Things to Read This Week (5/25/26)
Revisionist histories for Memorial Day
The Limits of Text, by Farah Peterson. How much did the text of the Constitution really make the law in the early Republic? A fascinating and skeptical exploration.
Prosecuting Contempt, by Sam Bray and Aditya Bamzai. A defense of the judicial appointment of prosecutors for contempt as part of the judicial power — contrary to the growing revisionist take. (With a rethinking of the criminal/civil contempt distinction along the way.)
In Search of University Democracy, by Daniel Hemel and David Pozen. This is not how I would want my university to be run, but anything co-authored by these two is worth reading asap.
Having the faculty and maybe even the alumni ultimately direct the university seems interesting and might be worth pursuing but I'm not that sure any of it would make much difference unless you had really strong protections against any delegation of that power.
For instance at Harvard and a lot of universities in theory the academic senate (faculty) have all sorts of power that is essentially never exercised and over time it withers as it gets wielded by a president and their staff.
Sure, initially the president and the staff are just minions of the faculty but over time they accumulate staff and make deals for support. They can buy off departments or movements that might otherwise limit their power. And over time big donors will demand some kind of assurances that their money will be used the way they want it to be. So there is a fair bit of pressure to create some board they can influence appointments to to solve that commitment problem.