I’m honored to be giving this upcoming lecture at my alma mater. Go Bears!

Public service announcement: In iOS26, you can make those incessant political fundraising texts stop. Go to Settings>Apps>Messages>Screen Unknown Senders and enable it. Now you won’t get a notification when someone random texts you and their message will go to a separate folder you can always check.

New book out now from ‪@universitypress.cambridge.org‬! Law and the 100-Year Life, co-edited by Solomon Center scholars, reimagines how laws and the institutions they shape—from labor to healthcare—must evolve in a world where more of us than ever will live to 100. law.yale.edu/solomon-cent...

We just posted a major new study of AI models and books, showing that some (but not all) models memorize large portions of some (but not all) books after training on the books3 database With A. Feder Cooper and Amy Cyphert, among others arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12546

Aziz Huq and @thelior.bsky.social shared legal insights alongside Chicago Quantum Exchange director David Awschalom at a panel moderated by Robert W. Karr Jr., a partner at Barnes & Thornburg LLP. The discussion kicked off an interdisciplinary CQE–led effort aimed at strengthening the growing field.

Big news on the constitutionality of tower dumps / geofence warrants…

You never know who you are going to run into on the UChicago campus. Thanks to Transportation Secretary @petebuttigieg.bsky.social for spending time teaching our students at the Institute of Politics and cheerfully indulging our faculty paparazzi.

I enjoyed two recent empirical papers on AI+Law, but realized they have somewhat different implications—in particular, about whether AI tools are actually useful for lawyers, or are too likely to err. I wrote up a blog post thinking through how to reconcile them: www.wilftownsend.net/p/is-ai-actu...

Picking a fight with Susman Godfrey is “land war in Asia” levels of foolish.

The Authoritarian Commons by Shitong Qiao "Documents and insightfully analyzes how the development of homeowners’ associations (HoAs) in China generated an ongoing democratic revolution in hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods." Out Now #LawSky

Brilliant (as always) piece by @bridgetfahey.bsky.social on why gov’t control over data is of constitutional moment. Yes it implicates societal and individual privacy concerns but also structural, constitutional grabs of power. Brava. Read www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

This is a massive setback for US transportation policy and yet another blow to environmental protection.

Landlords around the U.S. would be allowed to give tenants three days’ notice or less before evicting them, under federal legislation introduced last week that would strip away tenant protections put in place during the pandemic.

My new book, You Can't Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads: Angelo Herndon's Fight for Freedom, is out today. lithub.com/josephine-ba... Thanks to my family, friends, colleagues, and @wwnorton.bsky.social for helping me write about Herndon's fight for free speech and assembly.

Sarah Lee Best, Penn Law '21, was among the other brilliant and much-loved souls taken from us by this tragic plane crash. Sarah simply radiates kindness. She transforms classrooms, schools, and ultimately anything and anyone lucky enough to meet her. 1/3 www.bbc.com/news/article...

Yet another illustration of why data minimization requirements are needed in US privacy law. There’s no good justification to store so much customer geolocation information.

Hey, Property profs:

New draft article! “Standard Textualism” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... Main claim: Faithful adherence to modern textualism would produce far more standard-like (as opposed to rule-like) law than people have realized. Important implications for textualists AND critics of textualism!

This goes on the reading pile immediately!

A good moment to post for the first time. As I just said on a listserv: Tiktok "is the most pro-data-privacy/pro-data-protection opinion the Supreme Court has ever issued! Now given the track record, maybe that's not saying a lot. And given the unusual context, who knows what can be made of this?"

Prof. @thelior.bsky.social explores whether public awareness is key to overcoming dark patterns. His 2021 paper illuminated challenges posed by the tactic. Now, he explores potential solutions. “The nature of social science research is that whenever you answer one question, it opens up five more.”

Do you want to do the right thing and read this interesting paper now, or would you rather risk everything and read it later, when it might be too late?

Whether you care about fairness or fiscal responsibility, cutting the IRS’s enforcement budget (as many Republicans have proposed) would be an absolute disaster. New evidence from back-to-back studies in the latest @qjeharvard.bsky.social ... (1/4)

Our new research paper just posted! It asks whether dark patterns (manipulative online interfaces) can thwart users who are trying to make privacy-protective choices on a video streaming site. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... We find that dark patterns are very potent even when users have that goal.

