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jeremyzallen.bsky.social
@jeremyzallen.bsky.social
320 followers 180 following 30 posts
Historian at Lafayette College. Author of "American Lucifers," a labor/environmental history of the work of making artificial light.
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natashalennard.bsky.social
more brilliant supporters of critical thought in the world & at The New School who u can sign with! @katforrester.bsky.social @reproutopia.bsky.social @gabrielwinant.bsky.social @mayjeong.bsky.social @catherinelacey.bsky.social @vickyacab.bsky.social +! 🥰 what a crew! docs.google.com/document/d/1...
TNS Community and Supporters Demand: Stop The Cuts!
To President Towers and The New School Board of Trustees: We, the undersigned members of The New School community and supporters, write to demand you put an immediate halt to planned downsizing, layo...
docs.google.com
December 12, 2025 at 4:05 AM
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adamserwer.bsky.social
An entire cohort absolutely ruined by the realization they would never be better writers than TNC and resolved never to let it happen again
December 11, 2025 at 11:02 AM
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kjephd.bsky.social
If you want to tell me the plain language of the Constitution means something entirely different, you ought to have a heavy burden. But because we've allowed the public practices of folk constitutionalism to atrophy into lawyerly monopoly (see below), there's a brute appeal to authority available.
kjephd.bsky.social Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social · Nov 5
I gave the article a nice long 18th century-style title:

Folk Constitutionalism, or Why It Matters How Ordinary People Think about the Constitution

Here's the abstract, and a link to an ungated preprint: kevinjelliott.net/wp-content/u...
Text reading: A truly inclusive democratic politics must be understandable, or cognitively tractable, for ordinary people busy with the rest of their lives. This extends not only to everyday politics and policy, but to constitutional politics as well—non-specialist democratic citizens should be able to grasp the fundamental law that governs them and imagine their own role in shaping it as political agents. Yet these requirements raise a difficulty: in many countries, including the United States, constitutions are treated as the exclusive domain of lawyers and judges. As a result, constitutional matters are typically discussed using legalistic jargon that is inscrutable even to non-specialist lawyers, let alone ordinary citizens. How then can constitutional politics be made legible to ordinary citizens? In this essay, I argue this challenge is partly one of political ideas—specifically, the ideas ordinary citizens use to think about their constitutions, or their folk constitutionalism. This may sound strange because insofar as constitutions are treated as lawyers’ exclusive turf, the problem may seem to be one of practice, not merely ideas. But popular practices of what scholars like John Finn and Elizabeth Beaumont call popular or civic constitutionalism involve citizens and social movements in transforming constitutions. These transformations often occur behind the backs of everyone involved, as new frames and understandings come to gradually transmute constitutional meaning, which in turn pervades the public political culture and reshapes the public’s constitutional imagination. I suggest we need ideas that more closely reflect what democratic citizens already do in democratic constitutional politics, so that they can do it more self-consciously and dispel the impression of an anti-democratic lack of control that recent constitutional innovations reveal to be illusory. I explore the utility of ideas of unwrittenness and functional multi-textuality to the end of a …
December 7, 2025 at 7:31 PM
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mskellymhayes.bsky.social
The law is not now, nor has it ever been, a moral instrument.
November 29, 2025 at 1:47 AM