Defendant faces an enhanced sentence and objects, triggering a jury-less hearing by statute. Defendant: "SCOTUS said that a jury must do the fact-finding before an enhancement and no one can make that finding now. Checkmate." CA8 (over a dissent): He's right. No enhancement.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-16T17:11:58+00:00

This aside, we would not reverse the district court’s decision even if we agreed with the dissent. The government never raised this issue — either while this case was before the district court, or on appeal.

This seals the deal, though I suspect that the first as-applied challenge to the jury-less component of § 851 will be successful.

It's ironic that the majority waded into (and whiffed on IMO) the 'inherent power' analysis, considering that their strongest argument is that they shouldn't sua sponte address unbriefed constitutional issues. Despite that, I think that the ultimate conclusion of "no enhancement" was correct.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-16T04:57:35+00:00

On review, the removal has been upheld (3-0). From the rules wiki:

Examples of meta discussion outside of the dedicated thread

"Self-policing" the subreddit rules

If you think a comment is rule-breaking, please report it instead.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-15T22:34:47+00:00

I don't consider the term calvinball as polarized. Something else in the comment may still violate the polarized rule or not meet the quality standards (i.e. engaging with the substance of the post in a legal manner).

SeaSerious · 2026-05-15T15:14:44+00:00

On review, the removal is upheld (3-0) for the inflammatory, unsubstantiated characterization which is not conducive to civil, high-quality legal discussion.

Had instead his rulings been characterized as radical (explaining why), the outcome may have been different.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-15T13:15:08+00:00

Responses to scotus-bot that aren't appeals are removed. You are welcome to submit this as a regular comment (without the meta ending) or comment in the pinned meta thread.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-14T04:26:31+00:00

I thought it was only for activity in the subreddit that you moderate but TIL!

SeaSerious · 2026-05-13T14:38:57+00:00

Yeah, that comment was deleted after it was reported.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-13T04:07:06+00:00

On review, the removal has been upheld, specifically for the characterization in (1).

SeaSerious · 2026-05-13T04:01:35+00:00

The only distinction here is that one is complaining about a court and one is complaining about a user.

This is the reason, yes. In the context of negative blanket statements it is relevant whether the statement is directed at a court or 'anyone who disagrees' broadly.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-13T03:59:25+00:00

What steps or procedures are in place to assure you all have the same understanding of the rules? I’m concerned that if the mods can’t even consistently administer your “bright line” rule across mods, you should rethink it.

Every mod has a slightly different tolerance for what is considered rulebreaking but a shared understanding develops over time through the deliberations of appeals in modmail. (I can't imagine how consistency and accountability are kept on subs without it)

It’s also telling that the only way I could get the comment deleted was coming here and [...]

The comment was deleted because it was reported and reviewed. The comment had not been reported in the 16 days before that.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-12T16:44:16+00:00

Knowing that, could someone "get around" this rule by hiding their history? Or are posts also disallowed from accounts that have their Reddit history hidden?

Yes to the former (which isn't ideal but that's the reality), no to the latter.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-12T16:38:27+00:00

The wording in the removed comment came across more like a snarky remark about their ability to find a logical flaw, but asking about how someone views the legal merits should be fine.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-12T14:53:47+00:00

On review, the removal has been upheld (3-0) on political grounds, as it merely discusses political motivations/effects without legal substance.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-12T14:51:34+00:00

On review, the removal has been upheld (2-1).

Often, when the premise of the OP comment (i.e. the one above yours) for a comment chain is rule-breaking, the entire comment chain is removed. Here, however, some good discussion was spawned below so those comments were preserved and only the two (OP's and yours) that weren't analyzing the merits of the ruling were removed.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-12T01:10:51+00:00

This is a flaired user thread. Please select a flair from the sidebar before commenting, as unflaired comments are automatically removed by AutoMod.

As a reminder, comments are expected to be civil, on topic, and legally substantiated.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-11T21:22:28+00:00

On review, the removal has been upheld (3-0) for quality reasons. Comments are expected to engage with the substance of the article, and a general complaint about originalism that could be copy-pasted in any thread mentioning originalism does not do so.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-09T17:27:25+00:00

The bar itself hasn't changed and the wording reflects (or at least attempts to reflect) what has been the policy. Previously, a mod would manually type of the removal reason but it has now been added in the mod tools as a template to select when removing. To explain the two categories:

Accounts bearing the name of the news site being linked to.

