Things to Read (5/4/26)

From nineteenth century officers to twenty-first century voting rights

Officers at Common Law, by Nathaniel Donohue. An excellent job talk paper. I think the paper as better as a historically and legally sophisticated recovery of nineteenth century doctrine than it is as a commentary on unitary executive debates in the twenty-first century. But good regardless.

How the Gentry Won: Property’s Law Embrace of Stasis, by Rick Hills and David Schleicher. A critique of the past half-century of land use law, through the lens of The Wire: “We used to make shit in this country, build shit.”

There is also of course my Abuse of Power in the Second Trump Administration, linked yesterday.

And Supreme Court’s Gutting of Voting Rights Provision Was a Long Time Coming: Rick Pildes on Louisiana v. Callais. Many fascinating claims in this piece, including that the success of post-2020 redistricting litigation was a catalyst for the SCOTUS backlash; that the long-term partisan consequences of Callais are hard to predict; and that the best Congressional response would be to move beyond "[t]he race-discrimination model” in favor of “the model of strong universal protection for the voting rights of all citizens.”