144 House Democrats joined 203 Republicans to vote for this bill which gives DHS and ICE new powers to collect personal information of both migrants and American citizens

Wow: Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, one of the biggest children's hospitals in the nation, will be forced to create the nation's first ever "detransition clinic" as part of a $10 million settlement with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The Alliance for Higher Education is seeking comments by 11:59pm tonight on the US DOE's consideration of a new "intellectual diversity" criterion for accreditation. They are esp. interested in faculty, student, or uni. administration experiences with such criteria. docs.google.com/forms/d/1B5B...

Stanford is about to encounter our equivalent of "battle plans for working in downtown SF during Dreamforce," and it is spelled BTS. transportation.stanford.edu/news/stanfor...

CDT’s Travis Hall in Governing: “[Colorado’s SB 189 bill is] no longer really a discrimination bill. It is now almost entirely a disclosure-focused bill.”

this truly is the thing that makes the united states exceptional, and right wingers hate it so much they want to destroy it

Your city should build housing for trans refugees. Now, not decades from now. www.chron.com/culture/arti...

Thanks again to everyone who has reached out, keep 'em coming! I updated CA, PA, MI, MN, and KY, and added HabeasDockets.org to the nationwide databases. And for smaller states/territories (looking at you DC!), I added a "jump to state" dropdown list next to the search bar.

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

New, by me: U.S. lawmakers want answers from the chief executive of Instructure, which makes the Canvas software for schools, about the company's data breach and the defacement/extortion shitshow that followed. Millions of students' data stolen in the breach. Instructure paid the hackers' ransom.

ICE agents are walking around with a list of 20 million people to detain in their pockets because of this Palantir database: www.404media.co/ice-agents-h...

Days after a trans University of Washington student was killed in off-campus student housing, the UW chapter of Turning Point USA is hosting ex-trans activist Chloe Cole. Students are organizing at counter protest outside Kane Hall at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, 5/13

Google has rolled out a new feature for Android called "Intrusion Logging" that helps security researchers do forensic analysis to find spyware. It's pretty cool: techcrunch.com/2026/05/12/g...

GET A HAT

My professional responsibility professor (not at YLS) used his own past students who’d wound up in the Attorney Discipline section of the monthly state bar newsletter to illustrate the rules he was teaching us.

When I lived in Portland pre-smartphones/Google Maps, I had a friend who‘d lived in Ladd’s Addition. He told me he once sent out party invites with a map he’d photoshopped to make Ladd’s look normal. Many people never made it, the ones who did make it were all very late, and everyone was real mad.

My heart breaks for the student, a 19-year old trans woman; for her family; for the LGBTQIA+ community at UW; and for all affected by this horrific loss. Trans people deserve to live without fear, free from the rhetoric and actions that fuel this kind of violence. She deserved so much better.

FYI trans Americans with a Canadian ancestor can apply for expedited processing on their applications for Canadian citizenship!

In Louisiana and likely Alabama, actual, cast votes are going to be tossed out as officials speed ahead with new (or previously enjoined) maps. This is such an extreme use case for the Purcell principle that the court ignoring it here signifies that it was always a made-up toy, not law.

Full piece here: www.ms.now/opinion/medi...

The Purcell Principle means it always too late for courts to fix something racist and never too late for states to do something racist

a primal scream that captures a moment

sometimes @jasonkoebler.bsky.social goes OFF about something and it is always hugely rewarding to read, and today's installment is deeply thought-provoking and brought me to the edge of tears once or twice www.404media.co/your-ai-use-...

"For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underrepresentation of discredited viewpoints in elite higher education." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/wer...

BREAKING: Justice Alito extends his administrative stays — keeping mifepristone available on current terms — until 5p ET Thursday, May 14.

