192. "One First" Turns Three!

A look back on the first three years of "One First"; a note of gratitude; and some thoughts on what's next for the newsletter

Welcome back to “One First,” a newsletter that aims to make the U.S. Supreme Court more accessible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. I’m grateful to all of you for your continued support, and I hope that you’ll consider sharing some of what we’re doing with your networks:

The First Three Years of One First

Three years ago today, “One First” went live. Although I do the bulk of the writing, the reality is that this entire operation was actually the brainchild of my wife, Karen. After I finished writing The Shadow Docket in 2022, Karen felt strongly that I needed to be one of the voices out there trying to explain Supreme Court decisions and procedure at a more widely accessible (and more frequent) level. So we spent a bunch of nights after our two daughters went to sleep brainstorming how to pull that off. Karen eventually suggested a periodic newsletter—and, as usual, she was right.

A lot has changed in our lives since then. First, for those who have been following us for a while, we left Texas in 2024 to return back to D.C., where I joined the faculty at Georgetown Law last summer. Karen has continued to thrive professionally, launching Risepoint Search Partners—a legal recruiting firm—at roughly the same time. The newsletter has, ironically, been a constant even as we’ve embarked upon these exciting life changes.

I’ve also been trying to think through other ways of pursuing the same goal of raising the level of public understanding and discourse relating to the Supreme Court—from launching a TikTok to signing on to write a second book about the Court, this time with Viking, which will take a more macro look at the Court, including how we got to where we are today; and how (and why) we should fix it.

And last, our two daughters, who at the time of the launch still seemed so very young, are growing into awesome tweens who make us laugh—and keep us on our toes—every day. Indeed, our younger daughter Sydney remarked the other day that “I can’t believe people actually read that thing” (meaning this newsletter). There’s nothing like young kids—especially daughters—to keep you humble.

Karen says this is a picture from one of our newsletter planning “meetings” in 2022. I’ll take her word for it.

Of course, there’s been even more upheaval out in the world—especially with respect to what I’ve always thought of as the newsletter’s bread-and-butter, i.e., the Supreme Court’s relationship with the other institutions of government and with we, the people. It’s not just that the Court has become ever more of a lightning rod across an ever-broadening array of contemporary legal and political topics; it’s that the Court’s (and the justices’) behavior has become a series of stories unto themselves, from massive shifts in the nature and substance of the Court’s merits docket to the rise of the “don’t call it the shadow docket” docket to concerns about some of the justices’ personal conduct.

A common theme across all of these developments is the Court increasingly turning its back on the idea that it is—and ought to be—accountable to those other institutions. Justice Alito may have been literally incorrect in a July 2023 Wall Street Journal interview in which he claimed that Congress has no power to regulate the Supreme Court, but he was reflecting the zeitgeist—one that has a lot to do with how we got here, and that’s largely invisible to those who see the Court only as the sum of its rulings on the merits docket, as so many conventional accounts of the Court’s output historically have.

We’re never all going to agree about what the Supreme Court is doing, or how it is or should be doing it. But it does seem increasingly indisputable that the Court is regularly having major effects on all of our lives (and our system of government) even away from the cases receiving plenary review. Likewise, it seems increasingly indisputable that we’d all be better off with deeper, more nuanced understandings of its decisions, operations, and history—both to better understand the significance of the current Court’s work and to assess for ourselves the extent to which what we’re seeing right now is unprecedented.

And if that weren’t already clear, Friday night’s intervention by Justice Jackson in the SNAP case may well be Exhibit A for the importance of providing folks with this kind of resource; the post I sent out at 10:30 p.m. Friday has, as of this morning, garnered more than 450,000 views (more than doubling what had been the prior record for a “One First” post). I’ll leave to others whether posts like that one are having a positive effect on the national understanding of the Supreme Court; I’ll just say that, if nothing else, there’s clearly an appetite for that kind of content.

Indeed, if I were to look back on the last three years and ask whether we have accomplished our initial stated goal of “making the Court more accessible to more of us” I have to think that the answer is an unequivocal “yes.” Just this weekend, we passed the 100,000-subscriber mark, and the 366 posts we’ve released over the last three years have, between them, generated more than 17.2 million unique views. If you had told me three years ago we’d be anywhere close to those kinds of numbers today, (1) I would never have believed you; and (2) I would’ve been very worried about what would have to have happened in between (sigh).

Beyond quantitative assessments of how the newsletter has done, it’s also been deeply heartening to see the newsletter cited out in the world—in judicial decisions; legislative materials; and both short- and long-form legal and other academic and popular writing. I’ve likewise benefitted enormously (and hope my students have, as well) from being able to use many of these posts to supplement teaching materials. And it’s been so rewarding and reinforcing to hear, whether in personal conversations or in the lovely e-mails that so many of you have sent me over the transom, about how helpful/useful you’ve found at least some of the posts. I don’t doubt that the volume has led to a bit of a back-issues-of-The New Yorker problem, but my fervent hope is that you’ll always know where to look for relevant updates if and when you have the time.

