Balls & Strikes

Balls & Strikes offers unique insights and news about the courts, the judges who operate within them, and the legal system they represent. What sets Balls & Strikes apart is its understanding that interpreting laws is a political process that can lead to significant real-world effects. Historically, court rulings in the United States have contributed to severe economic disparities, weakened democratic principles, supported various forms of state-approved discrimination, and created numerous obstacles to achieving racial justice. Despite its grand ideals, the legal system has often prioritized the interests of the wealthy and powerful over the rights of ordinary individuals.

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Clarence Thomas Is Only Annoyed By Docket Manipulation When He Can’t End Your Right to Abortion Care

3 days ago | ballsandstrikes.org | Susan Rinkunas

Three years ago this week, the Supreme Court made the disastrous choice to overturn Roe v. Wade, which has resulted in nearly 20 states enforcing abortion bans and countless women and pregnant people being criminally investigated, medically maimed, or even killed. A January 2024 analysis estimated that, in 14 states with near-total abortion bans, close to 65,000 rape survivors would have been unable to get abortions after the Court issued its decision.
Amy Coney Barrett Cannot Wait to Legalize Discrimination Against Trans People

1 week ago | ballsandstrikes.org | Jay Willis

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees “equal protection of the laws” to everyone. But since many laws classify people on some basis, courts have developed a complex, multi-tiered system for determining when classifications are unconstitutional.
Senate Democrats Are Letting Trump’s Judicial Nominees Off the Hook

1 week ago | ballsandstrikes.org | Jay Willis

On Sunday, 11 days after the Senate Judiciary Committee held confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s first batch of judicial nominees, the committee published the nominees’ answers to follow-up questions posed by the committee’s members.
The Supreme Court’s Guns Cases Got Thousands of Children Killed

2 weeks ago | ballsandstrikes.org | Jay Willis

In 2008, the Supreme Court’s five conservatives rewrote the Second Amendment to say what Republican politicians wished it had said all along. In the years that followed, 7,398 more children than expected died as a result of gun violence, according to a new study. In his majority opinion in District of Columbia v.
Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Built America’s Racial Caste System

3 weeks ago | ballsandstrikes.org | Brando Simeo Starkey

Brando Simeo Starkey is the author of Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System, available June 3 wherever books are sold. The presence of Black people in America has produced a centuries-long fight between two hostile forces. On one side exists caste preservationists—those who fight to maintain the eternal primacy of the white population. Caste abolitionists sit opposite them.
Meet Josh Divine, the Trump Judicial Nominee Who Argued Christians Are “Obligated Ethically to Impose Their Beliefs On Others”

3 weeks ago | ballsandstrikes.org | Jay Willis

The highlights of the résumé of Josh Divine, President Donald Trump’s nominee to a federal district court vacancy in Missouri, are standard-issue conservative legal movement stuff: a clerkship with Justice Clarence Thomas; a stint in the office of Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley; continuous membership in the Federalist Society since 2013, when he started as a 1L at Yale Law School.
James Ho Understands What Trump Wants In a Supreme Court Justice

1 month ago | ballsandstrikes.org | Jay Willis

Getting on this White House’s Supreme Court shortlist is a matter of showing that you will be loyal to the president above all else. Of the many Trump judges who are angling for a promotion to the Supreme Court, no one is campaigning harder than Fifth Circuit judge James Ho, whose primary metric for success is the number of times the Wall Street Journal editorial board cites him with approval each week.
The Justices Did Not Want to Talk About the Children They Would Render Stateless

1 month ago | ballsandstrikes.org | Jay Willis

Among the more challenging aspects of following oral argument in Trump v. CASA, a case about President Donald Trump’s executive order purporting to end the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, is that the justices did not spend much time discussing Trump’s executive order purporting to end Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.
This Is How a Chilling Effect Works

1 month ago | ballsandstrikes.org | Jay Willis

Already, President Donald Trump’s attacks on BigLaw firms have earned him a deep bench of well-credentialed lawyers whom he considers available to serve his agenda at his convenience. Now, even firms he hasn’t (yet) targeted are also cowering before him, because the mere prospect of a laughably unconstitutional executive order is enough to keep managing partners lying awake at night between very expensive sheet sets.
David Souter Knew His Role

1 month ago | ballsandstrikes.org | Jay Willis

David Souter, whom President George H.W. Bush appointed to the Supreme Court in 1990, and who spent the remainder of his 19-year tenure making conservatives insane with rage, died at his home in New Hampshire on Thursday. He was 85 years old. Today, a Republican president would not even consider someone with Souter’s résumé for a district court judgeship, let alone a seat on the Supreme Court.