"Less well-known than jurisprudence is what the law professors Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres have termed 'demosprudence' — the idea that legal change does not flow exclusively from courts and other government actors, but..."

"... may proceed from the mobilization of the people themselves. When Sotomayor switched gears and aimed her rhetoric at the public, she was planting the seeds for demosprudence, alerting the people to the imminent threat to abortion rights in the hopes that, hearing her alarm, we might mobilize. Not with a Jan. 6-style insurrection but with the sort of grass-roots energy that once fueled the civil rights movement and other progressive social causes. This could take many forms, such as enacting the congressional bill that would codify Roe’s protections, turning state legislatures blue so as to stanch the stream of increasingly restrictive abortion laws and building broader support for telemedicine and the distribution of pills that can induce abortion in a private setting. In a morning that offered little cause for optimism for those who favor reproductive freedom, Sotomayor’s subtle message was both pragmatic and — at least potentially — uplifting. The court will not save our rights. But maybe we can save them ourselves. "

From "Sotomayor saw she couldn’t sway her colleagues. So she talked to us instead. The liberal justice signaled that the next round of the abortion fight might be political, not legal" by lawprof Melissa Murray (WaPo).

There's no need to wait until the Court overrules Roe (i.e, Casey). 

Murray notes "the congressional bill" and links to "House passes bill to create statutory right to abortion as a battle over Texas law heats up" (from last September). There will only be bans on abortion if the democratic processes within government provide the relevant statutes — contrary to the delusion of those low-information citizens who think the fetus is about to acquire a constitutional right to life — and these democratic processes can just as well enact a statutory right to have an abortion. 

If we the people really want this right, we can get it. The Democrats have a lot of power now, and there should be pressure on them to use it, and you can see the House has already acted. We're told the President "strongly supports" the legislation. The trick is to get the bill through the Senate.

The new Attorney General will be Jeff Sessions.

The NYT reports.

Mr. Sessions was also under consideration for secretary of defense, creating debate within the Trump transition team over which job he should fill.

Mr. Sessions, a former prosecutor elected to the Senate in 1996, serves on the Judiciary Committee and has opposed immigration reform as well as bipartisan proposals to cut mandatory minimum prison sentences....

While serving as a United States prosecutor in Alabama, Mr. Sessions was nominated in 1986 by President Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship. But his nomination was rejected by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee because of racially charged comments and actions. At that time, he was one of two judicial nominees whose selections were halted by the panel in nearly 50 years.

What were the "racially charged comments and actions" from decades ago and is it something that reflects on Trump now?

In testimony before the committee, former colleagues said that Mr. Sessions had referred to the N.A.A.C.P., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other civil rights groups as “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” An African-American federal prosecutor then, Thomas H. Figures, said Mr. Sessions had referred to him as “boy” and testified that Mr. Sessions said the Ku Klux Klan was fine “until I found out they smoked pot.” Mr. Sessions dismissed that remark as a joke.

"That remark" refers to the KKK, presumably, and not to calling Thomas H. Figures "boy." Here's an article in The Guardian from 2009 (and thus disconnected from current efforts to heighten everything racial that has to do with Trump):

"Perhaps the biggest difference between the racers and the randonneurs was socioeconomic."

"Racing was a working-class sport — prize money was a way out of the coal mines or factories."

"You don't have the liberty to say, 'Well, the other guy deserves to win' if your living depends on it," [Jan Heine, editor of Bicycle Quarterly, a Seattle-based magazine about the history, technology and culture of biking].

Randonneuring was more of a refined hobby. "If you're doing this for fun, suddenly the distinction between winner and second becomes meaningless," says Heine.

Also:

"There was a lot of animosity in France, actually, between the tourists and the racers," Heine explains. "Because the tourists said, 'We are going in the mountains, and we are a participatory sport.' " Participatory meaning that women could ride alongside men — and people could ride basically whatever they wanted. This drove innovations in bicycle technology that today are widespread: If you've ever ridden a bike with a derailleur, thank the randonneurs.

Interesting the way the inclusiveness toward women changes things — this particular activity... and everything else. Who wins and who loses? Or... shall we say?... the inclusion of women changes the nature of the activity so that speaking in terms of winning and losing becomes inappropriate and those who play to win and triumph over losers become socially unacceptable oafs?

ADDED: I am reminded of the perennial efforts to restructure law school to suit women. Recently, in the Harvard Crimson:

Harvard Law student Jessica R. Jensen hates the Socratic method. “It’s the worst thing in the world,” she said. “It forces you to talk like a man... It made me feel really uncomfortable and incompetent at first, and it really impacted my performance in classes the first year.... You feel like you don’t know the material really well because you feel like an idiot in class.”

The worst thing in the world? Worse than coal mining or — the coal miner's alternative income source — the Tour de France?

Employed in some form across most classrooms at Harvard Law School, the Socratic method, a teaching style that relies on cold-calling, lies at the heart of the debate over gender issues and serves as a focal point for the Shatter coalition. Today, many students and faculty have raised concerns over the teaching method, saying that men are more likely to participate voluntarily in Law School classes than women....

Yet the root cause of this disparity remains contested, as professors, students, and administrators debate whether the Socratic method—the traditional form of legal pedagogy—needs to be adapted to account for gender disparities in the classroom.

