He died at Irwin, the detention center made notorious by allegations of unwanted gynecological procedures, and that Biden had shut down. Trump reopened it. Now it’s the site of yet another death in ICE detention following claims of medical neglect.

What a tremendous interview with former FTC Commissioner Becca Slaughter and the Yale Daily News. President McInnis and the trustees come off very, very poorly. An administration that will live in infamy. yaledailynews.com/articles/alu...

The students of the Yale College Council have made an outstanding statement calling on the university not to cut a deal with the federal government at the expense of their rights: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwX1...

So did this change his view on medicaid work requirements or bsky.app/profile/atru...

“I will be one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up for Palestinian human rights. And I will stand firmly against bigotry aimed at Jews. Those are not two different jobs. They are the same job,” Brad Lander said.

My kind of politician, and my kind of Jew.

What's really astonishing is not the far right authoritarian party doing this, but the near-total lack of <loud public collective action> by university chancellors & presidents to oppose this existential crisis. Almost impossible to overstate how total a failure of leadership this is.

People who lost family members in the fight for the Voting Rights Act tell @talkingpointsmemo.com how they feel about the Supreme Court’s decision demolishing it. talkingpointsmemo.com/news/their-l...

Why do faculty and students have so little say in the governance of American universities? This terrific new paper by Daniel Hemel and David Pozen asks why American universities are liberal autocracies rather than stakeholder democracies. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

As someone pointed out to me offline, this is a really funny typo in Alito’s mifepristone dissent: www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Come work with us! Are you a *great* litigator with a love for teaching? We are launching a formal federal Indian law clinic--and are looking to hire a two-year clinical fellow to work with us and the great Professor Deborah Archer (also President of the ACLU). apply.interfolio.com/186544

this is the closest I've ever come to actually suggesting a "one neat trick" suggestion for anything, but I'm so serious here. the Virginia Constitution gives the legislature the power to set retirement ages for judges "REGARDLESS OF THE TERM TO WHICH ELECTED OR APPOINTED." make it 54 right now.

Here's Judge deGravelles's opinion and order prohibiting for 14 days the elimination of the position of Criminal Clerk of Court in Orleans parish, to which ex-prisoner Calvin Duncan was recently elected to a four-year term starting Monday. (49 pages) storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

This is such an outrage. Calvin represents the very best of public service, and must be seated as Clerk. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/u...

Marathon? I’m sure every hour in JD’s presence must feel like an eternity - but come on, he just got there.

The PA Supreme Court has decided, in large part based on a law student note authored in 2023, that our state constitution's protection against cruel punishments is based on a more robust understanding of cruelty than the US Constitution. That note from Kevin Bendesky (HLS '23) is here:

Recently the DOJ sued UCLA, arguing that we are such a "hotbed of campus antisemitism"—primarily because of pro-Palestinian student protests—that it's a hostile work environment for Jewish faculty and staff. Well, many actual Jewish faculty and staff vehemently disagree and we wrote this letter:

Legal writers: I've posted to SSRN a short user's guide about how to use the Zotero citation manager and its Word plugin to automatically generate Bluebook citations that are 95%* compliant. The paper explains which fields to use for which type of source, and examples of generated citations.

Are you a law student or recent graduate looking for clerkship opportunities? State Court Report is hosting a free virtual event on everything you need to know about clerking on a state supreme court. Judges from high courts across the country will share insights. RSVP today:

The Deportation Data Project is hiring a fulltime senior research analyst to work with us on obtaining data on immigration enforcement in the US. Competitive salary, excellent University of California benefits, and work on a small, collaborative team. Join us! deportationdata.org/hiring.html

Concerned about ICE's $45 billion plan to convert warehouses into immigration detention centers? This is what they'll look like inside. From ICE's plan for the Social Circle, GA facility. Each little dot: a person. www.socialcirclega.gov/home/showpub...

So after Trump pardoned Honduras's narco-president, the admin didn't just let him out--they canceled an immigration hold and sent a specialized team to **chauffeur him to the $1k/night Waldorf Astoria.** “It's "absolutely fucking nuts,” said one official www.propublica.org/article/trum...

