Adam Davidson

In it, I argue that it's possible these amendments are interpreted to be aspirational, but they are best read to at least prohibit some common punishments, like solitary confinement, when incarcerated people refuse to work, and they could go much further to attack the total control model of prisons.

Now online: My latest article on state constitutional amendments that go beyond the Thirteenth Amendment's protections against slavery and involuntary servitude. All about what they are, what they've done, and what they could and should do going forward.

lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archiv...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. "The order was to kill everybody," one of them said. A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck. The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack - the opening salvo in the Trump administration's war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth's instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

This is murder. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

www.oklahoman.com/story/news/s...

Calvin Duncan wins Orleans clerk of court race - Verite News New Orleans Duncan, a political newcomer and former prisoner, defeated incumbent Darren Lombard by a wide margin in Saturday's runoff.

a big runoff last night, in New Orleans:

Calvin Duncan was exonerated after spending *28 years* in prison; he tried to get his own case records from the New Orleans city clerk—but the office dragged its feet.

So Duncan ran to become city clerk himself, and yesterday ousted the incumbent.

If they win, Democrats will have to use their newfound authority to rethink, even dismantle, agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. They may need to walk back the Bush-era decision to consolidate those agencies and others under a single department, given the wild abuses perpetrated under this administration and its predecessors. It will need to give serious thought to major political and social reform, including D.C. statehood, a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering, a new voting rights act and federal protections for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, including the rights of gender and sexual minorities. Democrats will also need to embrace the legislature’s constitutional authority to structure the executive branch and the judiciary, up to and including Supreme Court reform. If they win next year, Democrats will need to treat the next Congress not as a return to the status quo ante but as the beginning of a new era in which the principal task is to roll back the president’s effort to create and consolidate a personalist dictatorship. They’ll need to fortify the American political system against future attempts to play dictator and lay out a project of genuine democratic renewal. None of this is possible without a willingness to use power rather than just hold it. What we’ve seen this week is that there are still too many Democrats whose instinct is to retreat to normalcy rather than face the conflict at hand.

Jamelle was cooking.

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/o...

I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

One lesson of the Sandwich Guy Case is now more than ever when you are called to jury duty you should go

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!

Attention has (justly) gone to the abuses in Chicago but the assaults in Los Angeles never ended. The military left but they were guarding building. DHS paramilitaries remain active in L.A. it's bad.

We just filed our PI brief in this one detailing how these stops are illegal, in part, because DHS won’t accept that REAL IDs are real.

ICE rejected one woman’s ID and put her in shackles because “the Biden Administration made a lot of mistakes.”

ij.org/press-releas...

Whatever you’re imagining Brian’s favorite part to be, you’re not dreaming big enough.

Now if you’re asking me for a prediction, do I think SCOTUS is going to stand up to Trump in this way, particularly while he still has power? No.

But could they do it while maintaining the sort of logical consistency judges like to purport to have? Yes. The option is open if they want to take it.

Remember the prosecutions against Trump didn’t end because SCOTUS ended them. They ended because DOJ chose to end them after he won.

I wrote about this in The Society Cases. If SCOTUS wants to walk away from the ledge, the groundwork is there. Barrett’s concurrence sets the stage for Trump v. US being considerably narrowed. And as I write, SCOTUS has a history, including in this case, of not giving presidents complete wins.

So many people of color who ever attended a majority white college or university or high school could tell you tales about their racist peers or instructors.

It is something we are/have been expected to endure.

I hate profiles of conservatives who are worried that their country is changing and would welcome profiles of liberals and leftists who are afraid of same thing from the opposite direction and treated their concerns the same kind of reflexive deference

U.S. District Judge April Perry says it comes down to a "credibility determination."

"I simply cannot credit [the Trump administration's] declarations to the extent they contradict state and local law enforcement. … DHS' perception of events are simply unreliable."

I might end up talking about this graph all day.

I think one thing Dems need to realize is that "Americans" are not buying into the "cities on fire" lies of this admin.

It's JUST Republicans. So if you're a governor of a solidly blue state, or a blue-city mayor, the national story is NOT YOURS.

ICE admits that up to 50% of arrests in its Chicago raids are "collateral.” These aren't statistics. They are parents taken from their children, neighbors taken from our communities. When does a "collateral" U.S. citizen child's trauma matter? This isn't law enforcement; it's a campaign of terror.

Crowd chanting, "lick them boots! Lick them boots!" at ISP.

No.

Signed, a criminologist (for all intents and purposes)

Opinion | Mourn, or Else

Great column by @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

(gift link)

If you are an immigrant, you learn the asymmetrical balance of power when it comes to mistakes.
You make a mistake - you pay for it. The bureaucracy makes mistakes - you might pay for that too.
This is getting worse. More administrative mistakes and zero tolerance for immigrant errors.

The President turning the military against Americans is a bigger story than the shutdown and media outlets should treat it accordingly.

Findings of Fact & Conclusions of Law – #261 in American Association of University Professors v. Rubio (D. Mass., 1:25-cv-10685) – CourtListener.com Judge William G. Young: ORDER entered. FINDINGS OF FACT AND RULINGS OF LAW, PURSUANT TO FED. R. CIV. P. 52(A)(Sonnenberg, Elizabeth) (Entered: 09/30/2025)

Our little AAUP chapter went 2/2 vs. Trump!

Noem and Rubio…misused the sweeping powers of their offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their 1st Am protected political speech. They did so in order to strike fear into similarly situated non-citizens…

Feels like the compromise position for the democrats voting to fund the government should be 1. the healthcare funding they’re asking for so we don’t devastate tens of millions of people for no reason 2. Laws for the things we thought we already had laws for like not sending the military to cities

the president of the united states wants to use the american military to kill american citizens on american soil. that's the whole story!

In five minutes of scrolling I saw the President declare war on the city I live in at a mandatory military rally, an interesting discussion among legal scholars and commentators about how to describe where we are on the descent into fascism, and someone call Adam Serwer a cat racist. Love this place

Trump: "The ones that are run by radical left Democrats -- what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. They're very unsafe places & we're gonna straighten them out one by one. This is gonna be a major part for some people in this room. That's a war too. It's war from within"