Dorna Mohaghegh

Buc-ee’s wins federal court trademark fight against competitor Choke Canyon A federal jury Tuesday ended a trademark battle between two titans of the Texas travel...

Buc-ees has precedent. They won an arguably more ridiculous trademark infringement suit a few years back.

www.chron.com/news/houston...

Fifteen Years

i’m not crying you’re crying

xkcd: Fifteen Years

THREAD: Judge Ellis is the first federal judge to review extensive body cam video of DHS's actions in Chicago. She finds that DHS *repeatedly* misled the public and made claims that were disproven by agents' own videos.

I'll go through some of the most egregious ones here.

Big Tech executives and investors spent at least $764.5 million during the 2024 election cycle and over the course of 2025 so far. (See Table 2) Nearly three-quarters of this sum (74%) favored Republicans; nearly half was given by Elon Musk (46%). Corporations categorized by OpenSecrets.org as electronics businesses, including Apple, Nvidia, and OpenAI, collectively spent $226 million lobbying the federal government during the first three quarters of 2025. Internet businesses, including Meta, Amazon, and Google parent Alphabet, spent $88 million. (See Table 3) The combined $314 million in lobbying spending by technology sector corporations is surpassed only by the pharmaceutical industry, which spent $341 million. Big Tech corporations collectively gave $21.6 million to pay for Trump’s inauguration. (See Table 4) Palantir and ByteDance investor Jeffrey Yass each are reportedly giving $2.5 million to pay for Trump’s replacement of the East Wing of the White House with a “Golden Ballroom,” and Google is giving $22 million to the project to settle a lawsuit Trump filed over his suspension from YouTube after the January 6 riots. ALL of the largest Big Tech companies have cozied up to Trump by helping pay for his garish ballroom(See Table 4) Taken together, this means Big Tech has so far spent more than $1.1 billion to distort federal policy to prioritize the industry’s profits over protecting the public. (See Table 1)

A @publiccitizen.bsky.social report by @rickclaypool.bsky.social details more than $1 billion in spending by Big Tech firms to secure political advantages www.citizen.org/article/robo...

new paper by Sean Westwood:

With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

Um so that is very bad. For many reasons, but perhaps the most obvious end-game of this new development is if you people are just reading AI summaries of original content, but that kills how we fund original content... eventually you won't have original content for AI summaries to draw on.

12/

Fireable offenses for Harvard president: bad faith allegations over half a footnote in something published two decades ago.
Non-fireable offenses for Harvard president: being good buddies with the most notorious child sex trafficker in the country.

the decision to really just abandon moderation and let it rip suggests that this is what meta wants for its platform. this is the final, idealized form of the product

“I yipped about inclusion”

NEWS! The ABA Admin Law Conference is FREE this year, in light of the shutdown. Great for admin law practitioners, academics, and students. It'll be Nov. 21 but you'll also be able to access recordings for 30 days afterwards.

6 FREE hours of CLE (approvals pending), including 3 ethics hours:

Three German universities offering post-docs for researchers "who cannot conduct or continue their work in the USA appropriately because of actual political pressure. "
www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskoll...

Partial SNAP benefits still delayed in WV because of tech issues, governor says • West Virginia Watch Issues with outside vendors handling West Virginia's SNAP benefits are the hold up to thousands of residents getting their food stamps.

Issues with outside vendors handling West Virginia’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are the hold up to thousands of residents getting their food stamps amount, while some other states have already begun distributing benefits, reports @amelianews.bsky.social.

I contacted my Representative. Have you contacted yours?

He has now erased fully 10% of the term to which Grijalva was elected.

That large numbers of people believe it isn’t possible to know what is actually happening in the world = a crisis for democracy

Why America’s Government Shutdowns Exist and How to End Them One Legal Memo Created The Shutdown Era. Another Can End It.

Did you know gov shutdowns aren’t in the Constitution, any law, or Court ruling?
They exist because of a 1980 OLC memo—a lawyer’s opinion that everyone just went along with. Before 1980, funding gaps didn’t cause shutdowns.

What one memo created, another can undo. How the next D admin can undo it:

Deeply proud to be affiliated with Berkeley Law and to work with the faculty who have signed this letter. #GoBears

Image of the first page of the casebook

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!

Paragraph 9 requires disclosure of "anonymized" admissions data. Paragraph 14 requires payment of $30 million dollars, over three years.

Cornell has reached an agreement to restore federal funding (I have not read it): statements.cornell.edu/2025/documen...

“He’s having a seizure and they’re trying to rip the baby out of her hands”

The more democratic elements of the American constitutional and economic order are actually throwing up road blocks to Trumpism. Protests and boycotts and low level courts and juries and cetera. Elite actors on the other hand are all too frequently caving. Fascinating study in who actually cares!

The university system itself did not join that case nor the one that was before Judge Lin on Thursday. But system leaders have spent months in talks with the government about a possible settlement. The system has said little about those negotiations, and it tried unsuccessfully to keep the Trump administration's U.C.L.A. settlement proposal out of view, fighting a public records lawsuit all the way to the California Supreme Court.

While administrators have been negotiating in secret, faculty and staff have been fighting. It just could not be more clear who gives a shit about the university as an ideal and who doesn’t.

hmmm what kind of features could be being looked at there, I wonder, what kind indeed

Judge Criticizes Immigration Agents in Chicago: ‘Use of Force Shocks the Conscience’

"The use of force shocks the conscience."

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/u...

The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

HAPPENING NOW: Judge McConnell is sharply rebuking the Trump administration for what he said was defying his order to make full SNAP payments by Nov. 5. He has ordered USDA to make the *full* payment to states by tomorrow.

New: Conde Nast fired four employees who were among a group that confronted the company's head of human resources on Wednesday over the decision to fold Teen Vogue into Vogue/recent cuts. Employees who were fired included journalists from the New Yorker, Wired, and Bon Appétit.

U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis' preliminary injunction is in.

Read it in full here: cst.brightspotcdn.com/37/f5/b85033...

Georgia Democrats had not won a statewide race that wasn't for a federal office since 2006.

They won two races tonight, both against GOP incumbents.

The margins? 62% to 38% in both.