‍For those of us who are both Supreme Court watchers and World Cup fans, there was an odd convergence of worlds with the hand-down of Trump v. Barbara on June 30, 2026, the last day of the Supreme Court’s annual Term, and the United States Men’s National Soccer Team’s trials and tribulations that took place during the following week. With a red card suspension slated to sideline the U.S. Team’s star forward Folarin Balogun from their Round of 16 World Cup match against Belgium, President Donald Trump picked up the phone to call his friend Gianni Infantino, head of FIFA, the World Cup organizer. By President Trump’s own telling, he urged Infantino to set aside Balogun’s suspension and let him play. Hours later, that is precisely what happened. The President then posted on Truth Social, “Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!” The irony was more than a little rich. Balogun was born in New York City in 2001 when his mother traveled there to visit her sister and was then refused boarding on her return flight due to her advanced pregnancy. But under Executive Order 14160, which President Trump issued as his first act in office of his second White House term on January 20, 2025, the circumstances of Balogun’s birth would render him ineligible for United States citizenship.

‍In a stunning expansion of presidential powers, the Supreme Court in Trump v. Slaughter overruled a ninety-year-old precedent and held that Congress cannot limit the President’s power to remove heads of federal agencies. This is a major lessening of checks and balances and again shows the six conservative justices’ disregard for even long-standing precedents. In this essay, I initially summarize Humphrey’s Executor, which was overruled in Trump v. Slaughter, and its progeny, before examining the consequences of its overruling in Slaughter, particularly as it relates to presidential power.

‍Pretextualism—the use of formalistic legal logic to mask unstated motives under a misleading cover story—has a long, troubling pedigree in American jurisprudence. Louisiana v. Callais exemplifies its modern revival. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for a six-justice majority, deployed this deceptive methodology to dismantle the final remnants of the nation’s most consequential civil rights law. Pretextualism has been baked into Supreme Court decision-making from the institution’s earliest days to its more recent controversies. While history is full of examples, pretextualism is especially salient today because the Trump administration deploys it so rampantly. The Supreme Court’s historical reliance on pretext, combined with its recent reluctance to confront executive deception, paved the way for the Court’s revival of pretextualism in Louisiana v. Callais.

Brokering Safety identifies a failure of privacy law: the tendency to allocate responsibility to individuals through opt-out and deletion rights, even as informational harm is generated by distributed systems capable of reconstructing, predicting, and targeting individuals over time. Privacy self-management fails, the Article shows, because the law has assigned them a task that the architecture of the data broker ecosystem made impossible. By grounding its critique in system design, Brokering Safety reframes the problem at the right level of analysis and points toward a corresponding solution: redistribution of responsibility from individuals to the institutional actors who generate exposure at scale. This comment builds on a mechanism in the Brokering Safety analysis. That mechanism is inference: the capacity of distributed systems to generate reliable, actionable knowledge about individuals by aggregating and recombining incomplete, loosely related data. This mechanism strengthens the centralized obscurity proposal by clarifying that the inadequacy of existing regimes reflects a category error: regulating transactions in data rather than the production of knowledge.

‍Companies in the networked information economy collect personal data to provide their services. Businesses are also always keen to develop other ways to monetize this consumer information. A handful of the largest leverage their platforms to serve content or ads on behalf of paying advertisers. After all, many companies are willing to pay handsomely for targeted access to potential buyers across devices. Others sell the data to third parties who find further commercial uses for it. Current legal doctrine allows this last category—data brokers—to sell or license personal data although they are not the ones to collect it from consumers. Meanwhile, most people do not know or understand these background deals and practices, even when they consent to them. Most consumers feel that they have no choice but to click yes and accept the terms of service. To put it starkly: the prevailing regulatory approach in the United States has effectively normalized data exposure.

‍Tragically, U.S. privacy law has neglected to address a significant dimension of privacy. While lawmakers and judges have routinely recognized intrusions into our secluded spaces and breaches of our confidentiality and secrecy, they have largely failed to protect our most common yet also our most underappreciated form of privacy: the practical obscurity that allows us to live freely and with dignity. Obscurity, which is the state of protection that arises when personal information is difficult for some people to obtain or correctly interpret, serves several vital interests: (1) it safeguards our ability to express ourselves without fear that everything we say could be used against us; (2) it enables us to participate in key democratic processes like protesting without the government recording our opposition in a database; and (3) it allows us to form intimate relationships where we selectively share what is on our minds and in our hearts. Ultimately, obscurity provides the “breathing room” we need pursue self-development or establish healthy boundaries with others.

In January 2026, right after overthrowing the President of Venezuela but just before launching a war with Iran, the Trump Administration ramped up its efforts to annex Greenland. During this period, President Trump’s rhetoric surrounding the Danish territory reached a fever pitch, with erratic threats of both a military invasion of Greenland and the imposition of tariffs on European goods. On January 17, in response to a near-unanimous opposition by European countries to the proposed annexation, President Trump threatened several European states with blanket 10 percent tariffs starting on February 1, 2026, which would quickly increase to 25 percent on June 1, 2026. He posted on Truth Social that these increased tariffs would be effective until the United States reached a deal for the “Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

To the public, Learning Resources v. Trump was a fierce condemnation by the Roberts Court of President Donald Trump’s brash assertions of constitutional power. The Supreme Court flatly rejected the claim that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) provision empowering the President to “regulate . . . importation” in the face of emergency unlocked tariff powers. The New York Times pronounced the decision as a “Declaration of Independence” by the high court. Slate praised the thirteen pages of the Chief’s opinion backed by a majority as “a withering rebuke . . . [a] crisp, confident opinion.” But if you look deeper—for instance, at the remaining 157 pages—it becomes clear that the Court’s conservative majority experienced a catastrophic meltdown.