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About a decade ago, I moved into an apartment in Washington, D.C., that seemed like a bargain. The unit was in good shape and in a nice location. The price was reasonable—slightly below market rate, but not suspiciously low for a fourth-floor walk-up. I did a brief walk-through before signing the lease, just in case, only to cut it short when my editor at the time called to let me know that the Brexit vote was looking closer than expected.Only after I moved in and tried to fall asleep on the first night did I realize why I was able to rent the place so easily: It was a few blocks down the street from a fire station, and the trucks passed under my window whenever they responded to a call. It took me about a month—a painful, exhausting, bleary-eyed month—to get used to it. Now I can sleep through almost anything.I think about that fire station whenever I stumble across one of President Donald Trump’s social media posts during his second term. Gone are the days when his 140-character remarks on Twitter would shape the news cycle, in the late 2010s. Now it is easier to tune out the long jeremiads that he cranks out on Truth Social, which also might be the least readable social media website in internet history.Trump’s social media rants these days are so frequent and so voluminous that it is rarely worth paying them any specific attention. But his Mother’s Day post about the Supreme Court is a notable exception. The president gave a surprisingly frank assessment of his view of the Supreme Court—and how he expects personal loyalty from the justices that he appoints to it.In the lengthy post, Trump criticized two members of the high court for voting in Trump v. Learning Resources, the case that nixed his purported ability to impose hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs under a Cold War–era emergency powers law. The Supreme Court held 6–3 that Trump had exceeded the powers laid out in the statute.“I ‘Love’ Justice Neil Gorsuch! He’s a really smart and good man, but he voted against me, and our Country, on Tariffs, a devastating move,” Trump wrote. “How do I reconcile this? So bad, and hurtful to our Country. I have, likewise, always liked and respected Amy Coney Barrett, but the same thing with her. They were appointed by me, and yet have hurt our Country so badly!”It would be hard to find a better example than this of Trump’s thinking that the justices that he nominated to the high court should be personally loyal to him. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, his third appointee to date, was among the dissenters. There were six justices in the Learning Resources majority; four of them did not warrant a mention here. Trump did not even bother to criticize Chief Justice John Roberts, who actually wrote the opinion.Naturally, that partial silence was not out of respect for the court. Trump obviously does not hold the three liberal justices in high regard. Last month, for example, in another social media post, he described Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as “low IQ,” an insult that he typically reserves for Black lawmakers and officials. Chief Justice John Roberts has also been frequently criticized by Trump in the past, but received a less harsh treatment after his rulings for Trump in the disqualification case and the immunity case.Instead, Trump focused on the two justices he appointed who ruled against him. “I’m working so hard to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and then people that I appointed have shown so little respect to our Country, and its people,” he continued. “What is the reason for this? They have to do the right thing, but it’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to ‘almost’ the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.”Two things stand out here. One is that Trump implicitly admits that, by siding with him, Gorsuch and Barrett would not be doing “the right thing.” So deeply ingrained in American culture is judicial independence that even Trump himself, the arch-heretic of American civil republicanism, must acknowledge it. The other is that Trump drops the pretense and explicitly demands loyalty from them.Trump’s demands for personal loyalty are no surprise 10 years after his first rise to power. The Russia investigation, which consumed the first half of Trump’s first term, exploded into public view after Trump demanded personal loyalty from then–FBI Director James Comey and then fired him after he didn’t receive it. So highly does Trump prize loyalty that he has packed his second-term Cabinet and key federal agencies with loyalists who often place his personal whims above ethics, the public interest, and the law itself.But it is still striking to see him demand it from Supreme Court justices—and, by extension, from a coequal branch of government—simply because he appointed them. If this is his public thinking about the justices, it casts doubt on whether any second-term Trump appointee can be trusted to place the national interest or the law ahead of Trump’s personal and political goals.Kevin Warsh, who is currently awaiting a Senate confirmation vote to be the next Federal Reserve chair, told lawmakers last month that he would “take [his] responsibility to be an independent leader of the Federal Reserve very seriously” and assured them that Trump had never “asked [him] to predetermine, commit, fix, [or] decide on any interest rate decision in any of our discussions, nor would I ever agree to do so.”That under-oath answer would be more reassuring if Trump hadn’t spent the last year waging a war against Fed independence and specifically demanding that interest rates be set to his liking, at his whim. His administration has launched pretextual investigations into both Jerome Powell, the outgoing Fed chair, and governor Lisa Cook. Trump tried to fire Cook from the Fed last summer despite statutory for-cause removal protections; the Supreme Court blocked her removal pending its decision on the merits later this term.Trump desperately wants the Fed to lower interest rates to help boost his chances in this year’s midterm elections. He wants it so badly that he has tried to destroy the Fed’s independence—a load-bearing pillar of American monetary hegemony—just to achieve it. Now his nominee is asking Americans to believe that Trump does not want personal loyalty from him—even as Trump demands it of Supreme Court nominees who are unambiguously independent from him.If Trump is willing to demand personal loyalty from Supreme Court justices, what about his lower court nominees? Senate Democrats have asked Trump nominees for federal judgeships whether they believe Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. On multiple occasions, they have merely responded that Biden was “certified” as the winner—an evasive response that flatters Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election, defies the will of the American people, and suggests a lack of independent judgment.