Time for my once-a-year post on this blog.
This year I published two short articles, one casebook, and two notable pieces of commentary.
The first article: Is Quasi-Judicial Immunity Qualified Immunity? This is a continuation of a debate about the historical foundations for qualified immunity, published as a response to an article by Scott Keller in the Stanford Law Review. It’s only 11 pages, but might be the most important thing I’ve published in a couple years.
The other article: Reflections of a Supreme Court Commissioner provides my own take on all of the topics addressed in the long committee report of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court, on which I served in 2021.
The casebook is the Fifth Edition of Paulsen, McConnell, Bray and Baude. I apologize to all of the students who bought the Fourth Edition hoping to resell it, but some of the major Supreme Court decisions from last term (like Bruen and Dobbs) made a new edition urgent.
The two pieces of commentary included a discussion of the use of history by the Supreme Court: Of course the Supreme Court needs to use history. The question is how. The Washington Post was especially great to work with her, willing to let me keep in much more substance and nuance than a newspaper usually will. I was really happy about that.
And in The Atlantic, my take on the “Independent State Legislature” controversy, with Michael McConnell: The Supreme Court Has a Perfectly Good Option in Its Most Divisive Case. From the key graf: “Missing from the debate has been a key principle that points to a sensible middle ground: A state constitution may limit a legislature’s power over federal elections, but it may not give that power to somebody else. We need not an independent-state-legislature doctrine, but a constitutional-state-legislature doctrine.”
A lot of things in the hopper already for 2023.