And that brings me to the most important thing to say on this anniversary:

An Enormous Thank You

All of the views, shares, and feedback are wonderful, but none of it would be possible without YOU—the readers—who have continued to steadfastly support this effort. The moral support has been invaluable, as has been the encouragement you’ve provided in the comments and offline. But I also owe special thanks to those who have been able and willing to spend some of their hard-earned money on a paid subscription. Whether you’ve been a long-time paid subscriber or a brand-new free subscriber, there aren’t enough words to express my gratitude—although I hope you’ll consider the above as at least an opening salvo. I also owe thanks to the two research assistants I’ve relied upon to help with the newsletter over these three years—Alyssa Negvesky (Georgetown Law ‘25) and Grace Kiple (Georgetown Law ‘26). I’m often asked how I’m able to put out so much content in such short order, and a big part of the answer is because I’ve so often been lucky to have great and timely help.

As Karen will tell you, when we started this newsletter, my biggest fear was that we’d eventually run out of content. In fact, the opposite has been true. And as more and more of you have come to rely upon these posts for at least some coverage of the Supreme Court and related topics, it has, perhaps unsurprisingly, come to take up ever more time each week (see, e.g., last week and the five different issues we put out). This has always been a labor of love, but there’s increasingly been an emphasis on the labor part.

That leads me to my one ask: If you’re not already a paid subscriber and have the wherewithal to become one, I hope you’ll consider this third anniversary as a good opportunity/excuse for taking the plunge. And if you’ve been with us since the beginning or somewhere along the way, I hope you’ll renew when the time comes—which may be as early as today for many of you. I’ve done my best, especially recently, to make most of the newsletter’s content available to everyone—and to put only a modest subset of the work behind a paywall. But especially as this has become an ever-more-time-intensive operation, and as the topics I’ve tried to cover have become ever-more significant to all of us, the more of you who are able to provide that kind of support, the more I’ll be able to (try to) keep everyone on top of everything that’s going on.

Finally, I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Karen, without whom I’d be lost at sea in general, and not just when it comes to promoting the newsletter on- and off-line (although she still regularly begs me—correctly—to stop using X completely). She has done far more than her fair share of bedtimes, early-morning school drop-offs, and everything in between so that I could write the newsletter—including one especially infamous episode in which she woke me up early on a Saturday morning because she knew I’d want to write before we had to head out for the day. And while we haven’t had any installments of “Karen’s Corner” in a while, I have hope that it might (i.e., will) make a return appearance or two in 2026.

What’s Next for “One First”

Speaking of 2026, anniversaries are useful milestones not just to reflect upon (and in this case relish a bit in) the past, but also to try to look to the future. At least for the time being, the newsletter won’t be going anywhere. If anything, if things keep up at this pace, it may even be expanding. I also would love to try to do more with “First One,” my (haphazard) effort to have a weekly podcast version of the newsletter that … got overrun by events. Indeed, I had originally set out to write the newsletter twice a week—once for all subscribers and a bonus issue on Thursdays for paid subscribers that would be much more personal (some of the early bonus issues are, in retrospect, quite … specific). But the cadence of the Court and the importance of the moment (to say nothing of the catharsis that this writing has so often provided during times of seemingly existential dread) has left me constantly feeling like I need to write more; it’s hard to imagine that going away anytime soon.

To be sure, I can’t promise that I’ll be able to maintain this pace forever (if for no other reason than because Karen might actually kill me), but I’ll continue to do my best to try to help educate everyone about the Court and the issues surrounding it. If anything, this is becoming ever-more important by the day.

And that brings me to the last thing to say on this third anniversary:

Although this isn’t where the newsletter started, it’s become clear to me that the most pressing issue when it comes to the courts (and the Court) today is the increasingly rapid decline in the public’s confidence in the judiciary—and the implications of that decline for the persistence of the rule of law in our Republic.

This week seems like an especially propitious moment to return to this theme—with the Deputy Attorney General suggesting that the Justice Department is at “war” with lower courts; with increasing tension between lower courts and the Supreme Court; and with a Reagan appointee retiring from the bench entirely so he could speak publicly about, and work to thwart, the “existential threat to democracy and the rule of law” posed by the current administration, especially in its mounting assaults on judicial independence.

As I noted in my anniversary post from last year:

We’re never going to agree on how to fix [the decline in the public’s trust of the courts]—just as we’re not going to agree on exactly what caused that decline in the first place. But to pretend that it isn’t a problem, or that it’s a problem caused only by those who have identified it as a problem, is to bury our heads in the sand. And by the time we pull our heads out and look around, we may not recognize the federal judiciary that’s left.

I’ve dedicated just about all of my professional life to the importance of stable institutions in preserving the rule of law—and, especially, an independent and accountable judiciary. It’s become too easy, in our current climate, for folks to sanction whatever rulings and behavior lead to results of which they approve; to criticize whatever rulings and behavior don’t; and to assume that everyone else is doing the same thing. But I see this newsletter’s signal contribution as helping to make the case, sometimes overtly and sometimes simply through its topical coverage, for preservation of the institutional role of the federal judiciary—even in contexts in which those courts are handing down rulings with which I (sometimes vehemently) disagree.

That might make me a regular target for criticism on certain social media networks; in certain judges’ chambers and government lawyers’ offices; and at the occasional Federalist Society convention; but we didn’t start this newsletter to win any popularity contests. The goal was, is, and will continue to be, to help people better understand the Supreme Court, the federal courts more generally, and the issues surrounding them—not just as an abstract good, but because of my fervent belief that, the more we think about the Court (and the courts) as an institution, the more we might agree on where things have gone wrong and where, how, and why to fix them.

Whether or not you’re already persuaded, I hope you’ll let me keep working at it. And regardless, thanks for three illuminating and rewarding years; here’s to the next three!