On January 20, Inauguration Day, University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck tweeted, “Time to go back to my obscure corner of the ivory tower — and I couldn’t be happier about it.”
But many of his 154,000 followers would not have it, and they urged Vladeck to keep broadcasting his views on CNN, Twitter and other media outlets. He resumed his tweets and appearances and continued to opine that the impeachment of Donald Trump could take place after he was out of office.
Meantime, he has sparred with Sen. John Cornyn on Twitter after Cornyn said President Biden’s order to end the ban on transgender soldiers was not a unifying move. “The better question, Senator, is why you prefer discrimination,” Vladeck wrote.
In an interview with Texas Lawbook last week, Vladeck said, “The obscure corner is unfortunately less obscure than I’d like it to be at the moment.”
But it’s clear that Vladeck thrives from the nationwide footprint he has made as the go-to professor who could explain the three I’s — Insurrection, Impeachment and Inauguration — as well as topics ranging from pardon power to the Supreme Court and election law.
Vladeck, who joined the UT faculty in 2016, acknowledged as much in the interview: “For better or worse, I have this trait where the more fired up I am about something, whether positively or negatively, the more energy I have to write about it.”
And fired up he has been. On January 6, the day of the riot at the United States Capitol, Vladeck estimated he tweeted in “the low three figures,”—100 or more tweets, in other words. In one of those tweets, Vladeck criticized Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for claiming that those who stormed the Capitol were not Trump supporters.
Paxton soon blocked Vladeck from his Twitter feed. It was somewhat of a badge of honor, though Vladeck said, “I think it’s inappropriate for any public officials to be blocking any of their constituents. But I’m more amused by it than offended. That to me is just another symptom of the broader disease of the lack of tolerance for principled discourse with which we disagree.”
Vladeck may have provoked Paxton earlier. On December 8, when Paxton filed the dead-on-arrival election lawsuit against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin with the U.S. Supreme Court, Vladeck said, “It looks like we have a new leader in the ‘craziest lawsuit filed to purportedly challenge the election’ category.”
His criticism went beyond Texas. On inauguration day, Vladeck offered a brief farewell to Trump: “In: Gaga, Out: MAGA,” a nod to Lady Gaga’s powerful rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner.
In one of his most applauded tweets, Vladeck mocked Trump ally Rudy Giuliani for his fruitless post-election litigation with this gem: “Rudy will soon be appealing all of these adverse rulings to the Supreme Courtyard by Marriott.” He was playing off Giuliani’s bizarre Philadelphia appearance at “Four Seasons Total Landscaping.”
One sure measure of Vladeck’s fame: the Room Rater gave him a nine-out-of-ten score, praising his background of bobbleheads of founding fathers and Supreme Court justices, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
CNN’s Supreme Court reporter Ariane De Vogue, who has worked with Vladeck for years, said, “Steve has an extraordinary ability to see an issue from every prism. He effortlessly toggles between hefty subjects like the separation of powers, impeachment, insurrection, as well his own particular expertise in military law, and can distill complicated issues for the layman. At his core, he is a master teacher, with infectious enthusiasm, energy and patience.”
As popular as Vladeck’s commentary has been in many quarters, it’s safe to surmise that some red-state Texas residents are not Vladeck fans. Asked if his students, colleagues, neighbors and others have reacted to his criticisms, Vladeck said his students seem to like his media presence, but had gotten little pushback otherwise.
“I’ve been vocal and that’s been in some respects deliberate,” Vladeck said. “Here I am, a chaired, tenured professor at one of the nation’s top law schools. It seems to me that it’s actually pretty important for people like us to be vocal. I hope I don’t say anything that provokes my institution to sort of take any adverse action. I haven’t yet. I harbor no illusions about just how privileged I am. But I think that, at the risk of misquoting Spider-Man, with great privilege comes great responsibility.”
He does his fair share of teaching, writing scholarly law review articles, and last October argued his third case before the U.S. Supreme Court – United States v. Briggs, a military justice case that went against Vladeck by an 8-0 vote.
But there’s nothing like social media. “It’s the weirdest thing, but the best law review article that I’ve ever written has probably been read by about 1,500 people. I send a tweet and maybe it’s seen by 100,000.” (His favorite law review article, by the way, was a 2011 review in the Harvard Law Review of a book on habeas corpus in pre-revolutionary England.)
Surprisingly, perhaps, Vladeck also said, “I often do censor myself. You know, there are tweets I don’t send that I might have if I wasn’t teaching at a very visible state school in a very red state. But my hope is that by not sending those tweets, by not saying those things, when I say the other things, the university will have my back.”