My sense has been that most discussions of the TikTok case have been consumed by questions the Court might not answer. So I've published a post on why the #SCOTUS might uphold the legislation based solely on the protection-of-U.S.-person-data rationale. balkin.blogspot.com/2025/01/tikt...

I ran an experiment to see if any UChicago 1Ls actually read the boilerplate ABA learning outcomes at the end of a 4-page Property law syllabus. Result: One of my students spotted the offer and claimed the free casebook a few hours after I posted the syllabus, several days into their winter break.

I’m among the many admirers of Orin’s influential scholarship on the law of future interests in Ohio and its complex relationship to spousal joint tenancies. Everyone wishes he would write more articles in that vein.

I'm honored to be interviewing Judge David Tatel '66 today at 12:15 @uchicagolaw.bsky.social in a wide-ranging conversation focused on his career and remarkable memoir, Vision. ACS and DRAC are sponsoring this conversation with one of the nation's wisest judges. www.amazon.com/Vision-Blind...

This piece provides a vital response to the “less privacy just means you’ll see better tailored ads” canard.

New paper alert! Excited that my new article "The Invention of Immigration Exceptionalism" has been published by @YaleLJournal. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

I'm happy to welcome the University of Chicago Law School, @uchicagolaw.bsky.social, to Bluesky! To celebrate the arrival of our official account, here is a starter pack with my faculty colleagues. go.bsky.app/L81ZCoX

I'm happy to welcome the University of Chicago Law School, @uchicagolaw.bsky.social, to Bluesky! To celebrate the arrival of our official account, here is a starter pack with my faculty colleagues. go.bsky.app/L81ZCoX

Today’s Gaetz news is a splendid opportunity to recall the most unintentionally hilarious tweet in the history of legal education…. Imagine the indignity of being et al.ed by the Mooch.

For those interested in deleting tweets/likes/retweets/etc, but not wanting to pay, you can do it with the javascript code available at github.com/nikolaydubin.... You have to know how to get to the Browser console for a twitter page (F12 on Chrome), but otherwise it works great, if somewhat slowl.

My new paper: I dive into Fourth Amendment history and find the original public meaning of "unreasonable searches." But applying that original meaning in modern circumstances would be normatively awful, and courts should reject it. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Kate Weisburd and I have a new empirical paper out in the Northwestern University Law Review! We ask: what do ordinary Americans believe about how Miranda rights are invoked? t.co/fjpjlJ4vUY 1/4

The nicest compliment you can give an academic is to let them know how much you loved a paper written by one of their former students.

New and improved version just dropped … now with the @orinkerr.bsky.social rookie card.

R.E.M. is the greatest American rock band of all time.

These days everybody on Bluesky should be interested in privacy law. Here is a Starter Pack including some of the leading scholars doing research on this timely topic. go.bsky.app/M6UkFtA

There are far too many brilliant academics I follow on here to limit my list to 150 people, so this is regrettably small and a tad arbitrary, but here's my must-have expert list for scholars of law, history, and politics. go.bsky.app/V6whuQC

A ready-made issue spotter for my fellow Property professors! www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news...

This is an exciting development for privacy law professors and students! I used some of Matthew’s draft chapters in my Privacy class at UChicago, and they worked very well.

Oral argument synopsis: “We’re all pragmatists now.”

Today in Constitutional Law, I’m teaching on the commerce clause and civil rights, which means I get to tell my favorite story about how Tyler Perry took down the segregationist arguing against the CRA’s constitutionality. To quote @kevinmkruse.bsky.social, let’s dig in… 🧵

Yesterday I taught 70 UChicago first-year law students the Dobbs case, and then today I introduced an Israeli professor giving a lunch talk about the war. Every student across both events was respectful, thoughtful, and measured, intense views notwithstanding. Yet the antics of campus nitwits ...

Today in sick positions that should not need to be argued against: the claim that it's flatly *immoral* to grieve for dead Jews (by any means) bc any such grief, no matter how expressed, is inherently fuel to be "gobbled up" by the Israeli state and transformed into dead Palestinians.