“Democrat Justices always remain true to the people that honored them for that very special Nomination,” Trump continued in his Truth Social post. They don’t waver, no matter how good or bad a case may be, but Republican Justices often go out of their way to oppose me, because they want to show how ‘independent’ or, ‘above it all,’ they are.”This would surely be news to Democratic presidents. Both of Obama’s confirmed Supreme Court nominees voted against him in a 2014 case on his recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. Justice Elena Kagan sided with the court’s conservatives on blocking Medicaid expansion requirements in the landmark 2012 case on the Affordable Care Act’s constitutionality. I have personally never looked at the three current liberal justices in quite the same way since they voted to overturn Trump’s disqualification from the Colorado presidential ballot two years ago in Trump v. Anderson.I’m sure that the Supreme Court’s liberals would vote against Democratic presidents more frequently if the Supreme Court had a liberal majority. More daylight would inevitably emerge if those justices were frequently asked to constrain adventurous efforts to stretch law and precedent by liberal legal activists and Democratic presidents. But this is a conservative Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority, so those opportunities are few and far between.If anything, Trump should be thrilled with his treatment by the Supreme Court these days. During his first term, the court was much more willing to constrain Trump in key cases—keeping Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on the books, blocking a citizenship question for the 2020 census, allowing a New York grand jury to subpoena his financial records from his accountant, and so on. Back then, I noted, he seemed to assume that the court was closely aligned with him even when it very clearly wasn’t.Now the reverse is true: The Supreme Court has given him nearly everything that he has wanted over the last two years—and he still isn’t satisfied. This is the same Supreme Court that just boosted his party’s midterm chances earlier this month by demolishing what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. He should be thanking Gorsuch, Barrett, and the other conservative justices for saving his political career in 2024. Had they and their colleagues simply upheld the Constitution that year, Trump would have been barred from running for a second term and instead stood trial for his crimes. Every public and private act he has taken since then stems from those fateful decisions.From there, Trump once again recounted the scope of his 2024 electoral victory—which was middling at best—and expressed dismay that the court would likely soon strike down his birthright citizenship executive order. It is unclear whether he has any personal insight into the court’s decision-making. Leaks from the high court are increasingly common these days, and past presidents have occasionally received a clandestine heads-up about key rulings from friendly justices.Either way, Trump said his prediction was “based on what I witnessed recently by being the first President in History to attend a Supreme Court session,” which is a fair assessment of how the Trump v. Barbara oral arguments went. Trump’s attendance, he complained, “was not even recognized or acknowledged, out of respect for the position of President, by the Court—Something which did not go unnoticed by the Fake News Media!”“Well, maybe Neil, and Amy, just had a really bad day, but our Country can only handle so many decisions of that magnitude before it breaks down, and cracks!!!” he continued, in what can be interpreted as either a prediction, a threat, or an act of desperation. “Sometimes decisions have to be allowed to use Good, Strong, Common Sense as a guide. A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America!”One does not need a high opinion of the conservative justices to think this reasoning won’t work, at least not on some of them. Beyond the extralegal plea for “common sense” as the basis for immorally denaturalizing millions of Americans, the United States has also had birthright citizenship for the last 150 years. It could hardly be “economically [un]sustainable” if this country also became a global superpower in that timespan.What Trump’s rant does underscore is how he thinks about the court and its place in American society—not as a neutral arbiter of constitutional law but as a Pez dispenser to give him easy wins. In fairness to Trump, the court failed to disabuse him of his notion when it defied the Constitution on his behalf in 2024. But even these justices appear to have some limits—at least for now—as shown by the tariffs ruling that he despises.This rhetoric must also be held against any nominee he puts forward in a role that requires any sort of institutional neutrality, whether at the Federal Reserve or a federal district court somewhere in Florida or Texas. The president has made clear once again that he expects reciprocal favor from anyone he installs in a high government position. This is not a new siren blaring across our political landscape, but Americans cannot afford to sleep through it.

