Kash Patel is suing the Atlantic for a quarter billion dollars. I am begging people who are not familiar with Oscar Wilde’s downfall to read about his legal case. He filed a similar weak defamation suit, lost, and ended up serving two years of hard labor for the “gross indecency” the trial revealed.

ICE and Border Patrol claim that they can arrest people who follow them, record them, blow whistles, refuse to follow orders, etc for "impeding" their official actions. But the law officials are referencing is much narrower than they seem to think. prawfsblawg.com/what-does-it...

Wild opinion: Virginia has been violating the Readmission Act of 1870 for about ~125 years, illegally denying the vote to 1000s convicted of crimes that weren't "common law felonies." (Credit to @cbhessick.bsky.social & Edward Ayers, both of whom served as expert witnesses for the plaintiffs.)

“No one teaches the Western canon anymore!” “Look, Plato’s Symposium is right here on my syllabus!” “Whoa, whoa, whoa—not that!”

For those who are trying to assess the legitimacy of the charges against Bolton: 1) these charges came from the MD US Atty’s office—which is led by a career prosecutor 2) the investigation predates Trump taking office 3) the indictment suggests large amounts of classified material were involved

Whatever ends up happening in the James Comey prosecution, our country needs to grapple with the fact that public confidence in the impartiality of criminal prosecutions has been terribly damaged over the past few years.

Voting ends Oct 9 vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting...

I’m sure that bodes well for getting a conviction at trial

Oddly striking how this teenager, in accounting for her admittedly criminal behaviour, frames it as self-care. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Given what’s been happening in DC, I would think no one in DOJ should feel particularly confident about whether a grand jury will indict anyone right now.

I decided to look at all 66 prosecutor elections this fall. Why? Prosecutors have huge power over sentencing, charging, second chances, and even immigration implications. Here's everything you need to know, from East to West Coast. New from me:

I enjoyed reading through @cbhessick.bsky.social's latest "Prosecutors and Politics" study. Surprising to learn that most media coverage about prosecutors is neutral in tone (only 6% of 2020 coverage about prosecutors was negative). Is that still true in 2025, in today's era of weaponized justice?

Just posted my new paper (coauthored with Andy Hessick), called Facts, Policy, and Discretion, which is is forthcoming in the @ucdavislaw.bsky.social law review We address an important error that I keep seeing in criminal justice cases about the nature of discretion papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Calling it: Grand Jury Bluesky will be the worst Bluesky so far.

Curious whether anyone could tell me more about this statutory restriction on plea bargaining in Kansas. The conventional wisdom is that the parties will always evade plea bargaining prohibitions. I'm curious whether that has been the experience in KS with this limited carveout

These 2 paragraphs are bananas. Truly incredible stuff c/o US Attorney General Pam Bondi.

DOJ has now fired 26 people who worked on Jack Smith's team. Pure political vengeance against professionals committed to the rule of law. www.reuters.com/world/us/us-...

I'm a professor at the flagship university for the fourth whitest state in the US. Over 80% of our students are white. The biggest barrier to access here is that due to lack of state funding, we have top 10 highest tuition per capita of public unis in the country. We also have a food pantry.

this is all downstream of people finding it aversive to change their mind

I increasingly feel certain that the thing that has driven politics insane is the growing ability of people to find ways to validate their beliefs, no matter how incorrect and irrational. It started in right-wing media but has become central to all political discussion.

we call this "fighting antisemitism"

I always get caught off guard by Memorial Day weekend. It's somehow not on my list of summer occasions.

Important statistics. But questionable claim that SCOTUS isn’t willing to defend the rule of law.

This is the best assessment of the Trump administration vs universities battle that I've seen. Definitely worth the read. (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/o...

Can't wait until Trump's DHS spokespeople start trying to convince us this American toddler is actually a wife beating human trafficker

Trump is putting 100% of the responsibility and blame for Garcia’s release on “his lawyers” in DOJ Also, the implication of these comments is either that the lawyers are lying to Trump or that he can’t understand what they’re telling him.

I think if Jack Lowden is going to play Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice it’s only right that Gary Oldman should play Mr Bennet and Kristin Scott Thomas should play Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

If you’ve received a text claiming you owe unpaid tolls, you’re not alone.

I argued before Judge Wilkinson as an assistant federal defender. It generally didn’t go well for my clients. His opinion today is a credit to him and an indictment of everyone in the administration who brought us to this moment.

That is not what this clip says. It says a bunch of awful and divisive stuff. But it doesn’t suggest criminally charging people who call for due process. Come on people—what this administration is doing and saying is bad enough. There’s no reason to invent fictional bad things.

I am of the firm belief that law professors should not publish op eps on important legal issues until AFTER they’ve done the hard work required to produce a publishable article on a topic. The op ed is only getting published because the status of the prof is an implicit claim to expertise.

The man told them he was an attorney, and that his email contained privileged information. Nonetheless, government agents insisted on looking through his phone, exploiting their power to search at the border. This is something that all attorneys need to address immediately.

I want everyone to have due process rights, because I believe in the constitution and the rule of law. But sometimes a small part of me wants everyone to have the same due process rights that they advocate for others. Wonder how JD Vance would like being sent to prison without a hearing?

It's genuinely hard to express to sort of normal not politically plugged in non-lawyers *how* lawless the Trump administration is, and I think that's some part of the problem. You sound like you're hyperventilating, but it's just a flat description of what is going on.

Read and follow @cbhessick.bsky.social to learn how proliferating plea bargains damaged our criminal justice system and why they should not be used to prohibit any exoneration claims. And read and follow @robertmannbooks.com, too.

An excellent essay here from @alanrozenshtein.com on the presumption of regularity. Highly recommended reading for those who are paying attention to the Trump administration’s defiance of the courts. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what...

Well, El Salvador let Kristi Noem film a commercial inside the dang prison so maybe she could go there and escort him out.

Rupar isn’t the only active poster who does this with regularity—posts a video with a misleadingly incomplete or just flat out false caption. It’s terrible behavior.

-concentration camps -zero free speech -mass executions -complete repression of all ethnic and social minorities -one party state with no elections in which it’s illegal to criticize the government

*taps sign*

Canadians are pissed off. Cory Booker is pissed off. It's revenge of the nice people out here

Bondi’s statement says that this man *firebombed* a Tesla dealership. Reasonable people can disagree about whether 20 years is too much for that crime. But I don’t think that “vandalizing” is a fair way to characterize her statement.

Maybe I am misunderstanding the email that this group sent to law students, but it looks like they’re telling students that they have to preserve their personal statements to the law review in perpetuity. I’m no civ pro expert, but forever seems like a long time to have to preserve something.

Good for Clement, standing up for BigLaw, even when BigLaw didn't stand up for him.

We have had nearly two decades of panic about Free Speech on Campus and not a single case, not even the ones they made up, were as bad as what's happening now

Congratulations to @mrparsh.bsky.social and @cbhessick.bsky.social on the forthcoming publication of their article "The Nuances of Prosecutorial Nonenforcement" in the William & Mary Law Review! You can check out the abstract below. #WomenAlsoKnowLaw

The deans at WV and UNC--both public schools in states w GOP governors who have ALREADY targeted those universities--signed the letter. Which makes the silence of the top-most law schools--almost all privates in deep blue states--all the more unacceptable.