Natalist panic is rife nowadays. The White House is weighing initiatives to boost the number of births, ranging from a $5,000-per-baby bonus to awarding “National Medals of Motherhood” to mothers with six or more children. In March, the NatalCon gathering in Austin, Texas, declared that we’re “living through the greatest population bust in human history.” In April, the tech billionaire (and father of 14 children) Elon Musk posted on X: “Low birth rates will end civilization.”

And yet the world’s population continues to grow. 132 million people were born in 2024, boosting the global population by 71 million. Over the course of my lifetime, the U.S. population has risen from 160 million to 342 million and the world population has grown from 2.6 billion to 8.1 billion.

Still, given current trends, demographers calculate that world population will likely peak at just over 10 billion later in this century and then start to fall. Why? Because people are choosing to have fewer children. The total fertility rate—that is, the number of children the average woman has over the course of her lifetime—has been falling for decades. On a global scale, it has dropped from 5 kids in the 1960s to 2.2 children now. In the U.S., the rate has fallen from around 3.6 in 1960 to 1.6 today. That is well below the population replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.

Even if Musk’s end-of-civilization worries are a bit hyperbolic, should we be concerned about impending depopulation? In After the Spike, the economic demographers Dean Spears and Michael Geruso argue, somewhat persuasively, that we should.

The book’s first section shows that current fertility trends will yield a spike in population followed by accelerating population decay. Since many people still believe that a world with fewer people is worth pursuing, the authors next turn to dismantling the case against more people.

The most infamous modern prophet of population doom is the Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. In his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich proclaimed that the “battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Instead of that doomsday scenario, farmers deploying modern tech have boosted the number of daily calories per person by more than a third since the 1960s. Instead of rising death rates, global life expectancy rose from 57 years in 1968 to 73 years now.

Spears and Geruso comprehensively demolish Ehrlich’s doomsaying. They fully acknowledge that human activities have harmed the natural world, but they make a strong case that human ingenuity is addressing such environmental concerns as man-made climate change and declining biodiversity. “The data tell us that lives are better now than lives were in the past—even though there are many more lives around. Fears of a depleted, overpopulated future are out-of-date,” they rightly conclude.

So why are birth rates falling all over the world? The authors knock down the conventional hypothesis that rising monetary costs are to blame. The real costs of children, they argue, are the opportunity costs: “what a potential parent would be ready to give up to have an extra child.” The seductions of the modern world include higher paying work, longer vacations, restaurant meals, sports, video games, innumerable on-demand entertainment options, and so forth. “Once we see that costs include opportunity costs, as life becomes richer and more rewarding, children cost more,” they say. “Even if we eliminated every dimension of social inequality and unfairness between women and men, the opportunity cost of having a child would still be greater in the richer, freer, better-entertained future than it was in the past.” And as demographic history shows, fewer and fewer people are willing to pay those costs.

The authors fear a depopulating world will bring permanent economic and social stagnation. More people mean more ideas, and more ideas mean increasing abundance and better solutions to problems. “Without people to do the discovering, innovating, and testing, less creation will happen. Less advancement. Less progress,” they argue. “A larger future is a future with more total innovators.”

To have that more innovative future, Spears and Geruso want to move from depopulation to population stabilization. “The economics of scale and shared innovations mean that we can do more good together than alone,” they observe.

Spears and Geruso admit that they and other demographers have identified no policies that have ever lifted a country’s total fertility rate once it has fallen below the replacement level. They point out that “population control has never controlled the population.” To illustrate their point, they compare China’s fertility trend under its one-child policy to the trends of peer nations. There is no discernable difference—fertility was falling at basically the same rate in each country.

Neither outlawing abortion nor limiting contraception has had any discernable effects on these trends either. For decades, procuring or providing an abortion was a crime in South Korea, a policy that didn’t end until 2019. Yet that country has the world’s lowest fertility rate of 0.75 children per woman.

What about cash payments, subsidized child care, longer maternity and paternity leave, or free IVF treatments? None of them, wherever tried, have sustainably boosted birth rates.

Spears and Geruso also take on the argument that the heritability of high-fertility cultures will prevent depopulation. This is the idea that the children of groups that give birth to large families will themselves choose to have big families. Consequently, these high-fertility groups will eventually outbreed and replace the low-fertility people and thus boost future population growth. One problem: Contemporary high-fertility groups today have lower fertility than in their own pasts. They too are tracing the downward slope toward below replacement fertility. 

Despite these policy failures, Spears and Geruso worry that demagogues will use concerns over low birth rates to pursue unsavory agendas “of inequality, nationalism, exclusion, or control.” While they strongly believe that “it would be better if the world did not depopulate,” they also defend reproductive freedom. “Nobody should be forced or required to have a baby (or not to have a baby),” they maintain.

The book’s biggest flaw is that the authors mostly elide the inception and spread of the crucial economic and political institutions of liberty—strong property rights, free speech, the rule of law, self-government, etc.— that enabled the simultaneous increase in prosperity and population over the past two centuries. 