For decades, the United States didn’t realize it had a town in Mexico. Rio Rico, which sits just south of the Rio Grande and an hour’s drive from the southern tip of Texas, was founded in 1929 and functioned as part of Mexico in every practical sense. Its residents bought goods with Mexican pesos, paid Mexican taxes, and were subject to Mexican laws. Nothing about Rio Rico suggested that it belonged anywhere else. The problem was that the U.S.–Mexico border wasn’t where anyone thought it was.Years earlier, an American irrigation company had cut an unauthorized cutoff in the Rio Grande, leaving a loop of U.S. land south of its new course. Under treaties governing the boundary, artificial shifts in the river could not move the border. The legal boundary between the countries remained the same, and now cut through a dried-up riverbed—over which Rio Rico then expanded. So while the town was founded on Mexican land, its growth inadvertently moved it across the invisible border. No one noticed for years. When the error was finally uncovered by an American geography professor in the 1960s, American officials were forced to confront a peculiar reality: A town that had long functioned as part of Mexico was, in fact, straddling the border.The two governments eventually negotiated a fix. A 1970 treaty restored the river as the boundary, and in 1977, the United States formally transferred the land under Rio Rico to Mexico. The map once again matched the lived reality—but the law does not move as easily as the river does.In the decades before the correction, children had been born in Rio Rico on American soil. One of them, Homero Cantú Treviño, later entered the United States and faced deportation for overstaying his visa. His defense was straightforward: He was not an undocumented immigrant at all, but a U.S. citizen by birth.The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to everyone born on American soil and subject to American jurisdiction: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Cantú’s claim forced the government to confront a question that now sits at the center of Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship: What does it mean to be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States?For advocates of a narrower interpretation—right-wing immigration restrictionists, in the main—birth on U.S. soil is not sufficient. That’s the case that the president and his legal team made recently before the Supreme Court in Trump v. Barbara: Children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrant parents shouldn’t get automatic citizenship because they aren’t really integrated into the nation and subject to its jurisdiction. The Fourteenth Amendment applies only to those fully subject to American authority, they argued. Rio Rico would seem to have provided a near-perfect test case for that position. The town was governed in practice by Mexico. Its residents lived under a different sovereign, and the U.S. exercised no real authority over them. If “jurisdiction” is understood as something more than a formal abstraction, it is hard to see how it applied here. And yet, the U.S. declined to take that path.Cantú’s case made its way through the immigration system. The Board of Immigration Appeals supported him only on narrow grounds. But in reviewing the case, President Jimmy Carter’s attorney general, Griffin Bell, went further. He acknowledged the unusual circumstances but declined to draw a limiting principle from them. Birth on U.S. soil remained the decisive fact. Cantú was granted citizenship, as was everyone else from Rio Rico who could prove birth on U.S. soil. The episode presented an unusually clean opportunity to redefine the scope of birthright citizenship. If there were ever a case in which the U.S. might have insisted that geography alone was insufficient, this was it. The gap between sovereignty and governance was clear and undeniable, but the government chose not to draw that line.The reason is not hard to see. Once introduced, such distinctions are difficult to contain. If jurisdiction depends on the degree of control exercised by the state, then every marginal case invites a challenge. How much control is enough? What kinds of authority count? And how are those judgments to be made in situations where the facts are less clear than they were in Rio Rico? These, no doubt, are some of the questions the Supreme Court is wrestling with as it decides how to rule on Trump v. Barbara in the next month or two.The appeal of restricting birthright citizenship lies in its promise to align legal status with ideas about allegiance and authority. But as Rio Rico demonstrates, reality is messier. Sovereignty can be formal or practical, jurisdiction can be partial, and the relationship between the two can shift over time.So a simple rule has its advantages. For most of American history, that rule has been that birth on U.S. soil confers citizenship. That sometimes produces results that can seem counterintuitive in edge cases. But it has the virtue of clarity. And it avoids the need to adjudicate degrees of belonging.

