What I've been up to

Hi all. It’s been a while.

DALL-E generated image from the prompt “a group of lawyers arguing in the style of a medieval tapestry”

It’s also been a busy few months. December saw the release of the January 6 Committee’s final report—and now that the committee has winked out of existence with the arrival of the new Congress, I’ve been working on reading through the enormous trove of material released by the Government Publishing Office ancillary to the report. If you’re interested in diving into January 6 ephemera, I recommend taking a look through—the GPO site is chock full of deposition transcripts and other documents released by the committee. I’m hoping to write more about this in the weeks and months to come.

For the last year or so, I’ve been working on a long essay about the role of professional associations—like state bars and state medical boards—in helping society navigate what truth means. So many of the ongoing conversations about “misinformation” focus on what social media platforms should or shouldn’t do in helping determine the appropriate boundaries of speech. But other “arbiters of truth” might play a role, too. In particular, organizations that regulate the practice of lawyers and doctors have been thrust into the limelight recently as falsehoods around the coronavirus and 2020 election integrity have led to calls for these groups to take a more active role in policing what their members can and can’t say.

The essay is still forthcoming and will be published soon by the good people at Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. But in the meantime, you can get a hint at what I’m writing about in this piece I wrote for Lawfare about the ethics charges recently unveiled by the California state bar against John Eastman, the law professor best known for writing the “coup memos” setting out a bizarre legal theory under which Trump could hold onto power even after losing the 2020 election. The bar really threw the book at Eastman here—which may backfire, as some of the charges against him seem ripe for a First Amendment challenge. But even if this effort at discipline succeeds, I don’t know how much bar discipline can do in a society where there’s a robust market for martyrs. As I wrote:

The community of people who believe in the big lie is sufficiently large and entrenched enough that bar discipline—even disbarment—may not matter if lawyers can successfully situate themselves within the cozy confines of the pro-Trump media and political ecosystem.

On a somewhat different topic, I recently published a review essay with the Washington Post’s revitalized Book World section (RIP Outlook) on the 30th anniversary of the Waco siege, which began in February 1993:

Anniversaries can lend themselves to strained or hackneyed efforts to connect the commemorated event to more recent developments. But in the case of Waco, unfortunately, no such strain is necessary. In 1995, in an act of terrorism inspired by rage over the government’s handling of Waco, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. The Justice Department official who oversaw the investigation of that bombing, Merrick Garland, is now presiding over the Jan. 6 investigation in his role as attorney general. Paramilitary groups like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, whose members have been charged in connection with their roles in the attack on the Capitol, originated in a surge of far-right distrust of the federal government after Waco. In the two years since the insurrection, a number of militia groups present that day have splintered, but their ideologies persist.

I tend to be pretty hard on books I'm reviewing.