So what to do about depopulation? Spears and Geruso say they do “not pretend to offer the Solution. There is no Solution with a capital S. Not yet.” Instead they invite readers to work toward societies where “parenting can be combined with other paths to well-being and value; where parenting is fun, rewarding, and great more of the time.” Avoiding depopulation is a worthy endeavor, but that means figuring out how to lower the opportunity costs of parenthood. 

Science Correspondent RONALD BAILEY is co-author of Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (Cato Institute).

After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $29.99

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Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick is nobody’s idea of a “Marxist judge.”

He was appointed to the bench in 2016 by conservative Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R). Before that, Bolick spent decades in the trenches of the conservative and libertarian legal movements. As a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, Bolick worked with Clarence Thomas, who became a close friend and godfather to one of his sons. As a public interest litigator, Bolick battled affirmative action, championed school choice, advocated federalism, and helped to overturn a host of economic regulations.

Yet now Bolick is drawing fire from prominent supporters of President Donald Trump. Why? Because Bolick has spoken out against what he views as the Trump administration’s dangerous attacks on the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law.

As first reported in a detailed and illuminating article by Taylor Seely of the Arizona Republic, Bolick delivered a passionate speech in May before a gathering of the Society for the Rule of Law, a group focused on “rising threats posed by illiberal forces in our society, without regard to political party or partisan affiliation.”

“The idea that right-of-center lawyers would have to join together to defend the rule of law, sometimes against people who describe themselves as constitutional conservatives, is just really head-spinning to me. It’s almost dystopian,” Bolick told the group. In fact, “when I think of people wrapping themselves in the Constitution while they are simultaneously doing violence to it, it makes me wish that I was back in private practice again so that I could represent the Constitution in a defamation action.”

Nor did Bolick leave any doubt that his outrage was directed in significant part against the behavior of the Trump administration.

“Due process is the most foundational legal principle protecting individual liberty in Western civilization. It dates back to the Magna Carta,” Bolick observed. Yet “we have seen the words due process appear in quotes repeatedly, as if this concept was created by rogue liberal judges to help illegal immigrants stay in the country.”

Bolick was almost certainly referring here to Vice President J.D. Vance, a leading offender when it comes to putting due process in scare quotes.

Bolick also brought up the “deeply disturbing” words of “a high-ranking administration official” who said that the White House was “actively looking” at the “option” of suspending the writ of habeas corpus.

Bolick did not identify that official either. But he was clearly referring to White House adviser Stephen Miller. In addition to threatening to suspend habeas corpus, Miller also said that following through on such a threat “depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”

As Bolick recognized, that comment may have been an effort by the Trump administration “to intimidate the courts to reach decisions that they favor.” And that, Bolick said, “is really scary stuff.”

In a sane political climate, Bolick’s words of warning would be big news in conservative media. After all, he is a highly respected Republican-appointed jurist with a lengthy track record as a textualist. His resume and accomplishments should earn him a fair hearing from “his side” of the political aisle.

Yet as the Arizona Republic reports, the conservative response so far to Bolick’s speech has been a barely veiled political threat. “Justice Clint Bolick should stay out of the political arena,” declared Mike Davis, the head of the pro-Trump Article III Project. “When judges take off their judicial robes, climb into the political arena, and throw political punches, they should expect political counterpunches,” Davis told the Arizona Republic.

The fact that Bolick delivered this speech at this time suggests that he is ready for the fisticuffs. “Standing up for the rule of law and the independent judiciary, no matter who is attacking it, is an absolute priority,” Bolick declared, before adding, “count me in.”

Bolick is a principled legal thinker and one of the genuine good guys in American law. If he is worried about the health of our constitutional order, we should all pay heed.

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This is part of Reason‘s 2025 summer travel issue. Click here to read the rest of the issue.

On Saturday night, I had Indian food at a mosque potluck. The next day, I went to an African church service full of gospel music. In between, I went to a hockey game and stood on sea ice to watch a dogsled race. That’s life in Iqaluit, a Canadian boomtown on the edge of the Arctic.

The semiautonomous Nunavut Territory has always been different from the rest of Canada. The majority of the people there are Inuit (singular: Inuk), a people known for their colorful animal skin fashion, soapstone carvings, and gregarious sense of humor.

“I love traveling in the Arctic. You’ll always find something weird in the Arctic. Inuit are something funny,” said Inuk comedian Mary-Lee Aliyuk, wearing a sealskin skirt, during the Stand-Up North: Bush Party Baby tour.

On my flight into Iqaluit, announcements were read in English, French, and Inuktitut, the Inuit language. The whole city is filled with signs in the otherworldly Inuktitut ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ script. Fresh off the plane, I waited in line at a shop behind a traditionally tattooed Inuk mother wearing an amauti ᐊᒪᐅᑎ, a sealskin parka with a built-in baby pouch just below the hood.

But Iqaluit ᐃᖃᓗᐃᑦ is also distinct within the Arctic. A mining boom and a buildup in the Canadian government’s presence has brought a lot of demand for labor to the territorial capital. (Nunavut ᓄᓇᕗᑦ boasted the fastest-growing economy of any Canadian territory or province in 2024.) It’s drawing in a diverse and sometimes unexpected collection of people, including immigrants from tropical countries.

