Commencement Address To The 2024 Twitter Law School Graduates

The National Review, To the 2024 Twitter Law School Graduates:

A valedictory message to those learned minds whose legal education consists entirely of scrolling through Twitter.

Dear students, faculty, and anonymous trolls:

Congratulations on finally graduating from Twitter Law School. What a long trip it’s been, huh? After 30 full minutes of coursework and reading three sentences of a Sonia Sotomayor dissent, you have finally achieved the best legal education the zero dollars you have invested can purchase. Just think, when you started your journey, Sabrina Carpenter’s espresso was still hot!

Here at TLS, you have no doubt sharpened your skills at social-media-based legal punditry, and without the hassle of actually learning anything about the law. After all, there is a new season of The Bear out, so who has time to read all that law-talking stuff?

You have no doubt learned from the best Twitter lawyers that when an opinion comes out, it is important to skip right to the holding, then make wild generalizations about the sole sentence you have read. Remember, the first person to post about a case is always the most right, and thus most entitled to performative, smug outrage.

And if it is an opinion that makes you sad, you must immediately scroll down to the dissents, pluck out the most sensational lines, then make them sound as if no justice has ever dished up a more vinegary dish in a legal document.

It doesn’t matter if the dissent is buffoonish; at Twitter U, you decide what constitutes reality, because it is entirely too much work to check and see if the point you love in the dissent is actually addressed in the Court’s opinion. (And yes, I understand a movement is under way to change the name to “X U,” but the Court has ruled we can still refer to it as “Twitter,” perhaps its best decision of the term.) ...

But Twitter Law School 101 teaches that you must not even pretend there is a counterpoint to a sensational charge, lest people believe you to be a reasonable person willing to devote time to reading judicial opinions. Why offer boring takes when you’ll see more reward simply by feeling it more intensely than everyone else. ...

Listening to this speech has already taken up more time than you spent considering the legal consequences of the Trump immunity case, so I will wrap this up. The less time you spend listening to me, the more time you can spend arguing that the Court’s thoughts on immunity are similar to what led Hitler to take power in Germany or that this July 4 is the last one Americans may ever celebrate. Always remember — the bullsh** has to be so intense that it’s as if the bull spent a week eating the feces of another animal before turning it into a waste product of its own.

So go forth, young Twitter scholars. Here’s to your future success when another remotely contentious court case needs widespread misunderstanding.

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