In an April press conference, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth led a prayer for the mission to rescue U.S. airmen downed in war on Iran. He invoked Ezekiel 25:17—vowing, “I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger”—though much of the prayer was adapted from a monologue by Samuel L. Jackson’s hit man character in Pulp Fiction. A month earlier, reports had emerged of hundreds of noncommissioned officers complaining that they’d been told by their commanders that the war was part of God’s plan, and that President Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” It’s tempting to write off such utterances as just another deranged aspect of Trump’s second term, but religious zealotry has proved a useful tool of control for military leadership going back centuries, says Jasper Craven. His book, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, examines the ways in which brutality and blind loyalty within the armed forces have informed our traditional notions of masculinity.In fact, Craven writes, early nineteenth-century West Point superintendent Samuel Thayer believed that “Christianity could serve as a powerful binding agent for his military project, an easily imported belief system that would at once form resilience and motivation in his boys and help them elide the major moral questions at the heart of the burgeoning imperial project to which they belonged.”During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Craven and I discussed the tensions between morals and manhood within a military context.Lorraine Cademartori: Did the Hegseth speech surprise you?Jasper Craven: None of this surprises me. Pete Hegseth is the perfect embodiment of many of the different threads and histories that I have been tracing for the last three years as a part of book research. Religiosity has been core to military training since the founding of this country. We see from the earliest days of American military education—mandatory chapel, fire and brimstone sermons—and then most concretely with the founding of the U.S. Air Force Academy just after the Second World War: a strong evangelical subculture that has permeated the upper ranks of the military and is largely oriented around America’s supreme firepower. Obviously, the last two and a half decades have been marked by what President George W. Bush, in the days after 9/11, called a “crusade.” There is rhetoric that has long pervaded our military involvement in the Arab world. This is just the latest example in a long history.L.C.: Is the framing of this war as “end times” a new development?J.C.: [It] is definitely a ratcheting up of this rhetoric. I see it as a result of the fact that the American public and the American military at this point is very wary of conflict.… At this point the stakes must be ratcheted up to motivate the mission. When it becomes this existential, I think Hegseth and his deputies hope that it will animate the men fighting below them.L.C.: Right—you say in the book that “since America’s founding, military brass have painstakingly developed and refined a military curriculum that breeds loyalty, teaches obedience, and constructs violence, all the while convincing the public that conflict is a hardwired male instinct.” But the Founding Fathers had a fair amount of reticence toward the idea of even forming a military academy, or establishing a quasi-professional fighting force, correct?J.C.: These are people who endured a frustrating, and at times abusive, occupation by the British monarchy. The rebellion itself was a rejection of such tactics and such power. At the same time, this paradox forms in which the only way out of occupation is amassing of military power by the colonists. This tension has really marked America profoundly in the centuries since.… The Founding Fathers were generally really focused on ensuring that the soldier was never elevated above the citizen. L.C.: Eventually the Continental Congress votes to fund West Point in 1802. It sounded like there was a fair amount of back-and-forth about a vision of education of this “fighting elite.”J.C.: There are a series of scuffles culminating in the appointment of Thayer as superintendent to West Point [in 1817] that demonstrate the push-pull over what a military officer should look like. Thayer’s major nemesis, and also his former frat brother at Dartmouth, is Alden Partridge. [Partridge] offers, in his time as West Point superintendent, a more gentle approach, at least by military standards. He spares [cadets] the worst punishments and has a more relaxed approach toward military education. Thayer is someone who, through his experience in the War of 1812, watches in disgust as the men below him demonstrate incompetence, don’t always listen to his orders, sometimes defect. He wants obedience, and he believes very strongly that only a quasi-authoritarian environment can breed the right kind of soldier. Thayer imposes dozens and dozens of new rules that strictly limit cadet behavior. He brooks no dissent. He’s in charge for a fair amount of time, and I think his ethos disseminates [within the military] through the years.L.C.: One of the core arguments in your book is that the military has been profoundly effective in reaching out to children—young men, younger than 18, particularly through Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs, and through the growth of military academies. Tell me about this ecosystem.J.C.: Yeah, there’s a really interesting fight that plays out in the early twentieth century, in which military leaders and superintendents of military academies come to feel existentially threatened by the public school system, and by public school teachers, many of them women, pacifists, Quakers. This line of messaging emerges that viciously derides the female influence on the young American schoolchild. The military takes a number of actions to inject mandatory military trainings into public middle schools, especially in New York—which was where their power is concentrated, thanks to the allyship of corporate figures, like J.P. Morgan, who believe that creating obedience in young schoolchildren has an added benefit of [preparing] them to serve in corporate