This multicultural outpost may be a picture of the future. As climate change shrinks the polar ice caps, governments and business interests are scrambling for a piece of the newly opened frontier. In 2018, China declared itself a “near-Arctic state” and published a grand polar strategy. Both major Canadian political parties are promising a military buildup in the Arctic. U.S. President Donald Trump has infamously threatened to annex both Greenland and Canada.

Different governments have taken different approaches to this competition. Norway is trying to replace immigrants with the “permanent presence of Norwegian citizens” and “family-based community” in Svalbard, an Arctic island traditionally considered a neutral, visa-free territory, New Lines reported in November 2024.

But Nunavut has struck an inviting tone. “Limited local human resources limits the growth of our economy,” Annie Cyr-Parent, the territory’s director of minerals and petroleum resources, told the Nunavut News in 2024. The Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis estimates that Iqaluit’s work force would shrink by 30 percent over the next decade without immigration.

“As Inuit, we know we are always friendly to outsiders,” Nunavut Premier P.J. Akeeagok ᐱᔭᐃ ᐊᕿᐊᕈᖅ told Nunatsiaq ᓄᓇᑦᓯᐊᖅ, a local newspaper, in 2022.

Out of 6,870 people in Iqaluit, slightly more than half are Inuit, according to the 2021 census. Among the non-Inuit population, 850 are listed as “visible minorities,” including 375 black people, 215 Filipinos, and 95 South Asians. Iqaluit experienced a 110 percent growth in the number of foreign immigrants from 2011 to 2021, and 10 percent of the city’s residents are now immigrants.

I visited Iqaluit at the end of Toonik Tyme ᑐᓂᖅ ᑕᐃᒻ, the local spring festival, which happened to line up with Easter this year. (The main character of North of North, an Inuit sitcom filmed in Iqaluit, sums it up as “Whoo-hoo! We didn’t die this winter!”) The temperature during the day dipped just above freezing, and wet slush dripped down the hills. The surface of Frobisher Bay, however, was still frozen solid. The soundtrack to town was the low rumble of snowmobiles zipping across the sea ice.

‘A Lot of GoodWill’

Though Inuit nomads have roamed the area since time immemorial, Iqaluit itself is a relatively new city. With the help of an Inuk guide named Nakasuk ᓇᑲᓱᒃ, the U.S. military established an airfield on the shores of Frobisher Bay during World War II, part of a string of bases stretching from the northwestern U.S. through Canada and Greenland to Europe. A town grew around the air transit hub, and voters chose it as the capital of the new Nunavut Territory in the 1990s.

Islam arrived not too long after. The Pakistani-Canadian boiler inspector Syed Asif Ali founded a mosque, Masjid Iqaluit, in 2015. He had applied for a job listing in Nunavut, not realizing how far north the region was until he found out he couldn’t drive to his new hometown. “I tried not to go, but my wife said, you go and establish a mosque,” says Ali, who has since left Iqaluit and taken a job as chief gas inspector for the province of Saskatchewan. “The message of Allah has not reached there, and it is our duty to send that message.”

There are indeed a handful of Inuit who converted to Islam after the mosque was built, though I couldn’t interview any. A mixed Arab-Inuk couple at the mosque declined to be named or quoted for this story, citing privacy. Two other Inuit Muslims had moved out of Iqaluit before I arrived, according to Hussam Beg, a member of the congregation, who gave me a ride to the airport on my last day.

The immigrant Muslim community has also ballooned from around a dozen people when Ali arrived to around 100 people today. Many have had quite roundabout journeys. Mashiur Rahman is a Bangladeshi-Canadian biologist who lived in Ontario before finding a job managing Iqaluit’s fisheries. Beg was born in Saudi Arabia, grew up in the United Arab Emirates, lived in the Bahamas, and passed through the United States before getting a job in Iqaluit as a manager for a local air cargo company.

An information technician from Somalia tells me that his job once sent him to Grise Fiord, the northernmost civilian settlement in Canada, on an island that was completely devoid of human life until the Canadian government exiled some Inuit there in a bizarre 1950s experiment. The average yearly temperature is 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Now working in Iqaluit, he plans to retire to sunny Malaysia afterward.

Rahman picked me up from my hotel on my first day in Iqaluit for a tour of the mosque. Perched above Dead Dog Lake on the Road to Nowhere outside town, the mosque shares a parking lot with a small church. Outside, Inuit kids took joyrides on snowmobiles on the frozen lake surface. The sunset lit the hills pink and orange all the way down to Frobisher Bay.

That night the mosque hosted a potluck dinner. The flavors were heavily South Asian, with everyone’s favorite being nihari, a slow-cooked mutton stew. Muslims in Inuvik ᐃᓅᕕᒃ, an even more northerly oil boomtown in Canada’s Northwest Territories, make Arctic specialties such as reindeer curry, according to The Guardian. But the Iqaluit congregation finds it more difficult to source halal versions of “country food,” because hunting rights for non-Inuit are more restrictive than for Inuit.

