Things to Read This Week (4/13/26)

Automatic Interim Relief, by Aaron Jacobowitz. A strong legal case against automatic immigration stays such as in the Ninth Circuit and other circuits: “automatic interim relief is not always lawful. When awarded by a court’s procedural rules, automatic interim relief must be ‘consistent with’ federal law. That demanding requirement prohibits automatic interim relief that conflicts with, circumvents, or otherwise subverts federal law—which includes written law, like statutes and the Federal Rules of Procedure, but also unwritten law, like the law of writs and of equity. Courts are ignoring that limit and routinely awarding automatic interim relief unlawfully.”

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: A Public-Rights Paradox, by Scott Jones. Another interesting student note. (But I should clarify that I think there were quite plausible arguments that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 violated Article III, as I noted in Adjudication Outside Article III p. 1555).

Epistemic Discovery, Psychedelic Drugs, and the First Amendment, by Jeremy Kessler and David Pozen. Is this a doctrinal exploration of the constitutional right to freedom of thought, or a paper about the constitutional right to take psychedelics? Very interesting.

What Really Happens on the Emergency Docket, by Taraleigh Davis. A deep dive into the emergency/interim docket proceedings in Wisconsin v. Moeck in 2005. Very much worth reading as a 20-year-old case study, but I don’t think we can be confident in the post’s claim that “there is no reason to believe this process has changed significantly” since then. I just don’t think we know that much about the modern internal process.