Michael Rappaport

Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, and Director of the Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

@mikeduncan What a load of crap. A bunch of people who do not watch the games cherry picking plays. OKC gets far fewer foul calls than other teams.

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

Sadly, Thunder have lost to a lot of very long 3s, including Dame's

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

Attending the Originalist Bootcamp is always a highlight of the year!

[Randy Barnett @RandyEBarnett]

Jack Balkin discusses Framework Originalism, Steve Sachs describes Original Law Originalism, and Mike Rappaport defense Original Methods Originalism to the @GUConstitution Center’s Originalism Summer Seminar.

[Noah Tye @noahlt]

@olivertraldi Related, I'd love a history of "forward-thinking" ideas that were ultimately rejected. Communism and Prohibition are the easy ones but there must be thousands of ideas that were popular at the time but ultimately forgotten.

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

@noahlt @olivertraldi This is extremely important for conservatism!

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

I wondered about how Lepore's book was selected. So I looked into the jury and asked ChatGPT about their political orientation. Here is what it said:

Jacqueline Jones: Publicly progressive / left-liberal on race, labor, education, and history-teaching controversies.

Ada Ferrer: Anti-imperial / historically skeptical of U.S. intervention in Cuba, but explicitly wary of left/right slogans about Cuba.

Caroline Elkins: Strongly anti-imperial and critical of liberal-imperial apologetics; politically reads as postcolonial/left-liberal, though not necessarily partisan.

Adrian R. Lewis: Harder to classify. Military historian, Army veteran, critical of flawed U.S. war policy; association with Quincy Institute suggests foreign-policy restraint rather than conventional left/right politics.

John Wood Sweet: Social/cultural historian focused on race, gender, sexuality, slavery, and marginalized lives; likely broadly progressive in scholarly sensibility, but I found little evidence of explicit partisan political views.

In sum: The jury appears to lean heavily toward historians whose work foregrounds race, slavery, labor, gender, empire, colonialism, and marginalized experience. Politically, that likely means the center of gravity is left-liberal/progressive or anti-imperial, with Adrian Lewis as a somewhat different profile because of his military-history background and foreign-policy-restraint orientation.

Me again: Pretty much what I would have expected from the Pulitzer.

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

Jill Lepore has won the Pulitzer Prize for her book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. John McGinnis and I strongly criticize an article based on the book that Lepore published in The Atlantic. Here is one line from our piece:

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

"It is safe to say that, unlike the more rigorous work of her colleagues [at Harvard], her jeremiad fails to meet standards of scholarship, as it distorts quotations out of context, misstates facts, and confuses concepts." https://t.co/aRgxAnDQIG

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

@dwarkesh_sp Yeah, I'm listening to the full episode. Very interesting

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

Wow: Led Zeppelin invested £31,500 for the filming, Pink Floyd put in £21,000, & Ian Anderson contributed £6,300, because no studio would fund a comedy about King Arthur and the Holy Grail.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL was released 51 years ago today.

Led Zeppelin invested £31,500 for the filming, Pink Floyd put in £21,000, & Ian Anderson contributed £6,300, because no studio would fund a comedy about King Arthur and the Holy Grail.

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

@andreamacc @JamesLucasIT The shop.

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

Steven Pinker: "In March 2026, three prominent thinkers died within a day of each other. Lavish obituaries immediately marked the deaths of the always-wrong environmentalist Paul Ehrlich and the often-obscure political philosopher Jürgen Habermas. But two weeks after the death of Robert Trivers, one of the greatest evolutionary biologists since Charles Darwin, not a single major news source has noticed his passing. This despite Trivers’s singular accomplishment of showing how the endlessly fascinating complexities of human relations are grounded in the wellsprings of complex life." https://t.co/2ROUppLSd9

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

This gives bad teams incentives not to lose. One could imagine games where two really bad teams try hard to win to get a better pick.

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

Here is a tanking reform proposal. The number 1 pick goes to a lottery of the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th worst records. After those four teams pick, the 5th pick goes to a lottery of the 2nd, 3rd, and 8th worst records. Then the team with the worst record selects. #tanking #nba

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

@EWess92 Make that, why does it seem fine?

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

Scott Johnson: "When the Eighth Circuit reverses the opinion of a district judge, it customarily omits the name of the judge as a matter of courtesy." This is a bad policy. Federal judges are insulated. Reputational accountability is the one check on their behavior.

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

@EWess92 What does it seem fine? Why isn't reputational accountability a good thing?

[Michael Rappaport @MichaelRapp]

@CassSunstein @lsolum @WilliamBaude @StephenESachs @sherifgirgis I don't think we are all Dworkinians. I am not one. But I do think there is a Dworkinian argument for originalism.

[Michigan Law Federalist Society @MLaw_FedSoc]

It was a full house today as we welcomed @MichaelRapp from USD Law to discuss the Unitary Executive Theory with our very own @jdmortenson and @chris_j_walker. Thank you to the panelists!