A banner on the side of the mosque advertises the Arctic Food Bank, which was founded by Muslims in Inuvik and later opened an Iqaluit branch. Nearly 50 percent of Nunavut households suffer from hunger, due to a decline in game animal herds and the high costs of importing anything else. In Iqaluit, the secular Niqinik Nuatsivik Nunavut Food Bank ᓂᕿᓂᒃ ᓄᐊᑦᓯᕕᒃ ᓄᓇᕗᒻᒥ ᓂᕿᑖᕐᕕᒃ opens only once every two weeks, so the Muslims fill in on alternate weeks. “The food bank gets a lot of goodwill,” Beg explained to me.

After dinner, Rahman took me to the Toonik Tyme hockey tournament. Teams had flown in from the farthest reaches of the Arctic Circle and from down south in Québéc to compete. Inuit in parkas and sunglasses lined up alongside white Canadians with mullets and baseball caps at the concession stand, staffed by a woman in a hijab.

‘Raw Humanity’

The next day was Easter Sunday. I headed to the Catholic parish, where Africans and Filipinos lined up in their Sunday best. Father Barry Bercier was giving a homily about eternal life that seemed applicable to the strange life of the Arctic as well. “It’s good to recognize what you don’t understand,” he said.

After Easter services came the Toonik Tyme dogsled race. A little after noon, locals started to gather in Frobisher Bay awaiting the teams’ return from their morning voyage across the sea ice. I trekked out onto the frozen harbor, following the tracks left by snowmobiles to the finish line. Others showed up on cross-country skis and a pickup truck. The finish line was marked with orange plastic webbing next to a parking lot carved into the sea ice. By Iqaluit standards, it was a hot day; one of the skiers was stripped down to shorts and a sleeveless undershirt.

Later I returned to the church, where two Cameroonian boys helped me find the entrance to the rectory. I was going to meet with Bercier, and the boys were going to a church group that shares building space with the Catholic parish. The group sang and danced to the lead of a female preacher, who invited everyone to “come to the table of Christ, regardless of denomination.”

Hailing from Worcester, Massachusetts, Bercier has been “obsessed” with the Arctic for decades. Over the years, he has gotten himself assigned to Nuuk, Greenland; Pituffik Space Base, the U.S. ice fortress in Greenland formerly known as Thule Air Base; and Igloolik ᐃᒡᓗᓕᒃ, Nunavut.

Most Inuit in Nuuk and Iqaluit belong to Protestant denominations—the igloo-shaped Anglican cathedral is the most famous landmark in Iqaluit—so the Catholics there are almost all foreigners. Many Catholics in both Nuuk and Iqaluit are workers from the Philippines, a country famous for exporting labor.

“It was Philippine National Day my first summer in Greenland, and on Sunday after church, they all paraded up to my apartment, which was upstairs of the church, with a whole roast pig. And they came in and laid banana leaves on the kitchen table and placed the pig on the banana leaves,” Bercier said. “I said, ‘Where in Greenland did you get banana leaves? And the pig?’ They didn’t tell me. They just laughed.”

Igloolik, on the other hand, had an all-Inuit Catholic congregation in what Bercier calls “the most Inuit of all towns.” There, he preached with the help of an Inuktitut translator. In the north, he says, “There’s something beautiful, something mysterious—there’s a sense of holiness that can pervade things.”

‘Why Not Here?’

Ali, the founder of the mosque, had similar feelings. Inuit culture, he said, was more “natural” and “not exposed to the mentality of big cities.”

This isn’t to say that race relations are always kumbaya. Resentments sometimes flare up, behind closed doors or during heated moments. There are the expected tensions when newcomers, whether foreign- or Canadian-born, take highly paid jobs while so many Inuit live a subsistence lifestyle. “Transient settlers,” wrote former Nunavut official Kunuk Inutiq ᑯᓄᒃ ᐃᓅᑎᖅ in 2022, “generate wealth from our lands and resources and leave the scraps and waste for the Inuit.”

A particularly sensitive issue is the competition between the English and Inuktitut languages. In the early 20th century, the Canadian government tried to forcibly assimilate natives to the white Canadian way of life. Children were sent to the infamous “residential schools,” where conditions were harsh and native languages banned.

The government of Nunavut reversed course completely—official documents and public education are now offered in Inuktitut—but the language is still slightly declining, according to 2021 census data. An Inuk clerk at a store complained to me about outsiders “who come in speaking English and expecting to be spoken to in English” at a time when Inuit are trying to revive their language.

Still, many outsiders are there for the long haul and are accepted into the community. The cash register at Yummy Shawarma, a Lebanese restaurant near the airport, is decorated with a sealskin pouch, a collection of traditional Inuit ulu ᐅᓗ knives shaped like the half-moon, and a little statue of a hunter. When I visited, Arabic music was blaring from the speakers, occasionally interrupted by the sound of a bush plane taking off.

“Why here? Why not here?” Yummy Shawarma owner Khaldoun El-Shamaa told me between warm greetings to his regular customers. “I’ve been here 18 years, I love it. It’s a small community.” He added that, though he’s “not fluent” in Inuktitut, he “speaks a little.”

