Ellie Margolis

Our product can show you what's outside the window that's right next to you, perform a Google search slower than you can yourself, and misinform your surgeon mid-procedure, causing a catastrophic failure that will injure you for life. The entire economy is propped up on it

“I Have Been Here Too Long”: Read Letters from the Children Detained at ICE’s Dilley Facility Hundreds of children are currently being held with their parents at an immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas. In letters and drawings, eight kids convey the pain of feeling trapped with no end...

I have to assume that, whatever form judgment day takes, at judgment day, Donald Trump, his administration, and everybody in ICE will be forced to read--out loud--these letters to the person judging their worthiness to enter whatever heaven they're trying to get into.

Dear Ms. Wolfe, Petitioner-Appellee Rümeysa Öztürk submits this Rule 28(j) letter to advise the Court that on January 29, 2026, the immigration court held that the Department of Homeland Security had not met its burden of proving removability, and the immigration court thereby terminated removal proceedings against Ms. Öztürk.' This development underscores the dangers of the government's interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Under the government's view, it could punitively detain any noncitizen in retaliation for her speech for many months, so long as it simultaneously institutes removal proceedings—no matter how unmeritorious—all without any federal court review of the lawfulness of detention at any time. To be clear, the termination of Ms. Öztürk's removal proceedings does not moot her habeas case. (By contrast, as Ms. Öztürk has argued, this appeal is moot. Br. 18-20.) Without habeas jurisdiction and the bail order that is currently in place, any government appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals would again subject Ms. Öztürk to re-detention. See 8 C.F.R. § 1003.6(a). For that reason, she continues to suffer the threat of continuing "now-or-never" First and Fifth Amendment harms. Br. in Opp. 55-57.

NEW: An immigration court has terminated removal proceedings against Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, finding that DHS did not meet its burden of establishing that she was removable, her lawyers tell the Second Circuit. live-awp-vermont.pantheonsite.io/app/uploads/...

More than 30 legal scholars in N.J. condemn federal civil rights violations In rare collective statement, 35 faculty members document First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment breaches, calling attacks on protesters and warrantless raids 'hallmarks of authoritarianism'

Very proud of my Seton Hall Law colleagues for putting out this statement condemning the civil rights violations in Minneapolis and across the country. www.nj.com/news/2026/02...

Voss, Ana (USAMN) to me ~ I am no longer with the United States Attorney's Office.

NEW: Per her DOJ email, Ana Voss has left the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office.

Voss had been the civil chief in the office and her resignation and forthcoming departure was reported previously.

She was the other government lawyer at last week's big hearing: www.lawdork.com/p/the-minnes...

Opinion | Universities are sending Trump a dangerous message Higher education is under attack. Drop the appeasement.

Arne Duncan gets it. I hope the leaders of my university and so many others take this to heart. wapo.st/4qomlXe

This is so, so good. If you have units on algorithmic bias, or are just interested in incorporating simulations/interactive elements into your teaching, check this out.

In civil litigation, strategy is everywhere. Some of it is explicitly envisioned by rules of procedure, but other forms of strategy rely more on clever exploitation of gaps in the rules, sometimes through trickery, surprise, or psychological mind games. The role strategy plays in civil litigation is underexamined, which raises two concerns: first, this lack of attention entrenches strategy by default as a procedural value in competition with accuracy, efficiency, and other procedural values. Second, it amplifies the disadvantages experienced by unrepresented litigants. This Article builds on earlier work to examine how courts shape the space that litigants have for strategic behavior, in service of an inquiry into how that space ought to be shaped. Battles over the meaning and rightful place of strategy in civil litigation tend to play out in the arena of “gamesmanship,” a term courts use with increasing frequency to refer to behavior in the gray zone between the clearly allowed and the clearly disallowed. Strategic behavior in this realm is often unregulated by rules, only weakly governed by norms, and subject to significant judicial discretion. Judicial decisions in cases involving gamesmanship frequently expose tensions between respect for zealous advocacy and concerns about fairness and accuracy. This Article makes two contributions to our understanding of the role of strategic behavior in civil litigation. First, it examines the meaning of “gamesmanship” in a litigation context and proposes a categorization of gamesmanlike litigation behavior. Second, it applies this categorization in describing how courts use the term “gamesmanship” and surveys and theorizes how they treat behavior they have thus labeled. I argue that the concept functions as three distinct analytical tools: (1) as an aspect of purposive statutory analysis; (2) as a canon of construction; and (3) as an implied mental-state element. The Article concludes by imagining a different approach.