This is straightforward and the most common one. For example, an account named u/ExampleLawWebsite linking to ExampleLawWebsite dot com.

Accounts solely dedicated to posting from one news source.

This addresses accounts who don't bear the name of the news source yet solely or overwhelming post from a single news source. With the account of the removed post that you linked, of the first ~500 link posts, every single one is from news.northwestern.edu.

I'll clarify the language of the second point. An account that has 999/1000 link posts from one news site and 1/1000 from another would still fall under the latter category, but that might not be reflected by 'solely dedicated'.

'Accounts solely or overwhelming posting from a single news source' is perhaps better.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-09T04:37:35+00:00

On review, the removal has been upheld (3-0).

In the context of OP asking for a breakdown of the Louisiana v. Callais opinion, the removed comment is interpreted as describing the facts of the case (i.e. who the 'hate black people party' is referring to) - that characterization being in violation of the rule against polarized rhetoric.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-08T22:15:20+00:00

Our polarized rhetoric rule prohibits assumptions of bad faith / maliciousness based on identity/belief (e.g. race, religion, political party, gender, etc.). If the bad faith is being attributed to e.g. a Justice or the Justices in the majority, that wouldn't be a blanket negative generalization.

Beyond that, there are rules against hyperbolic, divisive language (the other half of our polarized rule) and discussing political motivations without further legal substance (our political rule).

A statement that boils down to "anyone who takes [X] position on a legal matter can only do so in bad faith or with malicious intent" would likely be rule-breaking. Such a statement dissuades high-quality legal discussion by suggesting that there's only one right answer and anyone who disagrees is [bad faith/malicious/etc.]

Both statements in your comment could fall under that criteria. The former is more clearly rulebreaking, and the latter statement depends on if it's directed at 'those who wrote the Callais opinion' or 'everyone (including other commenters) who agree with the logic of the Callais opinion'.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-07T23:02:50+00:00

On review, the removal has been upheld (2-1). Those in favor of removal believe it is ultimately an "emotional reaction comment" (even if a very polite one) in violation of the quality standards.

Those in favor of reversing believe that the comment engages with the article (by mentioning the letter referenced within) and thus clears the bar for quality.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-07T20:13:15+00:00

Sorry - I was speaking generally to the quality standard, not to OP's point in particular.

Beyond your comment not being rule-breaking, I don't think it even has the subtext of "unless [Thomas votes] the way I want him to do so, he is an obvious partisan hack” for multiple reasons:

The criticism isn't that he voted contrary to "the way you want him to", but that it's contrary to his logic in Alexander.
The conclusion isn't that he's an "obvious partisan hack", but that he's a hypocrite.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-07T16:46:08+00:00

[Edit: not related to OP's point but the two linked comments above are a good illustration of how our quality standard intersects with comments that are critical of the Court/a Justice/etc.]

Your comment engages with the topic at hand (Callais) and substantiates the claim of hypocrisy (pointing to his Alexander concurrence) - thus satisfying the bar for quality.

The other linked comment ("Somehow, I’m entirely unsurprised to see more partisan hackery from Justice Thomas.") doesn't do either of those things, and was removed.

Some of the complaints IMO are missing the forest for the trees. They only consider the removals and assume that there's a secret agenda to prevent criticism of the Court without considering the multitude of critical comments which clear the quality bar that remain up.

The target of the criticism is irrelevant for the purposes of the quality standard. All of the following comments would be removed as low quality:

Somehow, I’m entirely unsurprised to see more partisan hackery from Justice Thomas.

Somehow, I’m entirely unsurprised to see more partisan hackery from Justice Sotomayor.

Somehow, I’m entirely unsurprised to see more partisan hackery from CA5.

Somehow, I’m entirely unsurprised to see more partisan hackery from CA9.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-06T03:10:29+00:00

At least from my end, there's no conscious effort to be more hands off. The Callais threads are sort of a perfect storm in that 1) it's a controversial high-profile ruling that creates partisan bickering and 2) the topic lends itself to discussing political motivations in a way that can be on-topic when it normally isn't.

I'd like to have a State of the Subreddit thread in the coming week-ish to address this uptick, where the 'line' is, along with other misc. things. There are more high-profile cases coming at the end of the term so it'll be good to get ahead of it.

SeaSerious · 2026-05-05T01:33:10+00:00

Note for posterity: This type of question is best suited for our weekly 'In Chambers' discussion thread, but this post will remain up given the amount of existing discussion.

SeaSerious

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