One night I took a cab back from photographing the northern lights over the harbor. The driver was Nigerian by way of Toronto. “This is my home now. I love it here,” he said.

“Who doesn’t?” piped up my fellow passenger, a young Inuk woman.

The driver agreed. “How can anyone come here and not see it is an amazing place with amazing people?”

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In Turkey, four staff members of the satirical magazine LeMan were arrested on charges of inciting “public hatred and enmity” after publishing a cartoon that authorities claim depicted Muhammad, the founder of Islam. The cartoon, which LeMan insists was misinterpreted and meant to highlight the suffering of a Muslim man killed in Israeli attacks, showed two figures shaking hands in the sky while missiles flew below, symbolizing peace amidst conflict. Turkish officials condemned the cartoon, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said “those who insult the Prophet and other messengers will be held accountable before the law.”

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Today, Planned Parenthood challenged the constitutionality of the Big Beautiful Bill, which cuts funding for the organization. Planned Parenthood chose the District of Massachusetts. The Motion for a TRO was fifty-three pages long. According to press reports, the District Court granted the ex parte TRO within a few hours. (ECF should really start including time stamps, now that the Supreme Court has ruled constructive denials can be measured in minutes.)

Was this even enough time to read the entire brief? To consider it? To give it some thought? Or was this just a reflexive TRO that was granted because the Defendant is the Trump Administration? We saw a similar immediate TRO granted by another Federal District Court Judge in Boston who ruled in favor of Harvard, without any opportunity to actually review the pleadings. Then again, when the Supreme Court holds that District Courts are deemed to constructively deny TROs when they don’t rule in a few hours, lower courts take notice. There are no Denny’s in Boston. But for those curious, the one Denny’s in Lubbock is open 24×7.

You can tell the Judge in the Planned Parenthood case rushed. The order didn’t even address any of the usual factors. There was zero analysis whatsoever. I don’t see how this is a valid TRO. You need to at least gesture to the four factors.

Worse still, this was a TRO not of an executive action, but of an actual statute that passed bicameralism and presentment. And the judge ordered the executive branch to appropriate money that was expressly unappropriated.

Defendants, their agents, employees, appointees, successors, and anyone acting in concert or participation with Defendants shall take all steps necessary to ensure that Medicaid funding continues to be disbursed in the customary manner and timeframes to Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its members; Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts; and Planned Parenthood Association of Utah.

This is basically an administrative stay of an appropriations statute!

It is not even clear the court’s equitable powers supports such a remedy.

The TRO also requires the expenditure of funds not authorized by Congress, in violation of the Appropriations Clause. And SCOTUS held in OPM v Richmond (1990) that not even a court's equitable powers can overcome that bar.

— Trent McCotter (@TrentMcCotter) July 8, 2025

Lower court judges are misbehaving. The Supreme Court sent a clear signal on universal injunctions. I think a similar message needs to be sent about ex parte TROs. You should at least take enough time to “pretend” to read the complaint.

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So alleges Retraction Watch (Rita Aksenfeld):

Based on a tip from a reader, we checked 18 of the 46 citations in the book {Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced}. Two-thirds of them either did not exist or had substantial errors….

The book’s author, Govindakumar Madhavan, asked for an additional “week or two” to fully respond to our request for comment. He did not answer our questions asking if he used an LLM to generate text for the book. However, he told us, “reliably determining whether content (or an issue) is AI generated remains a challenge, as even human-written text can appear ‘AI-like.’ This challenge is only expected to grow, as LLMs … continue to advance in fluency and sophistication.” …

When asked about the potential use of AI in the work, [Springer Nature senior communications manager Felicitas] Behrendt told us: “We are aware of the text and are currently looking into it.” She did not comment on efforts taken during Springer Nature’s editorial process to ensure its AI policies are followed….

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Last week, I submitted a comment to the Supreme Court of Texas. In short, I argued that SCOTX should discount the opinions of the law school deans, as they do not represent the public interest. I’ve now reviewed the letter signed by deans from eight law schools, including my own. With respect, I did not find this letter very persuasive. Indeed, if this is the best the law deans can muster, then SCOTX should seriously reconsider what value the ABA provides. By contrast, the letter from University of Texas Dean Bobby Chesney offers a candid and realistic assessment of the costs and benefits of the ABA.

Let’s walk through the primary letter, which I suspect was drafted by Dean Leonard Baynes at the University of Houston Law Center. (As a general rule, the lead signature usually belongs to the primary mover.)

First, the letter states that the ABA provides a “baseline of educational quality that correlates with higher bar passage rates.” Baylor Law School, which signed the letter, consistently leads the state with a bar passage rate over 90%. Other schools that signed the letter routinely have a passage rate in the 70% range. Does anyone think that the ABA accreditation provides a “baseline” to determine bar passage? No. Bar passage is a combination of incoming class credentials, combined with the “secret sauce.” The ABA does require that law schools maintain a minimum level of bar passage. The Supreme Court of Texas could easily impose the same requirement.