And he does.
Law school dean Ward Farnsworth said in a statement, “We haven’t had any issues with the positions that Steve takes. Our community admires intelligence, and whether you agree with him or not – and of course plenty of people don’t — it’s obvious to everyone that Steve is wonderfully smart. Steve holds the Charles Alan Wright Chair here and is highly worthy of it. Charlie Wright had politics that were very different from Steve’s, but he was respected immensely by everyone because his talents were so formidable. In my experience, that’s how Texas lawyers generally are. They enjoy intelligent disagreement and value it.”
Vladeck said he has gotten some “unfortunately acerbic emails, tweets and voicemails,” including one that was threatening. He shrugged, “I just think a lot of people have lost their minds.”
The importance of helping the public understand the law is in Vladeck’s blood. He grew up in New York in a family of lawyers: his grandmother, aunt and uncle, and eventually an older sister were lawyers.
Vladeck said his younger sister, a non-lawyer, came to watch in the Moot Court finals when he was a 3L at Yale Law School. “It was the first time she had ever seen any kind of appellate argument. She came up afterwards and said, ‘I finally understand Thanksgiving.’” He explained, “the Thanksgiving table was a forum for legal debates. I was making legal arguments before I thought I was making legal arguments.”
His uncle David Vladeck is a noted law professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He recalls Steve’s love of maps and data. “At a very tender age — maybe 5 or 6, he had memorized all of the 400 or 500 stops of the NY subway system, and knew every statistic for baseball and basketball. No one can calculate an ERA quicker than Steve.” Steve considered being a sports reporter, but went with the family business – the law.
“I am immensely proud of Steve,” David Vladeck said. “Steve lives and breathes legal issues. He loves what he does. He works harder than almost anyone else. He doesn’t have axes to grind and while he is firm in his legal positions, he is rarely if ever disagreeable.”
Fellow UT law professor Robert Chesney would agree. He and Steve Vladeck have paired up for the National Security Law podcast, soon reaching 200 episodes, with about 15,000 downloads a week.
“Both of us prize genuine debate and are willing to change our minds and to give ground when the other has the better of the argument,” Chesney said. “We’ve been dear friends—and sparring partners—since the early post-9/11 period.”
Chesney dislikes being pegged as conservative or political partisan, but he said, “I can at least acknowledge that, when it comes to the classic national security law issues, I am more likely than Steve to agree with the government’s positions, though I often disagree.” He is a member of Checks and Balances, a group that in its mission statement says “would traditionally be considered conservative or libertarian.”
Vladeck has taught at the University of Miami School of Law and American University Washington College of Law, but was eager to move to Austin in 2016 with his wife Karen Vladeck, also a lawyer and now a partner at Wittliff Cutter in Austin.
“I had always been really, really fond of UT as a school and Austin as a place,” Vladeck said. “When I was on the entry level academic market in the Fall of 2004, Texas had been my dream job. I had a first-round interview with UT where I think they decided that I was too young, which fortunately for me was curable.”
They have two daughters, one five and one two-and-a-half. Steve and Karen have an interesting Twitter relationship with each other. She once joined one of Steve and Chesney’s podcasts and posted, “It honestly was so incredibly boring sitting there with you guys. I will never be a guest again.”
In addition to everything else they are juggling, Steve and Karen in December launched their own podcast, called “In Loco Parent(i)s” It’s about parenting and lawyering, and they invite guests including Slate senior editor Dahlia Lithwick, ACLU voting rights lawyer Dale Ho, and Goldstein & Russell partner Sarah Harrington, who may soon join the Biden Justice Department.
Another factor in his move to Austin was a reluctance to remain forever at Washington DC. “I didn’t want to be living and dying with the political ups and downs,” Vladeck said. “I wanted to really have a chance to step back and do some broader, more theoretical academic work.”
But, he added, “Then Trump came.”
Now that Trump is gone, what will life be like for Vladeck?
“Calmer, I hope. I think the reality is that the issues I’m interested in, the issues I’ve been writing about they’re not going away in a Biden administration,” Vladeck said. “The upside is that we won’t have to be excessively checking our phones when we wake up every morning to see who was fired overnight, or what new scandal broke overnight.”
And like any president, Biden will make blunders, Vladeck acknowledged. “I plan to be fairly critical of the Biden administration when circumstances warrant,” he said. “To me, the beauty of this job is that I’m beholden to nobody except, really in extremis, my colleagues.”