What do you all do?

Balls & Strikes publishes original commentary and reporting about courts, the judges who preside over them, and the legal system they uphold.

Ah, but I already read Noah Feldman’s Bloomberg columns.

Balls & Strikes’s coverage is a little different! It is premised on the reality that interpreting the law is an inherently political act with real-world consequences: Throughout American history, court decisions have fueled devastating economic inequality, hollowed out democracy, blessed all forms of state-sanctioned discrimination, and erected countless barriers to the cause of racial justice. For all its lofty rhetoric, the legal system is and has always been less concerned with protecting the rights of everyday people than it is with enabling wealthy and powerful interests to exploit them. 

Balls & Strikes seeks to hold courts, judges, and members of the legal profession accountable for their failures to fulfill their professed commitment to the cause of justice, and to facilitate some long-overdue conversations about how to make the legal system better, or at the very least, marginally less worse. To that end, in addition to its coverage of the Court and the courts, Balls & Strikes also publishes analysis of the judicial nomination and confirmation processes, the ongoing debate over reform proposals, and other stories at the intersection of law, policy, and politics. 

Why did you pick a name for the site that makes you sound like a poorly-trafficked baseball blog?

Balls & Strikes borrows its name from Chief Justice John Roberts, who, during his confirmation hearings, famously outlined a vision of judicial modesty by describing the proper role of a judge as “to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” This metaphor omits key facts that every Little Leaguer knows: Umpires use different strike zones, apply them flexibly, and are entrusted with a tremendous amount of power and near-unlimited discretion in its exercise. Balls & Strikes’s coverage will highlight how the myth of judicial objectivity confers a sense of legitimacy upon unjust, undemocratic outcomes, which is precisely why so many powerful people work so hard to uphold it.

Who are you, exactly?

Jay Willis is the editor-in-chief of Balls & Strikes. Balls & Strikes is sponsored by Demand Justice, a nonprofit advocacy organization focused on the courts and legal issues. All opinions expressed on Balls & Strikes are solely those of the bylined author, and do not necessarily represent the views or reflect the specific views or advocacy goals of Demand Justice, its staff, or its supporters.

Balls & Strikes maintains a policy of editorial independence derived from standards adopted by the Institute for Nonprofit News and the American Press Institute. We maintain a firewall between donor support for Demand Justice and editorial decisions about what stories Balls & Strikes covers, and how. Balls & Strikes editors make independent decisions about the assignment of stories, their content, and their editing, and allow no internal or external right to review or influence the site’s coverage.

Are you on social media?

Sure, you can find us on Bluesky here. We do not use Twitter or Facebook, because we do not to force you to access our content by using a busted-ass platform littered with neo-Nazi-curious memes, stolen engagement-farming video clips, obvious crypto scams, AI porn bots, or some combination thereof.

Do you have a newsletter? Is it free?

Yes we do, and yes it is. Every week, we’ll send out an email with some exclusive subscriber-only content, a round-up of the best judiciary-adjacent writing we could scrounge up off the Internet, and a doofy Getty Images photo of some justice who probably died a long time ago. You can subscribe here.

Do you accept submissions? How can I pitch you?

Yes, please email us at [email protected]. We typically pay $500 for essays of about 1,000 words, a rate that can vary based on the amount of research and/or reporting the writing will entail.

Not sure what to pitch, or how to pitch? You can find detailed submissions guidelines here.

How can I send you well-deserved praise for how good and correct the site is?

For that and anything else, please reach out to [email protected].