A valedictory message to those learned minds whose legal education consists entirely of scrolling through Twitter.
A valedictory message to those learned minds whose legal education consists entirely of scrolling through Twitter.
D ear students, faculty, and anonymous trolls:
Congratulations on finally graduating from Twitter Law School. What a long trip it’s been, huh? After 30 full minutes of coursework and reading three sentences of a Sonia Sotomayor dissent, you have finally achieved the best legal education the zero dollars you have invested can purchase. Just think, when you started your journey, Sabrina Carpenter’s espresso was still hot!
[Pause for laughter at topical joke.]
Here at TLS, you have no doubt sharpened your skills at social-media-based legal punditry, and without the hassle of actually learning anything about the law. After all, there is a new season of The Bear out, so who has time to read all that law-talking stuff?
You have no doubt learned from the best Twitter lawyers that when an opinion comes out, it is important to skip right to the holding, then make wild generalizations about the sole sentence you have read. Remember, the first person to post about a case is always the most right, and thus most entitled to performative, smug outrage.
And if it is an opinion that makes you sad, you must immediately scroll down to the dissents, pluck out the most sensational lines, then make them sound as if no justice has ever dished up a more vinegary dish in a legal document.
It doesn’t matter if the dissent is buffoonish; at Twitter U, you decide what constitutes reality, because it is entirely too much work to check and see if the point you love in the dissent is actually addressed in the Court’s opinion. (And yes, I understand a movement is under way to change the name to “X U,” but the Court has ruled we can still refer to it as “Twitter,” perhaps its best decision of the term.)
For instance, you may have recently read a dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in which she asserts that the majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts grants immunity to a president who “orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival,” “organizes a military coup to hold onto power,” and “takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon.”
After reading such an acrid passage, make sure you do not take the time to read the actual opinion of the Court, which addresses many of the outrageous statements made in the dissents. For instance, Roberts’s opinion specifically lays out how a president can still be prosecuted for bribery!
But Twitter Law School 101 teaches that you must not even pretend there is a counterpoint to a sensational charge, lest people believe you to be a reasonable person willing to devote time to reading judicial opinions. Why offer boring takes when you’ll see more reward simply by feeling it more intensely than everyone else.
Even more importantly, the middle ten minutes of your TLS studies has no doubt taught you to pretend the opinion delivered by the Court is completely unexpected. Don’t worry, this won’t expose you as someone who clearly had not been paying attention to the case until the second it dropped. Theatrical anger overrides obvious ignorance every time in Social Media Court.
For instance, there is no need to keep up with one particularly annoying National Review writer who months ago explained that the Court would have to find a middle ground between two equally absurd arguments: that everything presidents do in office is immune from criminal prosecution and that all of their actions are subject to criminal review. The justices, this writer noted, had an impossible task before them, as they knew their decision would be referenced for decades to come. The Court would have to find a way to keep unofficial conduct subject to criminal review while protecting official duties from future prosecution.
(That writer shouldn’t be given immunity from criminal prosecution for boring column writing, amirite?)
Here at TLS, knowing anything about the case beforehand is actually an impediment to social-media success, as it may thwart your ability to mislead as boldly as necessary to boost your likes, reposts, and follows.
For instance, knowing literally anything about the case may make you pause before posting something like “So Biden can’t forgive student loans but he can order a drone strike on the loan collectors?” Or “It’s a founding principle of this nation that nobody is above the law. [The Court] betrayed it.” Or “So ends the part of the American experience where our leaders were bound by the rule of law.” Or the common claim that it is “genuinely shocking that a Court justice is now on record that the Court has sanctioned that a president can order Seal Team Six to assassinate his political opponent.”
Just think of all the likes and reposts you’d be leaving on the table if you exercised the restraint of an adult human! And imagine the calumny you would foist upon yourself by noting, for instance, that you would be screaming at people on the other side of the issue if, say, Barack Obama was held criminally liable for a deadly drone attack on an American citizen. Then you would no doubt be demanding that the Court recognize that some official acts are beyond the scope of prosecution, as they would hinder a president’s core decision-making ability and imperil national security.
And you must never, ever think ahead far enough to recognize that America elects presidents of both political parties, and one day your favored chief executive may be standing in front of the Supreme Court looking for immunity. Had the Court failed to recognize an exception for official acts, presidents of every flavor could be facing lawsuits from overzealous prosecutors of the other party until we all end up fighting the robots rather than ourselves.
In summation, the nearly half hour you have spent steeping yourself in progressive hyperbole is more than enough to declare the Court’s 6–3 decision to be “political” without ever acknowledging one way in which it could have been less “party-line”: One of the liberal justices could have sided with the majority. (This very thing happened in the Fischer ruling, for instance, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joining the conservative majority.) “Bipartisanship” is only to be celebrated when it means “conservatives siding with liberals” (as also in Fischer, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett writing the dissent, joined by Sotomayor and Elena Kagan), not the other way around.
And remember — just because you have never read a Court opinion, it doesn’t mean you’re not entitled to your public declarations. In the online world, Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s opinions of presidential authority are just as valid as “Hawk Tuah” girl!
Listening to this speech has already taken up more time than you spent considering the legal consequences of the Trump immunity case, so I will wrap this up. The less time you spend listening to me, the more time you can spend arguing that the Court’s thoughts on immunity are similar to what led Hitler to take power in Germany or that this July 4 is the last one Americans may ever celebrate. Always remember — the bullsh** has to be so intense that it’s as if the bull spent a week eating the feces of another animal before turning it into a waste product of its own.
So go forth, young Twitter scholars. Here’s to your future success when another remotely contentious court case needs widespread misunderstanding.