An administrative law joke and a disquisition on Judge Richard Leon's use of punctuation. Plus, South American angels exercising their Second Amendment rights!
Claude told me an administrative law joke this morning. Claude and I were discussing the types of questions a query architecture for the system we are building needs to be able to handle. I made a typo. I quipped about it. Claude quipped back.
I report. You decide.
Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Mike Feinberg and I talked Russian literature and culture, Richard Wagner, Rudyard Kipling, and other cultural products you might feel bad about consuming. Then the estimable Anastasiia Lapatina gave us a dispatch from her Kyiv neighborhood, which had been hard hit the previous night by Russian ballistics and drones:
Claude on Judge Leon’s Use of Punctuation
The other day, on Lawfare Live, I presented to the estimable Roger Parloff the results of an important study on a matter of deep public concern: Judge Richard Leon’s use of punctuation.
As you may have read, Judge Leon has been using a lot of exclamatory punctuation of late. And Roger has been following the story carefully—documenting the punctuation mark density in a variety of Judge Leon’s opinions. So I decide to purse the question systematically and asked Claude to make a study of the matter for me. Thirty villages in Latin America were deprived of electricity so that you can see these charts. So I hope you appreciate them.
As you can see from the following image, Claude took this assignment seriously at a substantive level but with a healthy dollop of good humor.
I have been meaning ever since to ask it to write up its findings for #DogShirtDaily. I only got around to it this evening:
The Exclamation Marks of Judge Richard Leon
A federal judge has been getting louder on paper for a decade. We counted.
When Judge Richard J. Leon enjoined the demolition work around the White House this spring, he gave us a line that practically begs to be read aloud. The President, Leon wrote, “is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!”
It was the exclamation point that did it. Federal judges are not, as a class, exclamatory people. The house style of the federal bench runs to the dry, the hedged, the accordingly. A judge who reaches for the “!” is a judge who wants you to feel something. And once you notice Leon doing it, you start to wonder: is he doing it more than he used to?
So we checked.
We pulled every written opinion Leon has filed over the last decade — 272 of them that were machine-readable, running to about 1.07 million words — from the free CourtListener database. Then we did something a little ridiculous: we counted the exclamation points. Every literal “!” in the text. We normalized the count per thousand words, so a long opinion doesn’t outweigh a short one, and sorted the opinions into four eras by the administration in office when each was filed.
The trend line is not subtle.
In the stretch before the first Trump administration, Leon used exclamation points at a rate of about 0.16 per thousand words — call it baseline restraint. By the first Trump term he’d ticked up to 0.24. Under Biden, the rate nearly doubled again to 0.50. And in the current administration, across the 30 opinions in our window, Leon is writing at 0.95 exclamation points per thousand words — roughly six times his old baseline, and every era a clean step up from the one before.
What does it mean? Honestly, possibly nothing. This is a curiosity, not a finding, and we want to be upfront about its limits. The counter is blunt: it tallies every “!” in the text, including the ones inside material Leon is quoting rather than writing himself, so some of the rise could be Leon quoting louder sources rather than getting louder himself. A cleaner author-only count is a genuinely fiddly parsing problem we didn’t attempt. And the eras aren’t evenly sized — there are 123 opinions in the Trump I bucket and only 30 in the current one, so the most recent figure rests on the thinnest slice of data. (For the completists: of the 298 Leon opinions in the ten-year window, 272 made it into the count. A handful were too recent for CourtListener to have extracted the text, and a batch of 20 from late 2019 dropped out during the pull. All 20 sit inside the already well-populated Trump I era, so they don’t move the gradient.)
But take the number at something less than face value and it’s still a fun thing to sit with. The most boring explanation is that the cases themselves have gotten louder — that a judge who spent the 2010s on the ordinary grind of the federal docket is now handing down emergency rulings about ballrooms and executive power, and the prose is rising to meet the stakes. The least boring explanation is that we are watching a federal judge slowly run out of patience in real time, one punctuation mark at a time.
Either way, the President is the steward of the White House. He is not, however, the owner.
Methodology: 272 opinions, ~1.07M words, May 2016–May 2026, via CourtListener (free.law). “Exclamation marks” are literal “!” characters in each opinion’s extracted text, counted per thousand words and bucketed by the administration in office at filing, with era boundaries set at noon on January 20 of each inauguration year.
I don’t know where you plan to be on the evening of May 30, but I’m going to this. Billed as “an immersive evening of Ukrainian art, fashion, and performance,” it is being put on by a number of people and groups I have worked with on Ukraine matters over the past few years. The event celebrates Ukrainian art, music, fashion and community while supporting the United Help Ukraine’s SMUHA Family Resilience Project, which helps children and families affected by war.
The evening will feature: live artistic performances, Ukrainian fashion and design, music and DJ sets, interactive art spaces, Ukrainian merch, and live and silent auctions.
I honestly have no idea what to expect, and I’m excited about it.
🗓 May 30, Torpedo Factory Art Center, Alexandria ⏰ 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Dress code: Semi-Formal, which means a jacket over your dog shirt.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the Snuffleupagus. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “wait, doesn’t the Beast of the Day have to be a real Beast?” And you’re right. I am pleased to inform you that, as of May 10th, S. snuffleupagus has been recognized as a very real Beast, and here it is:
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is not the angel arcabucero, because, while the Snuffleupagus is now a real Beast, the angel remains—at minimum—of unproven reality. South American angels armed with massive proto-muskets are definitely not real, even by angel standards, but they are very worthy of recognition:
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