just one.

submitted 3 hours ago • 0 comments

“the guy who successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that a fish is not a ‘tangible object’ under Sarbanes-Oxley is now a judge and he taught an originalism course at a law school and gave a book award to a white nationalist paper” is quite a bio

submitted 4 hours ago • 1 comment

I cannot fathom the level of depravity that someone must reach to refer to human beings as “bodies,” to then to high-five over how many they kidnapped, and then to describe the day as “good” based on the number.

submitted 4 hours ago • 4 comments

There can be no future for constitutional government in the United States that treats this as merely an unfortunate election outcome producing an administration with bad policies. It must be repudiated root and branch as an illegitimate criminal enterprise, void and unlawful in its entirety.

submitted 9 hours ago • 20 comments

Elon and Grok is the funniest ventriloquist dummy act in a looong time

submitted 3 days ago • 29 comments

I searched for "gritty supreme court" on Google. On the left: what I wanted. On the right: what the AI Overview gave me.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

the damage is incalculable. in the future, no one will trust our visas. no one will trust our grants. tax credits/incentives for infrastructure won't be trusted. The US is establishing itself as an unreliable partner.

submitted 2 days ago • 61 comments

My heart breaks for trans kids, who do not deserve this obsessive animus that adults are directing at them.

submitted 3 days ago • 16 comments

Sigh, this is unsurprising. As @yeargain.bsky.social has written, state courts can do what SCOTUS didn’t: strike down laws that discriminate against trans people, based on state constitutions. @statecourtreport.bsky.social

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Anguish over the Skirmetti opinion is a completely appropriate and justified reaction. But just like w/ Dobbs, state constitutions provide add'l protections. Some state EPCs are much broader than the fed EPC; others have implicit privacy/bodily autonomy rights. The fight moves to state courts now.

submitted 3 days ago • 4 comments

I wrote "Litigating Trans Rights in the States" in 2023. It was true then, and it's true today after Skrmetti. We need to litigate trans rights in state courts under state constitutions. I lay out the legal arguments for how to do that in the piece: moritzlaw.osu.edu/sites/defaul...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

A plea to journalists who insist on posting screenshots of court documents without including links: Please at least include the case number (at the top) rather than cropping it out so the rest of us have an easier time digging up the link that you inexcusably failed to provide?

submitted 4 days ago • 21 comments

I say, the factual allegations made by the fascist government in its arrest of an opposition party politician appear to be false!

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Mike Lee Stresses He Would Have Posted Same Thing If Own Family Savagely Murdered

submitted 4 days ago • 526 comments

does Harry Enten still think that Trump is "a soaring eagle" or no

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

A unanimous Wisconsin Supreme Court held Tuesday that a legislative committee cannot dictate WI DOJ’s ability to settle certain types of civil lawsuits, concluding that these cases fall within core executive branch powers. Opinion: www.wicourts.gov/sc/opinion/D...

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

CA5 upholds the federal ban on guns near schools for the unfathomably stupid reason that a 697-year-old English law is sufficiently analogous to the ban rather than that a democratically-enacted law banning guns near schools just, you know, MAKES SENSE. storage.courtlistener.com/pdf/2025/06/...

submitted 4 days ago • 5 comments

Georgia has a primary on Tuesday for the state Public Service Commission. It's gotten little attention. Statewide voter turnout is just 1%! But in Washington and Wheeler counties, turnout is >10%. Both have special elections for county offices, and that's apparently greater motivation than the PSC.

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

No Kings includes Draft Kings

submitted 7 days ago • 37 comments

Vance Boelter has been identified as the suspect in the Minnesota shootings, and some attention has been drawn to the fact that Gov. Tim Walz appointed him to the state's Workforce Development Board in 2019. This is a low-profile board that, under federal law, every state must establish. 🧵

submitted 7 days ago • 9 comments

the idea that any of Walz's appointees on the Workforce Development Board were ideologically aligned with him is dumb and uninformed. under state law, "a majority of the [voting] members must be...appointed from individuals nominated by state business organizations and business trade associations."

submitted 7 days ago • 2 comments

this is so fucking awful

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

this is an incredibly thoughtful thread that's worth reading in its entirety:

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

A three-judge appeals court panel on Friday cleared the way for Kansans to resume changing their gender markers on driver’s licenses, rejecting arguments made by Attorney General Kris Kobach and overturning a lower court ruling #ksleg kansasreflector.com/2025/06/13/k...

submitted 8 days ago • 9 comments