I’m ok. I’m a survivor so this small agitator isn’t going to intimidate me from doing my work. I don’t let bullies win. Grateful to my incredible constituents who rallied behind me. Minnesota strong.

Ilhan Omar is an American hero. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

Imagine how much they’d be lying about what happened without all the videos showing it from multiple angles.

They kill. They lie. They repeat.

A magistrate judge found no probable cause to support arrest warrants for 5 people involved in the St. Paul church protest. DOJ appealed to the 8th Cir. That appeal led to this remarkable letter from the Chief Judge of the Minnesota district court… storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

How do you reform an agency that is currently kidnapping children?

This must be weird news to see if you’re one of the literally hundreds or even thousands of university administrators who preemptively censored faculty, scrubbed websites, changed the names of centers, etc.

I understand the impulse to distance yourself from American history. I do. But the atrocities are the actual normal for many communities. And until we confront them as part of a baseline societal flaw and address why they keep happening, they will not stop. They will just continue to shift targets

🚨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.

Today, @jocelynsimonson.bsky.social and @ksabeelrahman.bsky.social challenge the idea that law review articles should conclude with a set of actionable prescriptions. This convention, they argue, constrains ambition, sidelines critique, and conflates near-term feasibility with rigor.

Pay for prison labor—labor that is in many cases mandatory or coerced, hence the popular argument that this is modern slavery—are so incredibly low that they’d be illegal in any other setting. Read @prisonjournalism.bsky.social on Tennessee’s 1st tiny (literal pennies) prison wage hike in 33 years:

There was a man who confessed to his lawyers that he committed a murder someone else was convicted for. They had him sign an affidavit and didn’t reveal it for 26 years until he died because of attorney-client privilege. That’s how strong the privilege can be. innocenceproject.org/news/illinoi...

Yes. And the counter example isn’t just in the failure of training substantively, or the risk/reality that training requires funding which ultimately just expands the system generally. It’s that the rhetorical shift Jamelle identifies is also absurdly difficult.

The thing about being very much of this country, but also writing about it from a critical perspective, is that I spend most of my time hoping that I’m wrong. Unfortunately…

I hate that contemporary reality keeps proving my parents right. Over and over again. They didn't teach anger or resentment toward white folks, but a clear understanding of Black existential wisdom due to history & lived experience. "They are trapped in a history they don't understand." -Baldwin.

It takes an enormous amount of courage to stand there, keep filming, and scream "What the fuck, you asshole" at someone wearing a badge who just shot and killed one of your neighbors in cold blood.

Um, holy fuck, they appear to be trying to rename immigration judges "deportation judges"---this ad just showed up in my Facebook feed

These declines are MASSIVE. And the comparative silence in media coverage is absolutely DAMNING. “Why are ppl always so afraid of crime?” THIS is why. When crime goes up, media trips over itself to report it. Falls to pre-war (!!) levels? Just CRICKETS.

Buried under 12 paragraphs and 4 ads is this: that an investigation into the politicization of data was conducted not by … actually reviewing any data … but just by interviewing senior officials who disliked their chief. So more politics.

NEW: A major shift in underway in recent months kicked into gear this week, with ICE trial attorneys around the country asking immigration "judges" to toss out *nearly all* asylum applications on the grounds of "safe third country" agreements with Uganda, Honduras, Ecuador, and Guatemala.

Now online: My latest article on state constitutional amendments that go beyond the Thirteenth Amendment's protections against slavery and involuntary servitude. All about what they are, what they've done, and what they could and should do going forward. lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archiv...

This is murder. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

a big runoff last night, in New Orleans: Calvin Duncan was exonerated after spending *28 years* in prison; he tried to get his own case records from the New Orleans city clerk—but the office dragged its feet. So Duncan ran to become city clerk himself, and yesterday ousted the incumbent.

Jamelle was cooking. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/o...

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer. He is a computer safety researcher. And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine. In under 1600 words. aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

One lesson of the Sandwich Guy Case is now more than ever when you are called to jury duty you should go

Law Profs teaching First Amendment: I have put together a FREE, recently updated, and easy to use casebook for use in free speech classes. If you are interested in using such a casebook, send me an email or DM and I would be happy to share!

Attention has (justly) gone to the abuses in Chicago but the assaults in Los Angeles never ended. The military left but they were guarding building. DHS paramilitaries remain active in L.A. it's bad.

We just filed our PI brief in this one detailing how these stops are illegal, in part, because DHS won’t accept that REAL IDs are real. ICE rejected one woman’s ID and put her in shackles because “the Biden Administration made a lot of mistakes.” ij.org/press-releas...

Whatever you’re imagining Brian’s favorite part to be, you’re not dreaming big enough.

I wrote about this in The Society Cases. If SCOTUS wants to walk away from the ledge, the groundwork is there. Barrett’s concurrence sets the stage for Trump v. US being considerably narrowed. And as I write, SCOTUS has a history, including in this case, of not giving presidents complete wins.

So many people of color who ever attended a majority white college or university or high school could tell you tales about their racist peers or instructors. It is something we are/have been expected to endure.

I hate profiles of conservatives who are worried that their country is changing and would welcome profiles of liberals and leftists who are afraid of same thing from the opposite direction and treated their concerns the same kind of reflexive deference

U.S. District Judge April Perry says it comes down to a "credibility determination." "I simply cannot credit [the Trump administration's] declarations to the extent they contradict state and local law enforcement. … DHS' perception of events are simply unreliable."

I might end up talking about this graph all day. I think one thing Dems need to realize is that "Americans" are not buying into the "cities on fire" lies of this admin. It's JUST Republicans. So if you're a governor of a solidly blue state, or a blue-city mayor, the national story is NOT YOURS.

ICE admits that up to 50% of arrests in its Chicago raids are "collateral.” These aren't statistics. They are parents taken from their children, neighbors taken from our communities. When does a "collateral" U.S. citizen child's trauma matter? This isn't law enforcement; it's a campaign of terror.

Crowd chanting, "lick them boots! Lick them boots!" at ISP.

No. Signed, a criminologist (for all intents and purposes)

Great column by @tressiemcphd.bsky.social (gift link)

If you are an immigrant, you learn the asymmetrical balance of power when it comes to mistakes. You make a mistake - you pay for it. The bureaucracy makes mistakes - you might pay for that too. This is getting worse. More administrative mistakes and zero tolerance for immigrant errors.

The President turning the military against Americans is a bigger story than the shutdown and media outlets should treat it accordingly.

Our little AAUP chapter went 2/2 vs. Trump! Noem and Rubio…misused the sweeping powers of their offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their 1st Am protected political speech. They did so in order to strike fear into similarly situated non-citizens…

Feels like the compromise position for the democrats voting to fund the government should be 1. the healthcare funding they’re asking for so we don’t devastate tens of millions of people for no reason 2. Laws for the things we thought we already had laws for like not sending the military to cities

the president of the united states wants to use the american military to kill american citizens on american soil. that's the whole story!

In five minutes of scrolling I saw the President declare war on the city I live in at a mandatory military rally, an interesting discussion among legal scholars and commentators about how to describe where we are on the descent into fascism, and someone call Adam Serwer a cat racist. Love this place

Trump: "The ones that are run by radical left Democrats -- what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. They're very unsafe places & we're gonna straighten them out one by one. This is gonna be a major part for some people in this room. That's a war too. It's war from within"

beyond heartbreaking

Shout out to Paul Butler.

Re: today's march in Chicago at 1 pm at 50 W Washington: I have seen some people posting complaints about this march that don't make sense, and I want to respond. First, some people complain that folks should take action in affected communities. They are. It's called rapid response. (Thread.)