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DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican - .@lamps_apple makes a pretty good case as to the identity:
Quote:
Apple Lamps @lamps_apple
Nikolas Bowie is the most plausible single candidate for the documentary source of the Shadow Papers. If he is not the direct source, the source is almost certainly inside his network.
The Times published seven memos from the February 2016 Clean Power Plan stay deliberation. Six justices. Roberts twice. Breyer, Kagan, Alito, Kennedy, Sotomayor once each. Six of the seven look identical in format. Chambers letterhead. Initials or signature at the bottom.
The seventh does not. The Sotomayor memo carries no chambers letterhead, no signature, no initials, and a date of February 16, three days after Scalia died, when every other memo in the packet runs February 5 through February 9. Either the date is a typo for February 6 and the memo was printed later on plain paper from a chambers working file, or it is a non-circulated draft Sotomayor wrote after Scalia died that never went to conference. Both readings point at one chamber. Whoever handed this memo to the Times had access to something that did not travel through the normal distribution.
Sotomayor's four OT 2015 clerks were Easha Anand, Nikolas Bowie, Bridget Fahey, and Matt Shahabian. Three of them have gone quietly into appellate practice and doctrinal scholarship. Anand runs the Supreme Court litigation clinic at Stanford. Fahey teaches federalism at Chicago. Shahabian is in private practice. None has built a public career against the Court.
Bowie has. For five years he has been building the most developed academic case in the country for dismantling Supreme Court power, with the shadow docket as a named reform target. His 2021 testimony to the Biden Commission called the Court "antidemocratic." His 2021 Harvard Law Review Foreword, titled Antidemocracy, runs the length of a short book in service of the same thesis. In October 2024 he co-authored a New York Times op-ed with Daphna Renan titled "The Supreme Court Has Grown Too Powerful. Congress Must Intervene." His Liveright book with Renan, Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People, lands September 15, 2026. Seven weeks before the midterms. He sits on the board of People's Parity Project.
And he has not kept the playbook theoretical. In 2023, on Elie Mystal's Contempt of Court, Bowie walked through the specific mechanisms Congress could deploy to disempower the Court… jurisdiction stripping, funding control, supermajority requirements on Court orders, the entire menu. He told Mystal the obstacle is not legal but cultural. "It's just a question of what do you think you could politically do to reassert democracy."
Then there is the Kantor relationship.
On February 2, 2026, ten weeks before the leak, Jodi Kantor published a front-page Times piece on Chief Justice Roberts's new nondisclosure agreements. Bowie was the closing quote.
"If the public were aware of how much of the deliberations affecting millions of people are made by 27-year-olds after happy hour, they'd be shocked."
Ten weeks later, Kantor and Adam Liptak showed the public exactly how those deliberations happen.
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