Op-eds, Speeches and Other Writings

Interview with Peter Salovey and Robert Post, The First Amendment in the Information Age, October 4, 2021 (podcast)

Interview with Clay S. Jenkinson, “America’s New Gilded Age: The Cycles of Constitutional Time,” Governing, June 12, 2021

Facebook’s Oversight Board was supposed to let Facebook off the hook. It didn’t. (with Kate Klonick), Washington Post, May 6, 2021

The Reagan era never really ended. A Trump loss could change that., Washington Post, November 3, 2020

Obama hoped to be a transformational president. He failed., Vox, January 19, 2017

Trump’s threat to democracy isn’t free speech, it’s this, CNN, November 30, 2016

A Grand Bargain to Make Tech Companies Trustworthy (with Jonathan Zittrain), The Atlantic, October 3, 2016

How liberals can reclaim the Constitution., Washington Post, July 11, 2014

Interview, “Blogging is a way of changing the relations of authority in the public sphere”, Verfassungs Blog, June 2, 2014

Ted Cruz, Leninist, The Atlantic, September 27, 2013

What Congressional Approval Won’t Do: Trim Obama’s Power or Make War Legal, The Atlantic, September 3, 2013

Interview with Francis Wilkinson, Originalism, Scalia and Gay Marriage: An Interview With Jack Balkin, Bloomberg View, March 26, 2013

How Obama Can Prevent Another Debt-Ceiling Crisis, The Atlantic, December 9, 2012

What It Will Take for Barack Obama to Become the Next FDR, The Atlantic, November 1, 2012

Why the GOP Should Fear a Romney Presidency, The Atlantic, October 24, 2012

The Right Strikes Back: A New Legal Challenge for Obamacare, The Altantic, September 17, 2012

The Not-So-Happy Anniversary of the Debt-Ceiling Crisis, The Atlantic, July 31, 2012

Tax power: The little argument that could, CNN, June 30, 2012

The Court Affirms Our Social Contract, The Atlantic, June 29, 2012

That boring old tax argument was always a winner, Slate, June 28, 2012

From Off the Wall to On the Wall: How the Mandate Challenge Went Mainstream, The Atlantic, June 4, 2012

The Health-Care Mandate Is Clearly a Tax—and Therefore Constitutional, The Atlantic, May 4, 2012

How Obama Can Attack the Supreme Court—and Win, The Atlantic, April 12, 2012

The Small Chance the Supreme Court Will Overturn the Health Care Act, The Atlantic, March 21, 2012

3 ways Obama could bypass Congress, CNN, July 28, 2011

Blinkered to Reality, Room for Debate, New York Times, December 13, 2010

Free speech helped avert Quran burning, CNN, September 10, 2010

Creating a National Norm, Room for Debate, New York Times, June 28, 2010

A Tax Like Any Other, Room for Debate, New York Times, March 28, 2010

Remarks at FCC Workshop on Speech, Democratic Engagement, and the Open Internet, Washington, D.C., December 15, 2009, republished on Balkinization, December 16, 2009

Interview with Scott Horton, Six Questions for Jack Balkin on the Entrenchment of the National Surveillance State, Harpers, July 16, 2009

Supreme Court Justices have it too good, The Guardian, May 6, 2009

Jon Stewart and the crisis of journalism, The Guardian, March 17, 2009

A Body of Inquiries, New York Times, January 10, 2009

Appointing Advisers No Fast Task, Atlanta Journal Constitution, November 26, 2008

Obama and the Imperial Presidency, The Guardian, November 12, 2008

What We Hold in Common, Keynote Address, Third Annual Conference on Access to Knowledge, September 8, 2008

With Boumediene, the Court Reaffirmed a Basic Principle, U.S. News and World Report, June 23, 2008

Questions of Justice, New York Times, October 17, 2007

Interview on Blogging and Legal Scholarship with Yale Law Report, Balkinization, February 2, 2007

Should Liberals Stop Defending Roe?, Legal Affairs, November 28th, 2005 (with Sanford Levinson)

Interview with Frontline on Abortion Politics, PBS, September 16, 2005

Alive and Kicking: Why No One Truly Believes in a Dead Constitution. Slate, August 29th, 2005.

A Nominee After Bush’s Own Heart. First published in Newsday, July 21st, 2005.

Justice O’Connor’s Final Defense. First published in the Hartford Courant, July 8th, 2005.

Bush and the Fear Factor. First published in the Hartford Courant, Sunday, November 7th, 2004.

No Blank Check for Bush. First published in the Hartford Courant, Sunday, May 16th, 2004.

The Passionate Intensity of the Confirmation Process, First Published in Jurist, Thursday, April 15th, 2004.

Don’t Use Those Words: Fox News Owns Them. First published in the Los Angeles Times, Thursday, August 14, 2003

A Great Gamble, By a Man Many Don’t Trust, Hartford Courant, March 18, 2003.

A Dreadful Act II, Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2003.

A Ruling the G.O.P. Loves to Hate, New York Times, January 25, 2003.

Actions Speak Louder Than Apologies, Hartford Courant, December 17, 2002.

The Truth About Our Institutions, The Responsive Community, October 2002.

Is there a Slippery Slope from Single-Sex to Single-Race Education? The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Fall 2002.

The Most Dangerous Person on Earth, Hartford Courant, September 22, 2002.

In Giving Up Our Rights, We’d Lose the War, New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 11, 2002

Who’s Next?, Hartford Courant, June 20, 2002

Diversity Offers Everyone a Stake, L.A. Times, May 17, 2002.

History Lesson, Legal Affairs 44-49 (July/August) 2002.

The Cloning Connundrum, New York Times, January 30, 2002     (NYT Article)

Using Our Fears to Justify a Power Grab, L.A. Times, November 29, 2001.

Bush’s Negative Mandate Narrows His Nominees, L.A. Times, January 12, 2001.

How Do We Measure The Will of the People?, L.A. Times, Monday, December 11, 2000.

The Supreme Court Compromises Its Legitimacy, Boston Globe, December 12, 2000.

Eyes, Robots (review of Ken Goldberg, ed, The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, New Republic Online, August 28, 2000. [html (Netmind) html (New Republic Online)]

The Court Defers to a Racist Era, New York Times, May 17, 2000.

An Implosion of Democracy, Boston Globe, January 17, 1999, at C07.

Senate: Return Impeachment Articles to Sender, Los Angeles Times, January 6, 1999.

Book Review of Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music in Performance, Notes 53 (December 1996): 419-23 (with Sanford Levinson).

Book Review of J.H. Schlegel, American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science, Law and History Review, 1996.

Give Us Liberty to Give Them Death?, The Washington Monthly 24-25 (October 1995).

The Constitution as a Box of Chocolates, 12 Const. Comm. 147 (1995).

Book Review of Walker, Hate Speech: The History of an American Controversy, Journal of American History, Oct. 1994.

Book Review of Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU, Public Law, Spring 1992, at 176-77.

Book Note of Arkes, Beyond the Constitution, 102 Ethics 428 (1992).

Book Review of Shiffrin, The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance (1991), Journal of American History, Sept. 1991, at 628.

The Top Ten Reasons to be a Legal Pragmatist, 8 Const. Comm. 351 (1991).