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Notes -
He's a little more partisan, charitably because of things like Baude/Paulsen, less charitably having seen a niche for Not-Obviously-Crazy Guy Providing Trump Legal Foundation. But that's kinda a different frustration.
I'll use this piece as an example. It's not wrong (uh, mostly; the aside about no one following Barrett on or off the court is especially lackluster as a contrast to Thomas), or even particularly partisan (uh, mostly; the swipes and 'compliment' at Sotomayor).
But break out the argument in reverse. Blackman wants to persuade you that "Even if an erroneous precedent cannot be overruled, courts should isolate the damage, and decline to extend it to new circumstances." Literally the subhead and closing argument. That's not an unreasonable thing to say! What's the buildup to it?
These are reasonable as summaries of the case, even if some progressives would want to emphasize different parts instead. They slot very nicely around his argument. They're also just not evidence for or against that argument; at most, the last point is just an example of a court doing that.
If Blackman was trying to present a story of the case, this would be compelling, but he's not. It'd be fine if he was providing advocacy as a purely normative matter, but he's not really doing that, either. He's telling you that you (or the courts) should do all these things, but every point on his list could come back with a time machine and a goatee and turn out to have happened the opposite way, and he'd still believe and tell you the same conclusion. These bullet points are not evidence; they're part of a story he's putting together such that the conclusion fits. It makes sense, if you already believe him, but if you don't there's absolutely nothing here that can or should change your mind.
He doesn't always fall this way -- he links to a (rarely downloaded) paper he wrote on the topic that is... not great, but at least winks underlying facts, this is a pretty direct normative argument, this is extremely bound to specific facts. It's not even always bad when he does this sort of narrative-writing framework-shifting stuff.
But it's something he's doing, in ways that aren't visible to many readers (myself included not that long ago!), where that invisibility seems likely to be bad for many of his readers.
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