Second, the letter contends that removing the ABA’s role would harm “the unserved and underrepresented, exacerbating existing access to justice challenges in Texas.” Quite the opposite. The ABA is a cartel, which creates massive barriers to entry, and increases the cost of legal education. There are currently no law schools in the Rio Grande Valley, parts of East and West Texas, and the Panhandle. Those markets could be served through innovative approaches. If SCOTX moved on from the ABA, law schools could innovate, and there would be more opportunities to promote access to justice.

Third, the Deans actually complain that removing the ABA’s role would make it harder for U.S. News to calculate rankings. This argument may seem persuasive to Deans, but I doubt the Supreme Court of Texas will care much about what a (former) magazine publishes. And it wouldn’t be hard for SCOTX to require law schools in Texas to publish these numbers. Indeed, I agree with Seth Chandler that accreditation should move to a formula based on such outputs.

Fourth, the Deans assure SCOTX that the DEI standards are “suspended” Yet, after Students for Fair Admissions, but before Trump’s elections, many of these Deans vigorously defended the DEI standards. I am not at all confident the ABA can be trusted if the Damoclean sword is eliminated.

At bottom, all the Deans have to rely on is portability. They worry that students who do not plan to practice in Texas will not attend their schools. But as I explained in my comment, accommodating the needs of students who wish to leave Texas is not exactly in the best interest of Texas.

I think a far better statement comes from UT Law Dean, Bobby Chesney. (It does not seem the Dean of Texas A&M submitted a letter). Chesney explains how the ABA’s standards do not simply set a minimum baseline, but instead tries to impose “best practices.” For example, the current “experiential learning” rule would impose handcuffs on law schools:

Even so, when the ABA Standards not long ago were amended to require every law school to change their graduation requirements such that every student (no matter their career goals and no matter the school’s resources) must spend at least six of their credits taking experiential courses, it seemed to many to be an example of the Council growing increasingly comfortable imposing its conception of best practices rather than confining itself to policing the baseline adequacy of the schools. But that original intervention was minor compared to the proposed expansion of this rule currently on the table.

Chesney closes with a call for change:

From that perspective, a well-designed alternative pathway should turn on an intentionally-parsimonious set of benchmarks for baseline adequacy, thus leaving maximum room for innovation. If well chosen, those benchmarks might actually be relatively administrable. They might consist, for example, of relatively-objective input measures such as the credits and particular courses required for graduation, the quantity and qualifications of the faculty, grading policies, etc. But in the spirit of innovation, they probably should as much or more emphasize outcome measures, especially bar passage, employment percentages, and cost-to-salary ratios.

One could err on the side of taking great risk in this way, in hopes of unleashing exciting innovations. Or one could err the other way, cracking the door open only to a limited degree by keeping the benchmarks (particularly requisite bar passage levels) demanding. Either way, however, it would be fascinating to see what might arise should the Court reopen such a pathway given the current climate of innovation, change, and cost concerns. I hope the Court will give some version of it a shot; it seems the Texas thing to do.

I agree with Chesney.

The post The Texas Law Deans Provide A Weak Defense of the ABA's Accreditation Role appeared first on Reason.com.

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This week, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Reason reporter Eric Boehm unpack the passage of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, focusing on its tax carve-outs, special-interest subsidies, and what happens when key provisions expire in 2028. They also examine the potential fallout from Trump’s looming trade deadline with the European Union, answer a listener question about the legality of masked federal law enforcement, and discuss the viability of Elon Musk launching a new political party.

0:00—America is still the greatest country on earth

6:18—The One Big Beautiful Bill becomes law

12:39—Medicaid cuts and what they mean

20:51—Sunset clauses will cause more instability

33:33—Listener question on masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents

42:16—Elon Musk announces new third party

49:47—Weekly cultural recommendations

Mentioned in This Podcast

“The Secret Police Are Here,” by Mike Brock

“Errol Morris and Jacob Soboroff: Trump’s Immigration Policies Are Indefensible,” by Nick Gillespie

Upcoming Reason Events

The Reason Roundtable Live in NYC! July 15

The Soho Forum Debate: Jacob Hacker vs. David Goldhill, July 16

 

Today’s Sponsors:

Future of Freedom: If you’re tired of cable news debates and Twitter shouting matches, and you’re looking for serious, good-faith conversations between people who actually care about liberty then it’s time to check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Each episode dives deep into a single topic—tariffs, campus speech, the Department of Government Efficiency—and brings together two guests who disagree on the best path forward. But here’s the twist: This isn’t a debate show. No interrupting. No dunking. If you believe the future of freedom depends on more than just winning arguments and you’re ready for something deeper than the usual echo chambers, check out the Future of Freedom podcast. Real disagreement. Real ideas. Real conversations. Subscribe to Future of Freedom wherever you get your podcasts.

• Producer: Paul Alexander
• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

The post The Insanity of Trump's Big Beautiful Bill appeared first on Reason.com.

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It’s a news cycle as old as the weather.

A terrible natural disaster results in the loss of life and property.

The chattering classes immediately begin to heap blame on their political enemies for bringing about the disaster, while partisans on the other side insist that they are blameless.

Initial comments from officials—who often have an interest in defending the performance of their agency—are taken at face value or taken out of context.

