At last, we have arrived at the Supreme Court’s busy season, to the extent that nine people with life-tenured jobs that pay a quarter-million dollars apiece to decide between 70 and 80 cases before breaking for a three-month summer vacation can ever be described as “busy.” This June, the Court will decide a series of landmark cases that could spell doom for, in no particular order, affirmative action, Tribal sovereignty, antidiscrimination law, and representative democracy. It is, in other words, a fantastic time for me, the editor-in-chief of a legal publication, to log all the way off.
Not forever! (And obviously not from Twitter, for as long as non-crypto dipshits are still allowed to use it.) But I am going on parental leave through the end of August, which means that mewling Sam Alito dissents about how the majority didn’t extinguish enough civil rights will no longer be the fullest diapers in my life for the immediate future.
The good news is that my absence will do nothing to threaten Balls & Strikes’s status as the internet’s premier sports-themed legal media outlet. This summer, we’ll be running weekly retrospectives from 5-4’s Rhiannon Hamam about some of the worst Supreme Court cases that she’s been unable to get out of her head, despite her very best efforts. Balls & Strikes contributor James LaRock will also be leading a wildlife tour of the worst Trump judges in America, who are cranking out unhinged opinions at a rate that sometimes makes it feel like the January 6 insurrection was a rousing success. And thanks to a handful of trusty pinch-hitting editors, our regular contributors will still be covering the Supreme Court’s biggest cases in all their presumed moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
As Balls & Strikes wraps its second term covering the Supreme Court, I want to once again thank you for reading and for all your continued support of the site. Balls & Strikes started with the premise that most establishment legal journalism is quite bad, and that we could at least play a part in making it better. It is my fondest hope that this month, you’ll start to see more members of the Supreme Court press corps covering the Court as the reactionary institution that it is, and not the gaggle of nonpartisan Westlaw power users they’ve previously imagined it to be. If so, great. If not, rest assured that I will be doing plenty of upset tweets about it.
As always, you can find us at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Twitter at @ballsstrikes, or get in touch at [email protected]. Thanks for reading, and see you in the fall.