NOT a recent acceptance but last Feb's paper now on SSRN, w/ many thanks to the excellent editors at Georgia L. Rev. Full paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

(Newer paper still in the cycle & on a very different topic! Sci. ev., skeptics, democracy. On SSRN soon, but lmk if you want to read.)

Huzzah!

I would like to thank my law clerk Bailey Warrior Pahang for her contributions to this opinion.

Very interesting: Washington Supreme Court Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis thanked her law clerk—by name, in a footnote on the first page of the decision—"for her contributions to this
opinion." It's very unusual for a judge to openly credit their clerk like this. www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf...

Next time somebody tries to get me to justify the existence of the humanities, I’ll just point out how for the past two Super Bowls we’ve all jumped online and engaged in collective semiotics and hermeneutics of the half-time show as text.

My dudes if you are also a white lady with anxiety you can buy trackers to put on your dog's collar you can even set it to alert if they exit your residence and you don't have to contribute to a fascist surveillance state to do it.

Love

The advertising during the game stood out for a high number of celebrity cameos and advertisements for futuristic technology, particularly for products like electric vehicles, virtual reality and cryptocurrency.[136][137][138][139] There were many cryptocurrency-related ads drawing comparisons to dot-com commercials during Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000,[140][141] leading some to refer to the game as the "Crypto Bowl".[142][143]

does anyone else remember when the 2022 Super Bowl had so many crypto ads people were calling it the Crypto Bowl and then crypto just absolutely fucking tanked?

anyway

If you needed any more proof that joy is a powerful form of resistance, this was it.

DOJ Meltdown: "The system sucks. This job sucks." - Lawyers Behaving Badly This week: A Department of Justice lawyer's in-court meltdown in Minnesota this week serves as a cautionary tale to us all.LinksDonate to The Human Rights Advocates in Minnesota.Docket for The Human R...

This is a superlatively thoughtful, detailed, & resourced documentation of our govt’s ongoing human rights abuses, to say nothing of civil rights violations. @davids.house.gov please listen /1

Here the “feels like” is currently-15 🥶🥶🥶

I’ve also seen plenty of exploitative situations.

Yes, this applies to the lasting marriages I am familiar with.

I’ve spend my whole life in and around academia and this is so common. I also know of many happy & long-lasting marriages that started as student/professor relationships, which gives me complicated feelings.

Impressive! That wind is no joke.

This is an important and brilliantly executed piece of audio journalism.

Ostensibly, it's about Julie Le, the DOJ lawyer who said she'd like a judge to put her in jail for contempt so she could get some sleep. But it's really not about her (mostly).

Listen to this to learn…

1/

208. The Fifth Circuit Jumps the Immigration Detention Shark Late Friday, two of the nation's most right-wing circuit judges adopted an odious legal claim that district court judges from across the country (and ideological spectrum) have overwhelmingly rejected

“Late Friday night, the Fifth Circuit adopted the extreme minority view—that the government can indefinitely detain without bond millions of non-citizens who have been here for generations; who have never committed a crime; and who pose neither a risk of flight nor any threat to public safety.”

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

DOJ Meltdown: Podcast Episode · Lawyers Behaving Badly · 02/06/2026 · 2h 7m

New episode! Clocking in at over 2 hours. We have some THOUGHTS about the recent DOJ lawyer meltdown in Minneapolis this week. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/l...

Oh crap. I am so sorry you have more to deal with.

Starting Harrow the Ninth for real this time (got distracted by Heated Rivalry last week) and watching Bridgerton and PONIES.

From Big Lots to warehousing humans: ICE plan sparks fear in Schuylkill County | Will Bunch A massive warehouse in Tremont, Pa., that once moved cheap goods will now detain migrants in a $119 million ICE deal.

This part of @willbunch.bsky.social's piece really stuck with me: A 24-year-old server's Republican father told her the camps were "just taking care of the illegal people" and she said, "I don’t feel like that’s true at all. I feel like they’re going after everyone.”

Aw, sorry I missed this. The poster is fantastic.

Incredible art of gritty playing fiddle on the roof of a west Philadelphia row home. In Yiddish it says Fidler Oyfn Fakh פֿידלער אױפֿן דאַך)

We put on an all-Yiddish community production of fiddler on the roof in Philadelphia and cast member and local artist Sofie Rose Seymour created the most amazing show poster that ever was