Defend the sacred

Powerful work

In Gaza, Israel takes truckloads of Palestinian bodies for DNA testing, to make sure they are not Israeli. They seldom return them. Mary Turfah examines what they are doing with the dead, how it structures Israeli power, and why they get away with it.

Good piece by @chashomans.bsky.social tracing the lineage of ICE-watching to BPP and AIM www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/u...

Prefigurative legality in action mitpress.mit.edu/978026253978... papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

For those commenting on the agents' surnames.

Last week in Minnesota, I watched ordinary people risk their lives to protect their neighbors. In the process, they not only won a significant—though not final—victory against authoritarianism, they proved virtually every MAGA social theory wrong. (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

David French argued Renee Good's murder is an example of the US having two sytems of law: orderly for friends & belligerent for foes. @victorerikray.bsky.social corrects him: US law has always promised fascism for non-whites & those who stand with them. groupthreat.com/p/americas-d...

Trusted friends in Minneapolis tell me that this fund is supporting many people but does not have enough money. If you can give, please do: chuffed.org/project/1671...

It’s always funny when palantir employees discover that they work at palantir

new year, new project

I wrote about the longstanding dynamics that produced our terrifying present for @phenomenalworld.bsky.social.

"Witnesses said a doctor was at the scene and tried to help the woman who had been shot, but the ICE agents refused to let the doctor in to help. Up to 15 minutes later, an ambulance arrived but was blocked by ICE vehicles that had occupied the street."

Important question. See @tonyabrito.bsky.social @ksabbeth.bsky.social Jessica Steinberg, Lauren Sudeall, Racial Capitalism in the Civil Courts for one among many exemplary answers in poverty law, race and law, and LPE literatures: columbialawreview.org/content/raci...

And, separately, it will be important as public anger rightly increases, for all the Minnesota and national Democrats--who boosted ICE, celebrated arming and growing ICE, taunted Republicans for being too weak on immigration enforcement, and bragged about building this fascist infrastructure--to...

“For institutions, private and public, that have power consolidation as a primary goal, it is useful to have a language for speaking about the technologies that they are using to structure people’s lives and experiences which discourages attempts to understand or engage those technologies.”

“The longer Americans indulge this preference for the language of the law over morality, the weaker their moral voice becomes. They lose the ability to say, forthrightly, that what the Trump administration has done is cold-blooded murder for which they and their partisans should be ashamed.”

This is the clearest articulation of what is happening to entire domains of research for no reason except anti-intellectualism: “It took us a long time to create the institution and put a lot of work into that, but it's vastly, vastly easier to destroy an institution than to create it,” Marks said

Madison not only thought noncitizens had constitutional rights, he wrote that deportation was such a severe punishment that the federal government had no power to do it absent a war or jury trial guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment

“the task before us is to remake the very social relations from which these fundamental problems emerge“

Parent advocates have been fighting school pushout since the first school desegregation order went into effect. This early history can teach us so much today. I’ve been thinking about writing this article since litigating desegregation cases at @legaldefensefund.bsky.social and it’s finally out!

🎯 "The entire project of the US right wing, is re-establishing the permissions structures [for] the persecution and dehumanization of hundreds of millions of people, specifically so that violence, whether vigilante, interpersonal or state violence, can be used to discipline... everyone it sees fit."

If tomorrow they made being undocumented a felony, it wouldn’t justify any of this. Things that are harmless or even good can be criminalized.

The right figured out long ago that if you contest something it is then contestable.

This has been a labor of love! Read on to learn about the new, democratic, membership-based structure. Join as a member — and come to our first annual conference in Richmond in Feb! 😊

Millions without credit scores face a catch-22: you need credit to build credit, but can't get credit without a score. @georgetownlaw.bsky.social's Nakita Cuttino proposes a solution: eliminate "unscored" status by presuming creditworthiness. Read more here: michiganlawreview.org/journal/pres...

I cover what people *are* doing (their work is harder than mine, but my work is not easy). From the last 12 months: newrepublic.com/article/1988... newrepublic.com/article/1946... newrepublic.com/article/1917... newrepublic.com/article/1916... newrepublic.com/article/1895...

Okay, so this exists now! 😬 Inside, you'll find: the IWW, Tom Mooney, the First Red Scare, labor juries, the ILD, the Gastonia Strike, Angelo Herndon, Euel Lee, Scottsboro, riots at the Supreme Court, Charles Hamilton Houston, Pauli Murray, the Worker's Defense League, FDR using a racial slur . . .

“wreckage is not an inert substance“

I wrote an essay for @bostonreview.bsky.social about what I learned about close reading when I taught at West Virginia University www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

This Day in Labor History: November 25, 1865. Mississippi created the first of the Black Codes. Designed to recreate slavery in all but name, this signified the South’s resistance to the freeing of their labor force and the lengths to which it would go to tie workers to a place under white control.

What's going with habeas and ICE kidnappings is a perfect example of what I mean when I say courts won't save us. Recently, ICE/the BIA made up a rule, saying nearly everyone ICE kidnaps is subject to "mandatory detention" (ie, no bail/bond). 282 out of 288 of judges to hear habeas cases disagree.

I havent read such a banger of an essay in a very long time. This is so well-written!

160 faculty from all 5 UC law schools signed this open letter detailing why the Trump demands to UCLA are unlawful, unconstitutional, and wrong: sites.google.com/view/uclawfa... Great to work with @fishkin.bsky.social @blakeprof.bsky.social @seanashiffrin.bsky.social on this statement.

thread

Have to say, it makes you think given that Germany really was in catastrophic economic straits. Whereas we are... not that, in all reality. Almost as if superstructures of racial/class domination could be used to sustain a fascist and reactionary regime for years despite materialist fundamentals.

here is my story about how Zohran's focus on community amid the loneliness epidemic helped young people connect their politics to an organizing infrastructure, that interviewed ZM, and does not use the NYT's framing of "they don't know how to make friends" :-) and also ran 4 days before NYT's lol

“Mamdani shows how new constituencies are born from taking political risks and made through probing investigation and performative interaction.“

One way to explain why prisons are so big & bad in the US is that weak feds didn't create a post-68 (de)industrial policy, so unregulatable, austere states built racist solutions to structural problems. Now the racist solutions are pursued by fully funded, unregulatable federal cops and prisons.

What are three policy proposals that you heard from @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social during his campaign & where do you currently live? [I want to see something/ I allowed QP on this]

you ever think about how this guy is a professor in good standing in elite colleges

University of Toronto law professor David Dyzenhaus, says that Harvard Law professor Adrien Vermeule “moved away from just being interested in [Carl] Schmitt,” a former Nazi scholar, “to actually embracing all dimensions of Schmitt’s theory: both the political dimension & the legal dimension…” 1/

Come out on 11/6 in SF to listen to the preliminary injunction hearing in AAUP v Trump! Show the federal courts that we stand up for academic freedom and will not capitulate! WE are the UC!

People like to repeat the lies that Occupy accomplished nothing but it’s not true. It reduced the shame of medical & student loan debt to a public that had largely bought the idea that Millennials were ingrates to the previous generations. It set a precedent for uprisings against police brutality.

The women married to fascists are usually also fascists. They weren't "tricked" into being with these people. They chose them.

probably a good time for a south asian critical race theorist to write on the sort of ladder pulling we see here