environments. [But] back in those days, people like John Dewey were making the argument that the best way to create peace is to establish, among children, the possibility, and to show them how it can be done, and they will be the great agents in changing this violent mindset of humanity. I think the military understood that, too, and that’s exactly why they fight to control boys at such an early age. L.C.: You even came to this book through reporting on youth in the military, at Valley Forge Military Academy and College in Pennsylvania—where cadets suffered widespread abuse and trauma.Seeing the raw, mutant, violent strains of masculinity that were leading to terrible abuse at Valley Forge made me want to write a book that could forcefully push back against this enduring idea that the military is this perfect catchall system for lost boys.J.C.: I’d been been covering the military and veterans’ issues for a while when I started investigating the Forge for Mother Jones, but that work helped me illuminate for the first time the pedagogy that pervades the Pentagon, pervades military training—and really this network—that maintains real power. I mean, there are 5,200 JROTC and ROTC programs in America. Seeing the raw, mutant, violent strains of masculinity that were leading to terrible abuse at Valley Forge made me want to write a book that could forcefully push back against this enduring idea that the military is this perfect catchall system for lost boys. Really, it just creates more dysfunction.L.C.: There have been periodic attempts at reform, going back to well into the nineteenth century. I was struck by the tale you relate in the book of Oscar Booz, a West Point cadet who died from chronic hazing in 1900, but who never told on his abusers, and many others. [Among other abuses, Booz was forced to chug Tabasco sauce, resulting in tuberculosis in his larynx, and to participate in the academy’s underground fight club.] The top brass often say the right things when these tragedies occur, but nothing changes. Is that because the model is simply irreconcilable with reform?J.C.: To inculcate loyalty, to motivate violence, you need to use pretty harsh tools, and I’ve lost count of the times military school leaders have, in the face of severe hazing scandals, or cheating scandals, or administrative corruption allegations, pledged to end hazing, to reform these programs, to impose accountability—to fully embody the very pure ideals that these places claim to live up to—but it’s never happened, and I don’t think that’s an accident. Creating these perilous conditions is vital to establishing a man’s desire to get out of them: to secure power, to secure validation. I think that is what’s most effective at forcing men to engage in really risky, violent, traumatic behavior.L.C.: How did you reach the conclusion that “American masculinity is predicated on the wobbly assumption that man is violent by nature”?J.C.: There are a number of underlying principles that Americans are in broad agreement with as they relate to American manhood. The subtext of many of these principles is very dark and fatalistic and violent. Sacrifice, for instance, is this big idea that you see many self-help gurus or manosphere figures preaching about: Man is expected to protect his family and to protect this country should threats arise. That is the pinnacle of American manhood.But it’s incredibly devaluing for man’s lot to essentially be there to take the arrows that may rain down upon him in some imperial battle. And so to justify that, what needs to be argued is that man is violent, that it is man’s inherent duty to fight and to kill. We continue down a violent path toward male validation that is playing out in so many of the domestic crises that this country is seeing today, whether in school shootings or domestic abuse or the opioid epidemic or anything else. I mean, military service is now the number one predictor of violent extremism in America. And it just doesn’t have to be that way. L.C.: Circling back to the beginning of our conversation—do you take anything away from the number of anonymous complaints? Does it tell you anything about the state of the military internally?When cadets break from the expectations foisted on them to be stoic, to endure unrelenting abuse, that space can really open up for reform. J.C.: Things are very fraught at the Pentagon now. I do think there are a lot of enlisted and officers who deeply value the political neutrality of the military, who have no interest in waging more war in the Middle East, who recoil at the idea or the actions of militarizing the southern border and deploying the National Guard into American cities. The problem is this abiding mentality of loyalty. I just look to the history of the American military, and I see situations in which gross war crimes were being committed, in which constitutional violations were occurring, and most people in the military sit idly by or participate in those activities. That’s due to a number of factors, including that there is also a long pattern of whistleblowers standing up and not seeing their issues heard or remediated. But I really wish that there were figures out there who were forcefully pushing back against what’s occurring. It makes you question all of this rhetoric that those who serve in the military are the most courageous among us. I’m not seeing much courage from people with skin in the game right now.L.C.: Had you heard that Valley Forge Academy is graduating its last high school class this month?J.C.: I do think that the story of Valley Forge is instructive, because what you can see is that when cadets break from the expectations foisted on them to be stoic, to endure unrelenting abuse, that space can really open up for reform. I mean, the reason that Valley Forge is in dire straits is because cadets and their families have relentlessly been voicing concerns for many years.… You can see tangible impact from them coming forward. They have had to subvert the ideology that has been drilled into them. And there is something that is very touching and beautiful about that. At the same time, the ideology is very well funded, and it will take a lot to undermine it forever.

