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I just got an ARC of this and I am beside myself. Allow Me to Retort was one of the best books I've ever read about the US Constitution.

ETA, now that I've finished the book --

The Thing About Elie Mystal is that he has the biggest pottymouth and the wickedest sense of humor of any legal commentator anywhere in the multiverse. He's also brilliant. Like "Allow Me to Retort," "Bad Law" skewers a legal system that, instead of working to protect us, perpetuates white supremacism, male supremacism, heteronormativity, transphobia, etc. etc. (By the way, "us" in that sentence naturally includes quite a lot of people who don't seem to know it.)

I could have predicted some of Mystal's targets: "Don't Say Gay" laws; abortion bans; "stand your ground" laws and the Second Amendment. Others hadn't occurred to me but seemed obvious once he pointed them out -- voter registration, for instance. Mystal describes how registration requirements effectively disenfranchise many people and says, flatly, "If you live somewhere, you should have a say in how you are governed, regardless of where you were born or how much money you have." (He doesn't say "and regardless of citizenship," but I'm pretty sure he would if you asked him.)

The government can determine who is eligible to vote based on lists it already has, including the census. All voters who are eligible that the government knows about are registered. All those who are eligible that the government doesn’t know about are presumptively registered, unless information is produced that they are not eligible. The end. That’s how it’s done in most of the rest of the world.

That last is kind of the kicker for me -- I wonder how many people in one country are aware of how voting is handled in other countries. (I do assume that "voting" in places like Russia, China, and Hungary is not meaningful as Mystal and I would like voting to be.)

Felony murder! I've been to law school and I like to conceive of myself as someone sensitive to the oppressive qualities of the US criminal "justice" system, but had I ever thought through the implications of felony murder statutes, especially as combined with three-strikes sentencing requirements? Quick explanation: basically, if you're involved in a felony and someone gets killed in the course of the felony, you're guilty of murder even if you didn't have a weapon and had nothing to do with the actual killing.

What do you know, it turns out that felony murder statutes penalize victims of domestic violence (because they may be coerced into participation, for example driving a getaway car) and also help underpin the cops' shoot-'em-up license (say you're fleeing the cops and they get a-shooting and kill a bystander, you've committed felony murder; you can see how this doesn't encourage cops to keep their weapons holstered).

I highlighted dozens and dozens of passages in "Bad Law" -- pithy ones, funny ones, sharp-tongued ones, and so many insults.

Jonathan Mitchell, a Republican fetus whisperer

Wherever neoliberals go, the story always stays the same: labor gets hollowed out, monopolies emerge, service gets worse, and consumer protections disappear.

... entire swaths of Americans consider the Constitution to be made up of the Second Amendment plus a whole bunch of “woke,� “liberal� sissy-ass  suggestions.

The most “woke� elementary school in the world (and the school my kids go to would be in the running for such an honorific) is not sensitizing kids to LGBTQ issues by teaching math through the operation of adding partners with a double-ended dildo.

Mystal suggests ways in which terrible laws can be changed; whether any of those means will work under present circumstances seems like a long shot. Something to strive for, or at least a pleasant fantasy. It's hard to call this lack a failure or a defect in the book; for one thing, he wrote it before the 2024 election, thus at a time when we could still hope to improve our country rather than just desperately try to salvage what we can of it.

May the Flying Spaghetti Monster bless and keep this man. Please read his book.

Thanks to Edelweiss and the New Press for the ARC.