@jerryedwards
Associate Professor of Law at West Virginia University College of Law. Formerly an ACLUFL Attorney. I enjoy writing about free expression, academic freedom, and American history. All opinions are my own, not my employer's, and are correct, probably.
📢 Abstract submissions are now open for the APHA 2026 Annual Meeting & Expo in San Antonio, TX (Nov 1–4)! As Program Co-Chair of the Disability Section, I'd love to see your work represented. Deadline: March 31. 🧵
But Joe, what happens if the Constitution says something I don't like? I prefer to stick to my imagined version of the Constitution.
As someone whose second book is forthcoming, I'm still smarting from how hard it was. So here's a new addition to #teamsecondbook resources: the Omohundro Institute's summer workshop for second (etc) book writers, The Historian's Writerly Craft. Apps due 4/20 (lol)
oieahc.wm.edu/events-overv...
"In fact, Iran has no Tomahawks."
Guy did an entire PhD seemingly without understanding what the point doing all that work was.
Agreed. I also think this idea applies to other actors, like judges. Short 🧵:
Good. That's the only safe way to ensure that research doesn't lead you astray.
Needs more Rick Astley. 😉
My article analyzes NYT v. Sullivan through the lens of Fourteenth Amendment history, specifically, the antislavery movement's understanding of free expression. After submitting it, I had the dreaded realization that my project really should be 2 articles. So I'm planning to split it up this summer.
Okay, fellow law profs: This is turning out to be a brutally slow submission season. While we wait, tell me about your paper that's currently out searching for a home?
I posted a new draft on the politics around crime victims and how states come up short in addressing victims' needs. You can read it here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Where a legal scholar works matters more than what they write. In the law review submission system---the primary publication market for legal scholarship in the United States---student editors face thousands of submissions for a handful of slots and rely heavily on institutional prestige as a proxy for article quality. We show that this credential dependence produces inequity that persists even after controlling for article quality: among articles of comparable merit, authors from prestigious institutions receive substantially better placements. We build a calibrated simulation of the law review market and benchmark it against deferred acceptance, a centralized matching algorithm used in markets like medical residencies. The current system produces severe misallocation: more than 60\% of top-tier placements differ from what quality-based matching would produce, and the rank correlation between article quality and journal prestige is 0.45 versus 0.79 under centralized matching. Which system achieves higher overall welfare depends on market tightness; as competition for slots intensifies---a trend already underway---the current system's disadvantage grows, losing up to 13.5\% of overall match quality. Partial reforms like extending deadlines have negligible effects; the primary source of both inefficiency and inequity is the decentralized structure of the market itself. Notably, centralized matching fixes the sorting problem but not the equity problem: prestige bias is embedded in editorial signals and would require changes to how articles are evaluated, not just how they are assigned.
I've been busy all weekend rage-coding and rage-writing this, which goes out to #LawSky. Behold a mathematicians' wrath at the mindboggling law review publishing system. Basically, I build a gigantic simulation model to show how much the system sucks. Hoping to get this up on SSRN before long.
Y'all have one too? Ours visited last week.
Indefensibly Erroneous Scholarship 1 Pages Posted: Last revised: 8 Mar 2026 Michael L. Smith University of Oklahoma - College of Law Date Written: March 08, 2026 Abstract This essay identifies the problem of heaping prestige in the form of additional citations onto scholarship that one is only citing to disprove. The essay then solves this problem by offering itself as a stand-in citation. Keywords: terrible work, misguided statement, overblown claims, utterly without value, wrong the day it was written, shred this
We all have that article we cite again and again because it gets things SO fundamentally wrong it must be addressed.
But by citing this work, critics boost its perceived impact and prestige through higher citation counts. Can anything be done?
Yes: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
I can tell you this, they aren't defending "freedom."
These anti-social transition bills have been kicking around for the last couple of years, and since you can't make it illegal for kids to have certain kinds of haircuts, they mostly focus on punishing teachers.
It would be a serious mistake to view this line of thinking as aberrational within the caucus even if some of its members (Ogles, Fine) communicate it in exceptionally crude or transparent ways.
Turns out that you shouldn't trust the rolling dumpster to do the driving for you.
Doug Rendleman passed away over the weekend. He was a giant in remedies and civil procedure. He was also a very gifted teacher. I was very fortunate to have him at Washington & Lee. www.ali.org/news/article...
I don't understand this. I have no interest in stealing from people. Not sure why anybody else who can afford to live comfortably would feel differently.
This excerpt from @amylittlefield.bsky.social's book...
"His anti-abortion beliefs, he told me, grew out of a link he saw between suicide and abortion. He seemed to identify with the unwanted fetus. He believed that all people deserved to feel wanted—a feeling he struggled to experience himself."
Another Mizelle stinker.
The felony murder rule is stupid and the idea that somebody would get the death penalty because of it would be morally abhorrent even If the felony murder rule wasn't stupid and even if the death penalty wasn't morally abhorrent on its own. Any conversation about "innocence" misses the point.
One of the reasons I keep saying: don’t fund ICE or CPB is the Democrats have to get out of the business of enabling the Republican’s disastrous mistakes. We have this insane agency because George W. Bush ignored a quite evident terrorist attack.
I don't like this. It was better when I was the only patently unhinged person in your mentions. Go away, other unhinged people, I'm staking claim to this territory.
We will now spend 500 million dollars renaming the Department of War, the Department of Short Term Excursion.
Trump's apparatchik in legal academia.
It was never an honest intellectual endeavor.
The candidate filing deadline is 3/13 in Utah, so it definitely looks at this juncture like Utah Republicans aren't going to make a run at getting a stay of the new congressional map from SCOTUS.