Note that both calling on students and relying on volunteers is bad for women.

“Women take longer to process thoughts before they feel comfortable to say them out loud than men do,” Jensen said, adding that men feel more natural in that kind of classroom atmosphere.

I guess as long as you mean well — which is to say, you think and get others to think you're helping women — you can engage in sex stereotyping even when it's disparaging women. I know you can restate Jensen's stereotype so that it's more flattering to women — a paraphrasing skill you might want to work on. Just say that women are reflecting deeply, forming more refined ideas, and contemplating the social dynamic of the classroom —  while these brutal, competition-addicted men lunge at the first opportunity to dominate and blurt out whatever comes to mind with little concern about what others in the room think about them.

Harvard Law professor Lani C. Guinier ’71, who has authored several articles on legal pedagogy, said... “women’s reaction to law school is an important warning sign, but a warning sign that the problem will not go away simply by focusing on helping the women think more like their male counterparts”....

Inclusiveness toward women changes things.

A hostile environment toward women at Harvard Law School?

Women "just can't do as well" because of "the way the school is structured"?

Is it the way the school is structured or the way women are structured? Consider this analogy:

So I think what I would say to you is probably captured by the miners' canary metaphor — that the women in law school are the canary in the coal mines. So they're more vulnerable when the atmosphere in the coal mines gets toxic. The canary, because of its different respiratory system, is more likely to start gasping for air, and that's a sign that the atmosphere is toxic not just for the canary but for the miners as well. So it's a signal to evacuate.

Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if what's toxic about the structure is the demand that students grapple with analogies? A woman at Harvard is like a canary in the coal mine, a different and much more delicate species than the coal miners, but useful because the miners can see when the canaries keel over and get the hell out before they die too.

That might be sexist, saying women are far more fragile than men, structurally sensitive to the stressful environment. But that's said — watch the video at the link at 1:55 — by female lawprof Lani Guinier, so modify your understanding of the analogy accordingly.

You might have thought something like this: Harvard Law School is very competitive, and women can get in and compete equally with men, and whatever the outcome is is the way it should be. It was a tough contest, but — as Guinier conceded — men are much tougher, so more men did well, and women had their fair shot, and if the top of the class is 20% (rather than 50%) female, there's nothing at all wrong.

But maybe an excessively competitive and stressful environment is bad for everyone, and maybe women do help us all by noticing and complaining. The men, advantaged in the competition, could say keep it like this because we like winning, and it's our love for winning that drives us to win as the game becomes more and more competitive, but our culture, our civilization, is built on combining males and females. Think about the way opponents of same-sex marriage keep going back to the idea that the marriage of a man and a woman is the fundamental building block of society. Though I support same-sex marriage — individuals should be able to choose their life partner in accordance with their sexual orientation — I can see the good that flows from males and females figuring out how to live together.

I'm just trying to open up a conversation here. I'll come back to this later.

Goodbye to Derrick Bell.

The eminent law professor has died.

He was a pioneer of critical race theory — a body of legal scholarship that explored how racism is embedded in laws and legal institutions, even those intended to lessen the effects of past injustice. Mr. Bell “set the agenda in many ways for scholarship on race in the academy, not just the legal academy,” said Lani Guinier, the first black woman hired to join the Harvard Law School’s tenured faculty, in an interview on Wednesday....

Mr. Bell’s core beliefs included what he called “the interest convergence dilemma” — the idea that whites would not support efforts to improve the position of blacks unless it was in their interest....

Much of Mr. Bell’s scholarship rejected dry legal analysis in favor of allegorical stories....

One his best-known parables is “The Space Traders,” which appeared in his 1992 book, “Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.” In the story, as Mr. Bell later described it, creatures from another planet offer the United States “enough gold to retire the national debt, a magic chemical that will cleanse America’s polluted skies and waters, and a limitless source of safe energy to replace our dwindling reserves” in exchange for one thing: its black population, which would be sent to outer space. The white population accepts the offer by an overwhelming margin....

Not everyone welcomed the move to narrative and allegory in legal scholarship. In 1997, Richard Posner, the conservative law professor and appeals court judge, wrote in The New Republic that “by repudiating reasoned argumentation,” storytellers like Mr. Bell “reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites."

Prof. Bell was 80.

"If the gender game worked when Rick Lazio muscled into her space, why shouldn’t it work when Obama and Edwards muster some mettle?"

"If she could become a senator by playing the victim after Monica, surely she can become president by playing the victim now."

I'm just getting around to reading Maureen Dowd's Sunday column. It's rich.

When pundettes tut-tut that playing the victim is not what a feminist should do, they forget that Hillary is not a feminist. If she were merely some clichéd version of a women’s rights advocate, she never could have so effortlessly blown off Marian Wright Edelman and Lani Guinier when Bill first got in, or played the Fury with Bill’s cupcakes during the campaign.

She was always kind enough to let Bill hide behind her skirts when he got in trouble with women. Now she deserves to hide behind her own pantsuits when men cause her trouble....

There is nowhere she won’t go, so long as it gets her where she wants to be.

Dowd has always paid attention to truth about the Clintons and feminism. I've really appreciated that.