Such has been the case with the weekend’s flash floods in central Texas, which have reportedly killed 94 people thus far, including (tragically) dozens of children at a summer camp along the Guadalupe River.

In the immediate aftermath, some local and state officials in Texas were quick to point the finger at the federal National Weather Service (NWS), whose initial forecasts from earlier in the week predicted much less rain than the region ended up getting.

This criticism was accepted by liberal commentators and Democratic elected officials, who in turn blamed faulty NWS forecasts on the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency cuts to the agency, which did leave some local Texas NWS positions unfilled.

Trump & Musk gutted the National Weather Service. The result was predictable: A bad forecast leading to the death of children in a horrific flood. https://t.co/OCqTwRSsGi

— Senator Scott Wiener (@Scott_Wiener) July 5, 2025

Do you think the Warning Coordination Meteorologist position at the Austin/San Antonio office was important?

He left in April as part of the DOGE cuts which offered early retirement to reduce the workforce. It’s now vacant, part of the strategy of reducing staff through… pic.twitter.com/AVe4joUqCm

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) July 5, 2025

The Warming Coordination Specialist in the Austin/San Antonio area was forced into early retirement by Trump and Elon’s DOGE firings.

Via @ryangrim pic.twitter.com/vDwqcl5FPJ

— Rachel Bitecofer ???????? (@RachelBitecofer) July 6, 2025

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.)  has called for a probe into whether cuts to the NWS played a role in the weekend’s disaster.

NWS has contradicted claims that it was understaffed in the run-up to the weekend’s floods.

“We had adequate staffing. We had adequate technology,” Greg Waller, service coordination hydrologist with the NWS West Gulf River Forecast Center in Fort Worth, told The Texas Tribune. An official with the NWS union also told the Tribune that local staffing was adequate to provide timely warnings.

Independent meteorologists have also defended NWS’s performance.

Texas meteorologist Matt Lanza writes on his Substack that “we have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that current staffing or budget issues within [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and the NWS played any role at all in this event.”

Lanza writes that while federal officials’ weather modeling and forecasts of rains from earlier in the week underpredicted the eventual flooding, these models and warnings were also periodically revised upwards in advance of Friday’s flood.

The timeline of NWS warnings also shows that it was providing advance notice of increasingly dangerous conditions in the areas that eventually experienced flash flooding.

The agency issued a flood watch on Thursday afternoon, a flash flood warning by 1 a.m. on Friday (about an hour after rains started), and a flash flood emergency urging evacuations at around 4 a.m.—about an hour before the most serious flooding occurred.

There did appear to be some delays when those NWS warnings were transmitted to the public via social media by local officials.

Lanza says that the weekend’s tragic deaths from the flood resulted not from inadequate advance warning, but seemingly rather from people on the ground not responding fast enough to the warnings they were receiving.

“I think we need to focus our attention on how people in these types of locations receive warnings. This seems to be where the breakdown occurred,” he writes on his Substack.

Getting people to respond quickly and appropriately to flash flood warnings, Lanza notes, is a difficult task, especially given that the weekend’s flood occurred in the wee hours of the morning when most people are inside and asleep. That means they were less likely to see text warnings of the impending disaster.

More generally, meteorologists who spoke to Wired stressed that precisely predicting how much rain will fall from a thunderstorm, and where it will fall, is extremely difficult. There’s always some element of chance involved.

That complicates when to warn people of potential flooding. It also makes it harder to get people to take flood warnings seriously.

More frequent and more ubiquitous extreme weather warnings can backfire, as anyone who’s ever ignored a “tornado” or “flash flood” text alert on their phone should be able to appreciate.

The more warnings one receives about a disaster that doesn’t end up happening, the less likely they are to take the next warning seriously.

It’s worth noting, too, that even given central Texas’ history of flash floods, the weekend’s floods were still an outlier event.

As one meteorologist told Wired, the amount of rainfall central Texas witnessed in a six-hour period exceeded the 1,000-year rainfall rate, meaning there’s less than a 0.1 percent chance of that happening in a given year.

Even the best emergency management systems will struggle with outlier events like that.

The Texas floods are, in that sense, reminiscent of the Los Angeles wildfires from earlier this year. Just as central Texas floods with relative frequency, so too does the Los Angeles hinterlands burn with relative frequency.

Like the weekend’s flooding, this year’s L.A. fires were more severe than normal, and thus caught people off-guard and overtaxed the systems designed to prevent and respond to them.

In the aftermath of California’s fires, it was largely conservatives blaming various liberal policies for the loss of life and property.

And yet, as I wrote in the aftermath of the fires, the real culprit was bad weather, not bad public policy.

In a general sense, better public land management, better urban planning, and better insurance regulations could lessen the destruction from California wildfires. None of those things would have stopped 100-mile-an-hour winds from blowing burning embers into urban neighborhoods that have been standing for nearly a century.

Likewise, advance weather warnings, better local responsiveness, and more weather sirens can all reduce the death and destruction from flash floods. They can only do so much in the face of a 1,000-year flood that causes a river to rise 30 feet in a few hours in the middle of the night during the prime recreation season.

