Danielle Citron

My contribution to the Solan symposium is "Pragmatics and Textualism," a deep dive into the role of context in the interpretation of statutes. Link: bit.ly/PragmaticsAn...

NYC Council pushes to ban stores from collecting biometric data Stores like Macy's and Wegmans use facial recognition software to track customers in New York City.

“New York City already requires businesses to post signs notifying customers when they collect biometric data, but the proposed legislation would make it against the rules entirely.”

Social media created this nonsense idea that not exposing yourself to hatred is isolationist. Choosing to not spend your free time with bigots isn’t living in a bubble. I don’t need to know what’s going on at X. I won’t be smarter or more knowledgeable or empathic by being there. Neither will you.

Bright spot seeing CCRI President @maryannefranks.bsky.social honored with the NAACP Digital Civil Rights Award!

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."

-- Brandeis, dissenting, Olmstead v. U.S. (1928)

Chatbots overemphasize sociodemographic stereotypes, researchers report | Penn State University Artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, which can be trained to reflect certain demographic attributes such as race or ethnicity, rely on superficial stereotypes that diminish the authentic experien...

“The researchers found that chatbots relied on superficial stereotypes and exaggerated cultural markers that diminish the authentic experiences of the humans they’re meant to represent.”

Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at hig...

And right on schedule: there goes pseudonymity on the Internet. arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800

Heads up, folks. You have calls to make!

At some point we have to face the sad truth that this array of Administration miscreants are living their HS fantasies. Under what other circumstances would a group of athletes welcome this guy into a locker room celebration?

They all just wanted in on it.

“Swamp,” my ass.

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, i...

A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Add this to research that suggests that as Musk took over Twitter (but before Twitter became X), the algorithm there was serving up content that leaned markedly to the right, even for users whose networks leaned left. www.arxiv.org/abs/2512.06129

Some cities are ditching license plate readers over immigration surveillance concerns Cities around the country are debating whether to keep their automatic license plate readers. Concerns about privacy and federal immigration agents can access local data are driving these debates.

Another example of why I hate so much the folks who tell us this stuff is inevitable.

It doesn’t have to be this way!

Often when communities see the stakes, they reject ubiquitous surveillance.

So SCOTUS, with its fabricated-out-of-thin-air immunity doctrine, has actually made American presidents less accountable than LITERAL royalty.

The Gendered History of Defamation Law Jessica Lake, a senior lecturer at Melbourne Law School in Australia, discussed her latest book, “Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law.” Professor Danielle C

LISTEN: In a talk hosted by #UVALaw’s LawTech Center, Jessica Lake, a senior lecturer at Melbourne Law School, discusses her book on the gendered history of defamation law.

Lifting up the life of civil rights icon Jesse Jackson. Hard to lay out the range of his work and contributions and how much he inspired. They are leaving us one by one, exhorting us to pick up the mantle with courage & determination. Justice work is a lifelong commitment. Thank you Rev. Jackson.

Study Reveals the Elite Lawyers Dominating the Supreme Court Docket | Law.com A group of law professors have tabulated the most successful Supreme Court lawyers when it comes to getting the justices to agree to hear their cases.

In a new co-authored research paper, Prof. Mitu Gulati finds that an elite group of attorneys have an outsized success rate in getting certiorari granted at #SCOTUS.

Here we go.

John Lim ’27 To Lead Virginia Law Review John Lim, a second-year student at the University of Virginia School of Law, will soon take over as editor-in-chief of the student-run Virginia Law Review.

The Virginia Law Review has a new leadership team. Incoming Editor-in-Chief John Lim ’27 shares his goals for the coming year.

Yes he was handsome. But give some credit to the meticulous attention his wife Anna Murray Douglass paid to his care, his home, & the presentation of his garments. It was Anna, a free woman who he met in Baltimore, who out of her meager savings gave FD the money for his train ride to escape.

Yes it’s Valentine’s Day. But it’s also the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass who was born in 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. He escaped from slavery & rose to become the most eloquent and forceful voice for the abolition of slavery & for Black voting rights in the U.S.

Let’s go Maryland Senate!

