A short observation, if I may, about this, the first pagan administration in American history. My text, ironically, is taken from the Book of the White House Twitter Account. (The irony is not just that the love of book-learnin’ grows scarcer the closer one gets to the top of the org chart of the current executive branch. It’s that a culture that reduces itself, stylistically, argumentatively, and in terms of time and resource allocation to a tweet adorned by an off-the-rack meme or AI-generated picture will erase more actual and potential books than a stadium full of Savonarolas. The charge of cultural and intellectual degeneracy hardly exempts academics and intellectuals, whose time allocation, online behavior, podcast promiscuity, and general revealed preferences suggest a relationship to the life of the mind roughly equivalent to Onan’s relationship to fatherhood.) The White House account has a tweet up, possibly marking the yearlong semidivine rites of the Trump Birthday Plus American Semiquincentennial. It reads:

The Revolution that began in 1776 has not ended—it still continues, because the flame of Liberty and Independence still burns in the hearts of EVERY American Patriot.

And our future will be bigger, better, brighter, bolder, and more glorious than ever before.

I don’t wish to pick on the fact that it’s kitschy, junky stuff, with pointless random capitalization. Of course, I refuse to ignore that fact. But so, minus the oddly Germanic capitalization practices, is most of the ceremonial or propagandistic language produced by all modern White Houses. (Viz., the white-bread staleness and vaguely desperate optimism–“Make no mistake, our best days still lie ahead”–of a Biden White House Independence Day tweet, chosen at random, from 2022.) Hackery is expected, if not obligatory.

What I want to suggest, in line with the paganism, is that it is so distinctly, if so very badly, ancient Roman in its approach, so second-string-court-poet-to-the-Emperor. One needn’t look very far to find many “intellectual” clients and beneficiaries of the Trump/Vance court drawing on and trumpeting a return to the works and values of ancient Greece and Rome. It’s thick on the ground. My personal favorite example, for sheer servility and gall, is this American Greatness column by famous trivia question Roger Kimball, in which he struggles, manfully but visibly, to justify the claim that Donald J. Trump embodies the Aristotelian virtues.

But what finally struck me, on reading the Ozymandian business above, is the conspicuous missing ingredient. It occurs to me that what is unique, uniquely fascinating, and bitingly hilarious about the particular Greco-Roman brand of paganism that characterizes the regime and its publicists is that it wants to recall the heights and glories of ancient Greek and Roman literature–minus Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca the Younger, Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, Juvenal, Plutarch, Livy, Cicero (if read honestly), Theophrastus, Hesiod, Homer except for the bloody bits, and every other classical writer who wrote about tragedy and the perils of hubris, arrogance, corruption, and vainglory.

“Iran is the most dangerous gatekeeper of the non-nuclear world, and if the nonproliferation regime is to be maintained, the U.S. must be willing to expend great effort to prevent Iran from acquiring the Bomb.”

Who wrote this? I did, in my 1995 undergraduate thesis. Back then, I thought about pursuing a career in the Foreign Service. My thesis on Iran’s post-1979 foreign policy.

Does the 2026 version of me agree with the 1995 version? Yes I do. Though I would reject much of what I did thirty years, starting with my wardrobe.

I’m looking for a good book or article on the history of Title IX. If you have any suggestions, please email me. Thanks.

This is a guest post from Jeff Bellin, the Lee S. and Charles A. Speir Chair in Law at Vanderbilt

A recent social media post listing the annual revenue of major academic publishers (spoiler alert: gargantuan!) reminded me of an issue that gets surprisingly little attention given its importance to legal education: casebook selection. I have a forthcoming symposium essay on this topic: The High Cost of Law School Casebooks which starts with an economic puzzle:

• Low-cost, self-published casebooks are increasingly available. (Check out this great list organized by subject matter for options in your field!)
  • High-priced commercial casebooks continue to dominate. 

The essay offers some explanations:

• “Safe” Selection The most important casebook selection moment occurs early in a professor’s career when they are incentivized to select the “safest” casebooks, generally the book they used in law school (i.e., Harvard or Yale) and/or used or authored by their mentors and colleagues. These books are typically “published by the handful of established academic presses who set the highest prices.”
• Market Distortion “[T]he people who pay for the books (students) are different from the people who choose the books (professors). And the people who set the price (publishers) are different still.” Professors may not even be aware of the high costs and pricing models, with many books now priced over $300 and publishers offering enhanced casebooks at even higher prices.
• Quality Matters Most Casebooks are tremendously important to a course (and a field) and that means quality, not price or even value, is the deciding factor: “A casebook’s merits should be the most important selection criterion.”
• Casebook Selection Inertia Initial choices are sticky, determining not just the adopter’s choice for years to come but also the choices of those who follow their path. “[C]asebook selections are strongly influenced by the casebook selections of the past.”

The Essay concludes by emphasizing that since quality, and especially the perception of quality – becoming the “safe choice” – is the key to broad adoption, free casebooks are not the solution and could even cause new problems.

“[A]uthoring a great casebook is hard, ongoing work—unfolding over decades—especially if one self-publishes the book, which is currently the only viable route to a low price. Casebooks require regular updates and new editions. Someone needs to send out review copies and respond to accommodation requests. There is endless checking for and fixing errors and reviewing proofs. Proofs themselves cost money. It is possible that some professors will take this on as a pure public service. But professors are people. And people respond to incentives. If we want the most experienced and insightful law professors to author great low-cost casebooks, we should incentivize them. One possibility is that law schools could meaningfully reward casebook authorship, but until that occurs, the broad spread between casebook costs and price leaves room for an alternative incentive: a modest royalty…. Law school casebooks should not cost $300. But they also cannot (sustainably) be free.”

Curious to hear others’ thoughts via email or comments. 

Full disclosure: My interest in this topic arose from authoring a widely adopted ($35) Evidence casebook and a less-widely-adopted-but-still-great ($35) Criminal Procedure: Investigations casebook.

As part of a program I’ll be doing this summer, I read Gideon’s Trumpet for the first time since I was a student. It holds up well. Though its description of the Supreme Court’s process is dated, the book is still an excellent introduction to constitutional cases for a layperson or a law student.

One tidbit: I had forgotten that John Hart Ely worked on the case as a summer associate.