How familiar are you with business courts? They may be flying under your radar, but your lives are deeply entangled. Nearly two-thirds of Americans live in a state with a business court. And some workers or consumers in those states—whether they like it or not—could end up having important cases decided by a business court. That could be a problem, because new research by the People’s Parity Project, or PPP, finds that half the business court judges in the United States are former corporate lawyers. In seven states, more than 90 percent of business court judges are former corporate lawyers. Only a small fraction of these judges have any experience representing workers or consumers in need. That’s one reason why critics say these courts are perceived as biased in favor of corporations. Though several states are rushing to adopt business court systems, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ended its state’s pilot program last year, after a new progressive majority took office. One justice warned that the program resembled a “two-tiered” court system. Business courts are often characterized as the ideal venue to settle disputes between businesses or between owners of a business. They’re intended to be quicker and more efficient; the same judges handle the cases from start to finish. Some proponents argue that the faster process makes litigation easier for small businesses, which may lack the resources of larger corporate litigants. In many states, however, the jurisdiction of business courts extends much further than disputes within or between businesses. Maine has a “business and consumer” court that is staffed by two judges with experience representing corporations and employers, who rule on lawsuits filed by consumers who claimed they were wronged by a corporation’s product or service.North Carolina’s business courts have very broad jurisdiction. The chief justice only has to designate a case as “complex” to assign it to the court. Recently, these complex cases have included a defamation case, a class action lawsuit by hospital patients over the privacy of their medical records, and the state’s lawsuit against TikTok over whether the app is addictive. The chief justice also assigns North Carolina’s Superior Court judges to the business court; our research found that all nine judges were former corporate attorneys.Many business courts were explicitly intended to be staffed with lawyers with experience in corporate law. A lawyer who helped design Arizona’s business courts said their intention was to get judges with “strong backgrounds in business litigation”—though they didn’t want the court to be perceived as “pro-business.” Elsewhere, the lawyers who proposed Michigan’s business courts listed one goal as “attracting and retaining businesses.”PPP’s new report found that 100 percent of business court judges in Arizona, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Tennessee are former corporate lawyers. In Delaware, where the prototype for business courts was created centuries ago, the appellate courts are also dominated by judges who spent their legal careers representing employers and corporations. The state’s “Court of Chancery” and the body of law that it developed is the reason why so many big companies are headquartered in Delaware.But after Delaware courts ruled to undo billionaire Elon Musk’s lavish compensation package from Tesla, some of those companies began leaving the state. Texas established its own business court, filled it almost entirely with corporate lawyers, and courted companies to reincorporate there. Delaware’s state legislature, which is controlled by Democrats, responded to this so-called “Dexit” by making their laws even friendlier to corporate executives. Texas explicitly requires business court judges to have experience either representing businesses or serving as a judge in civil court. These judges are also appointed by the governor, even though the state constitution requires that judges be chosen by the voters. In neighboring Oklahoma, lawmakers also established a business court with appointed judges. But the state Supreme Court struck down that law in 2025, because the Oklahoma Constitution says that judges must stand for election. Oklahoma’s judges are appointed and then run in “retention elections,” in which voters decide whether to keep them in office. Republican Governor Kevin Stitt signed a bill creating a business court with unelected judgeships. Stitt claimed, “I saw court systems in other states playing politics with people’s businesses.” He also called for judges with “business experience” to fill the courts.Republican lawmakers don’t want business court judges to be accountable to voters like other judges. In North Carolina, the chief justice has assigned an unelected “special” Superior Court judge, chosen by the legislature, to the state’s business court. Why do corporations need a separate judiciary, staffed by former corporate lawyers, that is unaccountable to voters? This raises obvious concerns about preferential treatment for corporations. And these concerns have