At the end of the day, people will pay a premium to live in the California woods, even if there’s the off-hand risk that a wildfire will burn their house down. Similarly, people like to camp and recreate next to rivers during a hot Texas summer, even if there’s a small risk of a flash flood.

The fact that the Trump administration’s cuts to NWS didn’t affect this most recent disaster in Texas doesn’t tell us much about the wisdom of those cuts.

One could argue the agency is functioning well, despite having fewer staff, and that’s proof that there was fat to cut at NWS.

Meteorologists in the media have countered that the Texas disaster shows how important a fully staffed NWS is for providing advance warning of impending disasters. Cuts to the agency could leave it under-resourced for future disasters.

It’s a worthwhile policy discussion to have. It’s not one we’re having in the aftermath of the weekend’s tragic floods.

The post The Texas Floods Were a Natural Disaster, Not a Policy Disaster appeared first on Reason.com.

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For more than a decade, it seems that different rules apply to Obamacare cases. In NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), a penalty was rewritten into a tax, and a mandatory Medicaid expansion was rewritten into a voluntary program. In King v. Burwell (2014), “established by the State” was rewritten as “established by the federal government.” In California v. Texas (2021), the Court found that the plaintiffs waived a standing argument that was clearly invoked. And so on. When health care is at issue, all the usual rules go out the window.

The latest ACA case continues the trend. Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, Inc. is an Appointments Clause case. Yet, the Court resolves this dispute based on a theory not developed below. Justice Thomas’s dissent explains what happened:

This case concerns the U. S. Preventive Services Task Force, a body that issues legally binding recommendations regarding preventive healthcare treatments. At the beginning of this suit, a subordinate official within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had for years appointed the Task Force’s members. Everyone now agrees that this practice was unlawful. Everyone further agrees that no one statute provides for a department head to appoint the Task Force’s members. But, rather than accept that the default mode of appointment applies, the Government invented a new theory on appeal, arguing that the combination of two ambiguously worded statutes enacted decades apart establishes that the Secretary of HHS can appoint the Task Force’s members. The Court today rushes to embrace this theory. I cannot. To begin with, I would not rule on the Government’s new theory before any lower court has done so.

Thomas writes that two questions are presented, but the Fifth Circuit only considered the latter question:

I would remand for the Fifth Circuit to consider the important threshold question that it skipped: whether the Secretary has the statutory power to appoint the Task Force. The Secretary may appoint the Task Force’s members only if (1) Congress has vested in the Secretary the power to appoint them, and (2) the members are inferior officers under the Appointments Clause. The answer to the first question significantly affects the analysis of the second question. But, no court has passed on the first question, and this Court has had only a limited opportunity to consider it.

And the novel theory the Court relied on was based on the Reorganization Plan of 1966 (not a statute). This Plan could not vest the Executive with new powers that did not exist in 1966. Yet, that is exactly what the government argued here.

Thomas explains:

Here, the purpose of a “reorganization” plan is to “give a definite and orderly structure to” a department’s existingfunctions, not to create new functions that a departmentcannot otherwise lawfully perform. Oxford English Dictionary 923–924 (2d ed. 1989) (defining “organize”). A plan may not, “under the guise of consolidating and rearranging, . . . creat[e] authority in the Executive Branch which had not existed before.” Dept. of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel,Memorandum of William H. Rehnquist, Assistant Atty.Gen. (Sept. 11, 1969), in Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1969 (ICC): Hearing before the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, 91st Cong., 1st Sess., 29 (1969) (Rehnquist Memorandum). Yet, that is precisely what the Government’sreading accomplishes, since, without the ReorganizationPlan, the Executive has no power to appoint the Task Force outside the gauntlet of Senate confirmation.

Seth Barrett Tillman and I wrote about the Rehnquist opinion here.

Justice Thomas also gets a good dig in about how Justice Kavanaugh focus on executive branch practice:

The intervening passage of the ACA also makes the majority’s appeals to “consistent Executive Branch practice” fall flat. Ante, at 31 (citing Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U. S. 369, 394 (2024)).The Government concedes that its practice from 2010 until its appeal inthis suit was for the AHRQ Director to appoint Task Force members invalidly, based on the mistaken view that the members were not officers. See Brief for Federal Defendants in Braidwood Mgmt., Inc., No. 23– 10326 (CA5), ECF Doc. 159, pp. 31, n. 2, 41. The practice thus sheds no light on whether the Director’s convening power constitutes an express vesting of appointment authority that overcomes the constitutional default. And, surely this Court did not overrule Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U. S. 837 (1984), only to defer to concededly unlawful executive action.

There is a big problem with Justice Kavanaugh’s fixation on tradition. At bottom, it is a deference doctrine, where unlawful conduct can become lawful if it continues.

In the normal course, the Supreme Court would have remanded the case to the lower court. But it seemed pretty clear that the Supreme Court did not want to give the Fifth Circuit another crack at this case, so the majority went ahead and decided this novel issue from scratch.

Here is your regular reminder that President Trump could have, but didn’t, elevate his Fifth Circuit appointees to the Supreme Court.

The post SCOTUS Bends The Law In Yet Another Obamacare Case appeared first on Reason.com.

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