Hannah Ryan in New York assembles the best and the brightest of the online legal commentariat … Intellectuals, pundits, provocateurs, investigative journalists … A fascinating hive of activity in the law space 

WHILE few can compare to the wit and wisdom of Justinian, there is a glut of legal media in the US. Here are the most notable blogs (as they call them here, “blawgs”), writers and podcasters talking law, national security and rights.  

It’s quite a feat, and well worth a subscribe. Lithwick also writes for Slate’s website from time to time.

The blog’s contributor list is a who’s who of public law academics, including YLS’ Bruce Ackerman and new Dean Heather Gerken, the University of Texas’ Sanford Levinson, and Harvard’s Mark Tushnet. They offer in-depth, academic analysis of constitutional, First Amendment and civil liberties issues. 

This is probably a more interesting field in the US than in Australia because of the role the Fourteenth Amendment in districting and voting rights.  

If you haven’t already, go back and have a read of her features “Billionaires vs. the Press in the Era of Trump” and “Should Prostitution be a Crime?” 

Gersen has been writing for the New Yorker‘s website increasingly frequently for the last few years. Her pieces are erudite but not alienating, and they have the annoying tendency to upend what you thought you believed. 

His best recent work was an April feature about the Federalist Society, a network of conservative lawyers which is studiously working to funnel conservative judicial nominees to the White House.  

It’s fair to say Tribe is unimpressed with Donald Trump’s presidency, and he’s behind the emoluments clause lawsuit which could present a significant constitutional challenge to Trump. 

Indeed, New York Times writer Emily Bazelon (see above) wrote about Lawfare for the magazine, in a piece called “How a Wonky National-Security Blog Hit the Big Time” (the short version is that Trump tweeted a quote from an article, presumably not realising that elsewhere in the piece the author had described his travel ban as the product of “incompetent malevolence”). 

Of late, editor-in-chief Ben Wittes has started his very own meme on Twitter, tweeting “tick tick tick tick tick” when he knows a big story is about to break and sending his followers into a frenzy. Most memorably, the tick tick tick preceded the New York Times‘s report that Trump had asked fired FBI Director (and Wittes associate) James Comey to end the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. 

While the so-called mainstream media has been getting excited about the FBI and the Russia investigation, people over at The Intercept (like another founding editor, Glenn Greenwald) are arguing that a “deep state” would actually be a profoundly bad thing. They also tend to resist lionisation of Obama and the Democrats in general.   

It’s fair to say they’re not fans of Donald Trump, Neil Gorsuch, or Jeff Sessions.