kept some states from adopting business courts. In July 2025, just a few months after Musk spent tens of millions of dollars in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, the court’s new progressive majority ended its state’s pilot business court program. The program had encountered opposition from judges and attorneys, including a former corporate lawyer who asked, “How does the public not look at this without believing that the court is putting its thumb on the scales of justice in favor of business? ... Why don’t injured parties and those that have been denied their civil rights get the same treatment?”When the previous conservative majority maintained the pilot program in 2022, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley warned that it was sending a message: “Businesses with large claims deserve special treatment, entitling them access to the most efficient, fair, and cost-effective treatment available in the court system.” She argued that everyone is entitled to the best justice the courts can provide and said that Wisconsin’s judges had no problem handling complex business cases. Voters in Nevada, which is making a big push for companies to reincorporate there, could soon vote on a constitutional amendment to establish business courts. Lawmakers have passed an amendment creating a court with judges who would stand in retention elections, rather than the nonpartisan, contested elections that other judges endure. They must pass the amendment again before it goes on the ballot for voters to decide.These states could ultimately regret rushing to adopt business courts. These unelected business court judges may, like the U.S. Supreme Court, start putting corporations over workers, consumers, or concerned shareholders. This is particularly a concern when states, such as North Carolina, confer broader jurisdiction on business courts.These courts are hearing lawsuits filed by workers or consumers, as well as challenges to crucial state taxes. Voters should demand judges on these courts with diverse experiences. If these courts are hearing cases involving workers, they must include judges who spent their careers doing something besides defending employers.Research has shown that judges’ backgrounds matter when it comes to how they rule. Our recent report found that judges in Connecticut who previously worked as corporate lawyers or prosecutors were more likely to evict people. Another study found that the same judges are less likely to rule for workers. And a 2022 study found that former public defenders were “less willing to render extremely long sentences tantamount to life in prison.” Professional diversity is important, especially when it comes to judges.Business court judges shouldn’t be drawn exclusively from the ranks of large, powerful corporate law firms. If that’s what lawmakers really want, they should say that explicitly. And they must ensure that the jurisdiction of these courts is sharply limited and doesn’t sweep in lawsuits involving workers or consumers.Voters in Nevada and other states where lawmakers are exploring the creation of business courts should take a close look. The public should understand what these judges do and how they’ll be chosen. These courts are sweeping the nation, and we should at least talk about how to do it right—and what the consequences are for getting it wrong.

While many proclaim that our species is doomed, the everyday work of mothers and caregivers shows that a better future is possible — one filled with joy and love. Thelma Young Lutunatabua for Waging Nonviolence When Trump won the first time in 2016, I drank shots of tequila in front of my computer and then passed […]

Senators are on track to confirm Kevin Warsh later this week following a surprisingly bipartisan vote Monday night.

The post He Was Fired for Sexually Harassing Students. California Allowed Him to Keep Teaching Anyway. appeared first on ProPublica.

We’ve noticed a jarring disconnect. Even as Donald Trump’s mental decline visibly worsens, his aides’ cultlike praise for him is proportionately growing. To wit: A top spokesperson offered a bizarre rationalization for his deranged new “proposal” to turn Venezuela into the fifty-first state. She also attempted to portray him as wielding absolute mastery over Iran, but accidentally exposed his lack of concern over soaring prices. And his propagandists lashed out at a reporter for sharing an image of Trump sleeping through an event. The decline is accelerating, yet the cult worship is off the charts. Running through all this is something dark: His sycophants know he’s passing from the scene, and no one is allowed to admit it. We talked to New Republic writer Virginia Heffernan, author of a great piece plumbing MAGA psychology. We discuss fresh signs of Trump’s sunsetting, the huge vacuum his passing will leave at the core of the right wing, and why his supporters are akin to an “end-stage cult.” Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

The vast scale of China’s oil buying power will help Beijing undermine one of Trump’s favorite trade tactics.