DOJ Forum Shops Harassment Campaign Against Trans Kids And Their Doctors https://abovethelaw.com/2026/05/doj-forum-shops-harassment-campaign-against-trans-kids-and-their-doctors/

New in JEPOP from @mathieulavigne.bsky.social: "The findings suggest that combatting misinformation has become a negatively valenced concept on the right and highlight how the politicization of misinformation debates can influence our ability to respond to it" www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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

Double amputee Rodney Taylor revealed the horrific conditions he endured in ICE detention: “They refused to feed me for 3 weeks because they expected me to walk the length of a football field to get some food." https://atlanta.capitalbnews.org/double-amputee-rodney-taylor-released-from-ice-custody/

ok i chuckled www.epicfurious.com

We are ostensibly a free country and the degree to which we don’t know what is actually going on in a vast network of “camps” on our own soil in the year 2026 is….. something we are probably never going to come close to actually grappling with as a country

What do you call camps where people keep disappearing and dying

There is a docket which notes every time a judge rejects a pro se initial filing. It’s filled w/ heartbreaking stories of folks looking for relief through the court system. They’re all denied on technicalities like page numbers, paragraph sizing, and formatting www.courtwatch.news/p/the-rabbit...

This is a good demonstration about why companies are trying so hard to become the platform for policing technology. The platform controls the data. www.thebanner.com/community/lo...

To learn more about the demise of this year's RightsCon gathering, I spoke to the executive director of Access Now, Alejandro Mayoral Baños, and the director of RightsCon, Nikki Gladstone, about their experience, why this moment matters, and what's next for the community they convene.

🚨 NEW TOOL for U.S. legal journalists ⚖️ I turned @allyjar.bsky.social's incredible crowdsourced Google doc on accessing state court records into an interactive map. Check it out and let me know about any errors, missing information, or ways I can improve this thing (link below)

Another example of how your data will be used against you. You should be able to own and drive a vehicle without it transmitting ANY data at all. Alternatively, include an ability to turn it off. Why should consumers pay for this self-surveillance that benefits others? @profferguson.bsky.social

Edtech giant Instructure was hacked (twice) — and finally put up a security incident page after the mass-defacement of Canvas school login pages. But you might not find the page because right now it has a "noindex" tag in the page's HTML code, which prevents it from being listed in search results.

Breaking news: Indiana University plant microbiologist Roger Innes has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders. The move comes after Innes complained about the government’s prosecution of Chinese postdocs. https://scim.ag/4tsDqRr

The Pike’s Peak Humane Society has a social media manager who is very good at their job

Thinking about how the hard-right SCOTUS majority willingly relied on total fabrications in both 303 Creative and Callais and yet even *they* wouldn’t go along with the just plain made-up “facts” in Murthy, calling them out in their decision rebuffing the plaintiffs.

Worth noting that the bad data was provided to SCOTUS in a DOJ brief, submitted by DOJ lawyers.

Have you read this? Maybe you should.

This is a very good website. I research privacy and surveillance for a living. I already know quite a bit about what our tools reveal about us and think about privacy and technology for most of my waking hours. And yet I still found myself gobsmacked when it all was put right in front of my face.

It's unrealized investment loss; Trump Media is a levered crypto holding co with a small media subsidiary. Hilariously, their Bitcoin cost basis is $1.131B; today it's worth $766M. Their equities seem to be yet more crypto, which went -17.4% compared to S&P 500 -4.63%. Buy high and hold bags.

We commend ABC for standing up for itself and the First Amendment. It’s about time outlets start telling Brendan Carr to kick rocks. Otherwise, he’ll continue making bogus pretexts to harass and jawbone licensees that air content his boss doesn’t like.

TMTG exists so that one person's posts can be screenshotted for free. And as the screenshots' like/RT numbers always show, it has ~0 other users; there's nobody to monetize. It's a Potemkin social network, with the overhead costs of a real one. That would be unsustainable even without all the graft.

It’s telling that Alabama took 14 years to implement Brown (you MUST desegregate) and < 14 days to implement Callais (you CAN eliminate Black districts if you call them Democratic, but you don’t HAVE to).

Today, I was scheduled to be a presenter on a panel at Rightscon titled "Is Freedom of Expression Dead? Rethinking free speech in times of authoritarianism." Really sucks that it was cancelled by pressure from an authoritarian government.

One must fully understand that the Virginia Supreme Court ruling is not simply overruling the voters based on a technicality--it is overruling the voters on a technicality THAT THEY LITERALLY JUST INVENTED FOR THIS PURPOSE AND EXISTS NOWHERE ELSE IN VIRGINIA OR FEDERAL LAW