Jacob Schriner-Briggs

Windmill?

Thank you Quinn, I will send along! (I also owe you conference responses, sorry, will do that ASAP).

Thanks very much Jerry!

Thanks very much Sarah!

Thank you Jess!!

Of course! I think I have your email, but would you mind DMing me a good one just in case?

Thank you Carolyn!

DEMOCRATIC BACKSLIDING AND THE LIMITS OF FIRST AMENDMENT LEGALISM 17 U.C. IRVINE L. REV. ___ (forthcoming) Jacob M. Schriner-Briggs* The second Trump administration has unleashed a wave of repressive activity targeting civil society’s most prominent institutions: news media, universities, law firms, and more. Political scientists have responded to these episodes with warnings of “democratic backsliding” while legal scholars invoke the same phenomena as proof that the freedom of speech is in “crisis.” This Article begins by bridging these diagnoses, arguing that the United States’s crisis of free speech is best understood as but one important dimension of its ongoing crisis of democracy. Given this understanding, the Article’s primary contribution is to assess whether the First Amendment, interpreted and implemented by courts, can secure free speech against an executive branch intent on suppressing it. While the First Amendment has supported important rulings against the administration, the Article’s basic conclusion is that reformers seeking to unwind the speech crisis must ultimately look beyond it. Though First Amendment doctrine can slow down an overtly censorious government, it suffers from major blind spots the second Trump administration has routinely exploited. Moreover, even when litigants are able to press First Amendment claims, the administration has engaged in “legalistic noncompliance,” strategies that frustrate lower court proceedings and which have frequently been countenanced by the Roberts Court. The legalism of doctrine and courts can serve speech-protective functions. Yet the crisis at hand, itself downstream from an anti-democratic politics, must be met with responses forged through democratic processes and implemented by democratic institutions. The best long-term hopes for free speech, in other words, lie more in democratic politics than constitutional law.

"Democratic Backsliding and the Limits of First Amendment Legalism" is forthcoming in the U.C. Irvine Law Review. I hope to have it SSRN-ready by the end of April. If you'd like to take a look beforehand, let me know. Comments welcome!

Don't like that either, to be clear!

You think my slop's ... banal? 🥹

That said, there might be a causality story here. Insofar as professional norms, pressures, incentives, etc. facilitate overproduction, they (can) point away from the humanistic aspects of writing: articles as commodities. That makes the choice to press the button in the first place much easier.

There's absolutely a connection. Unfortunately my mind is not working well enough to figure out the point I'd like to make here, but I still would rather a human professor throw something together for the cycle than press a button for an LLM to do it for them.

I think you and Evan here are getting at something similar. An important point!

Oh, this is so real. We aren't writing in an ideal context (whatever that would look like). I feel like my personal situation, though stressful, busy, etc. in uninteresting ways, gives me more than enough time and space to labor. It's only in that context I can speak to the "humanism" of writing.

Same to you and then some!!

Great point. I think we're in the same place and any "disagreement" is framing.

These came across at the same time for me, and even though I take you to be making different points, I think the basic insight is totally fair: it's useful for me to disentangle these questions, but also useful to put them back together.

I don't want to fight you, to be clear! I think about writing differently than other productive processes. I don't need other people to feel the same.

My refusal to hand over an irreducibly human endeavor to technologies that were foisted on society and became ubiquitous in like five years is a categorical one. When the machines learn to simulate a better me than me, they will still not be me. They can't be. So I'll do the writing, thanks.

I appreciate the many people believe they are better writers than the machines, and I have no reason to doubt them! But hanging our hats on that advantage immediately cedes too much. I'm going to write because it's a human need I have, and that will be so no matter the work's relative quality.

Seems to me that whether AI is "good" at writing is not the most important question, at least for scholars and creatives. The real question, I think, is what endeavors are people willing to hand over? Maybe the AI will be a better writer than I am. I don't care. I'm not willing to let go of the pen.

But what are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of it?

For a [Professor] Who Used AI to Write a Paper

I also like "a meal, a succulent Chinese meal"

"Clavicular, law"

As a teenager, I looked enough like the winner of the 1997 Scripps National Spelling Bee that well into college, strangers would semi-regularly come up to me on the street and ask if I’d won a spelling bee.

Ah, wait, I'm wrong. Screeds are long. Letter to the editor?

OK, I've seen enough.

I suggest that anyone interested in the sharp comments I've had about some of the anti-LPE movement pieces in the UChicago LR to simply read and compare the pieces by LPE scholars to those of their critics. It's astonishing.

Go here: lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archiv...

Its status as a screed becomes irrefutable after reading just Amy's piece situating LPE in American legal thought.

I.e., I don't think you're trying to denaturalize a prevailing view as Sam and Ryan were. They were trying to "exorcise" the ghost, but they didn't put that in the title. So even if you're "wrestling" with it rather than trying to cast it out, the title doesn't need to specify to be effective.