SD legal eagles: what are good websites for legal news, covering especially defense of democracy in the US? IANAL: please review these websites:
The Volokh Conspiracy: “Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent | Est. 2002”. This center-left observer has this conservative website bookmarked.
Lawdork: Chris Geidner on Substack. “With more than 75,000 total subscribers, Law Dork is a go-to source for legal reporting and analysis about some of the biggest news stories of our day, from the Supreme Court to the Trump administration to courts and legislatures across the nation… Since 2022, I have published my unique brand of in-depth, skeptical legal journalism here at the latest iteration of Law Dork… This is my full-time job.”
Reviews of other legal websites are welcome. I lack the training to evaluate them and I’d rather not fall down a dubious rabbithole.
C’mon some of our legally inclined must read legal blogs. Or can tell me about ones I should avoid because the writers are ignoramuses. Are Lawfare and/or Lawdork worth reading? I’ve added Democracy Docket to my link list.
A youtuber’s channel, but I highly recommend LegalEagle. Done by a practicing California lawyer. Since Trump came out of the woodwork again, he and his associates have been reporting closely on his and his associates’ actions and commenting on the assault to democracy wrought by Trumps regime.
I’ll throw in the humorous Lowering the Bar, which is good for a chuckle.
Seriously, you could spend hours going down rabbit holes. I mean, who wouldn’t want an update on United States v. 1855.6 Pounds of American Paddlefish Meat ?
I wrote “Rabbit hole”, but it’s not what I meant. I’m more concerned about reading bad commentary without having the legal background to know that the writer is applying dubious, fringy, or even cranky legal reasoning.
Just Security provides expert analysis and informational resources on the issues that matter most—without paywalls, subscriptions, or ads. Just Security is an editorially independent, non-partisan, daily digital law and policy journal housed in the Reiss Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law.
I would bet that they are legit. So far my top 2 are Just Security and Democracy Docket (for better or worse). Which legal website should win the coveted 3rd position?
If you’re open to podcasts, I’ll throw in a plug for the 5-4 Podcast (or why the Supreme Court sucks) which goes through various historically important supreme court cases and punctures the notion that the supreme court was ever that good at their jobs. They’re open that the current supreme court is the absolute most terrible SC we’ve ever had but do a good job laying out how this was not just some historical aberration but a clear manifestation of trends that have been allowed to fester for decades that have brought us to our current moment.
LegalEagle was the first person (and channel, along with the other contributors) I thought of regarding the OP. It covers fairly complex legal topics and cases while remaining very accessible to non-lawyers. Also, worth noting for anyone that looks at his channel, they do cover a lot of the Trump cases, but that’s because there’s a lot of Trump cases to cover. But they do cover quite a bit of non-Trump and non-political cases as well.
PS IIRC, he (Devin) went to school in California, but he’s a lawyer in Washington DC.