This is how you live a life

This is a genuinely huge, sweeping victory today for the University of California—or rather, for us, its faculty, acting through our faculty associations, while the UC itself maintained a strict policy of deer-in-headlights silence. The Trump admin has given up its appeal of a powerful injunction:

“Find the cost of freedom buried in the ground. Millions more will honor you. We will not back down” #JewsAgainstICE

The idea of a bill rendering people deportable for following religious law should make every Jew ill

Good to see that many Dem elected officials now want to be seen getting involved in the cases of immigrants who have been wrongly detained by ICE. Let's spare a word for @vanhollen.senate.gov, who did this for Kilmar Abrego Garcia back when wise pundits said this was politically dangerous.

A note from our editors:

For today's bonus issue of "One First," I wanted to follow up on a post from last August that looked at legal pedagogy and the dual state by reflecting on the relationship between legal *scholarship* and governmental lawlessness—with a particular focus on how I think about my own work:

Scrolling through the photos of Pam Bondi's "Minnesota rioters," it's just hero after hero. Every photo includes a cowardly DHS agent with their back to the camera. Bondi thinks she's going to win the propaganda war with this shit, but it's never been more clear that they're losing.

I wrote about my childhood friend Alexi Pretti. Please read it and share it and remember him as a human being. @theverge.com

NEW: There are 2,400+ elections for DA & sheriff this year. These matter hugely to criminal justice & policing—including: *these are often officials who decide ICE collaboration.* So I took a dive into these 2,400+ races to identify early hotspots and battlegrounds. Read, & check out our maps:

The people of Minnesota have executed one of the most impressive civil resistance campaigns I can remember: - Organized a city wide general strike - Maintained nonviolent discipline amidst violence - Mobilized 10,000s in subzero temps to protest and watch ICE - Flipped public opinion against ICE

Let us all have the courage displayed by the residents of Minneapolis.

You have to read this. Firsthand affidavit from one of the women who was there and recording the video. She talks about how Alex Pretti was directing traffic when she arrived. She watched him be killed in front of her. She's afraid to go home, worried she'll be arrested.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. — Frederick Douglass

🚨HOLY CRAP. An ICE whistleblower just revealed a secret memo authorizing ICE officers to break into homes without a judicial warrant, which DHS's own legal training materials say is unconstitutional! ICE then hid the memo from the public, passing it along by word of mouth and private conversation.

It’s ironic that they’re like “if we do ethnic cleansing we’ll have a high trust neighborly society” and then Minneapolis is literally doing high trust neighborly society and they’re like nooooo

This is like a satanic parody of the best moments of Reconstruction, which saw the DOJ using federal power to break up white supremacist conspiracies against civil rights. Here, white supremacists in the DOJ are using conspiracy law to attack civil rights.

Change a few words and this could have been the statement every university president had the opportunity to make last year. www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/s...

Federal officers do not have absolute immunity, but there is a web of doctrines that make civil suits against them nearly impossible to bring successfully. Congress knew they needed to fix this in 2020, and new reasons why they should are coming fast and furious now. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

"We must come together to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love." — Becca Good

My wife and I are pretty close to Good's age and our kid is younger than hers. I've been thinking since yesterday about what it would mean for ICE to orphan our daughter and it makes me feel sick. But if ICE thinks that's going to deter people like us from protesting, they are very, very wrong.

Minneapolis.

Now if we could just get people to view US prisons through the same lens they view CECOT.

This is full-on fascist propaganda that bears an uncanny resemblance to the "Letter Box," a feature of the notorious Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer highlighting lurid accounts of alleged "Jewish crimes."

In every age, a hero or sage came to our aid. This year, his name is Ahmed. Wishing you a zissen Chanukah.

It's been truly remarkable to see the grand jury system actually act as a real line of defense. Especially since--as I bet most non-lawyers don't know--the only legal person in the GJ room is the prosecutor: no defense, no judge. There is NO place more favorable to the state. And they keep losing.

The best thing about this isn't the merits so much as the fact that @raskin.house.gov is socializing serious structural reform. This is the register we need to be in in preparation for the aftermath.