The best case scenario is that Trump will waste $38 billion. The more likely outcome is that these will become warehouses of human suffering, and a permanent stain on America's history.

papers.ssrn.com Date Written: February 09, 2026 Abstract This Article develops the concept of digital ethnonationalism, which refers to the design and operation of opaque algorithmic systems and policies that reproduce racial and religious hierarchy and cultural homogeneity at scale. Recent federal reversals of anti-bias Al safeguards (including in consumer lending, housing, employment, procurement, and more), the stigmatizing of equity as "ideological," and pressure on platforms to relax content moderation standards exemplify this turn. Digital ethnonationalism is not confined to the United States. It is intertwined with U.S. pursuits of global technological dominance, the resurgence of nativist and ethnonationalist movements abroad (for instance, Germany and France), and the marginalization of the emerging global majority in shaping technology standards, governance, and norms. Ethnonationalist logic is increasingly embedded in digital technologies adopted worldwide. This Article does not seek to "solve" digital ethnonationalism but instead to lay the groundwork for a research agenda. It makes visible digital ethnonationalism as a growing challenge given its integration into critical infrastructure in diverse, multiethnic societies. For those committed to liberal, pluralistic democracy, the first step is to identify digital ethnonationalism and to develop strategies to recognize, cabin, contain, and navigate it within technology development, governance, law and policy. There is no silver bullet-effective responses are multifaceted and context-specific. Still, several core principles should guide action, including fairness (mitigating bias and proxy discrimination), pluralism (advancing linguistic, cultural, and epistemic diversity), autonomy (constraining covert behavioral manipulation and preserving meaningful human agency), and dignity (treating marginalized groups and women with respect so that they can participate in the networked age). Keywords: digital ethnon…

Digital ethnonationalism (noun) —
“the design & operation of opaque algorithmic systems & policies that reproduce racial & religious hierarchy & cultural homogeneity at scale.”
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
New paper @spenceroverton.bsky.social @daniellecitron.bsky.social explores
technofascism.

OpenAI has a new “health” app… 🤨

From the latest episode of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, with @emilymbender.bsky.social. From episode 71: A Bad Case of Hype-itis.

What It Means to Be a White ‘Race Traitor’

MUST READ from @nhannahjones.bsky.social today.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/m...

She Resigned as Penn President After a Controversial Hearing. Now She’s Back. Liz Magill, the former president of the University of Pennsylvania, will be the new dean of Georgetown University’s law school.

This is terrific news! Liz Magill is a great choice to lead Georgetown Law.

Regarding the controversy—Elise Stefanik ambushed Magill at that hearing with the evident goal of smearing her as an antisemite, which she is not (obviously). UPenn's loss is our gain.
www.politico.com/news/magazin...

@georgetownlaw.bsky.social could not be luckier with Liz Magill as their new Dean!! I’m so excited for my colleagues there and for all of us in the profession. Liz is a brilliant scholar, extraordinary generous colleague and wonderful human. Thrilling!! view.info.georgetown.edu?vawpToken=3L...

As constitutional interpretation becomes rooted ever more deeply into the past the Constitution seemingly has less and less to say about our present. It seems to offer little principled direction for navigating what many describe as a constitutional crisis. On questions ranging from birthright citizenship and territorial acquisition to aggressive federal immigration enforcement, executive intervention beyond U.S. borders, and the “history and tradition” of annexed territories such as Hawai’i, the Constitution’s familiar sources of authority and traditional narratives seem to falter. These domains appear to tread into empty constitutional landscapes and newly discovered territory. Scholars have increasingly traced this backward-looking orientation to conservative legal movements of the last half century. But the impulse to seek constitutional meaning in the past is not new. Long before the Supreme Court embraced originalism, and long before the modern turn to “history and tradition,” jurists and scholars assumed that the Constitution could not be understood apart from its origins and development. Constitutional meaning was thought to emerge from historical inquiry. The question, then, was not whether constitutional interpretation should engage with the past, but which past—and through what historical method. This Foreword argues that our present constitutional impasse stems, at least in part, not solely from excessive attention to the past but from fixation on a particular kind of past. Modern constitutional theory, I suggest, has been increasingly bounded by what scholars in the historical and social sciences call a methodological nationalism. By nationalism, I do not mean to invoke familiar federalism debates. Nor do I use the term nationalism as a pejorative or a critique of those whose research centers the United States and its founders. Rather, in identifying mainstream constitutional theory as operating within a nationalist frame, I seek to draw attention t…

New Foreword up on SSRN, previewing new projects on the history of constitutional history and what it can teach about legal frameworks at the heart of our "constitutional crisis"-federal Indian law, territorial law, expansion, immigration, and executive power. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

For decades the tech industry has insulated itself from criticism by leveraging the rhetoric of progressivism & benignity towards the disenfranchised & disabled, w promises of “access” & “democratization” that their products afford. We can’t stop them using this lang but we can stop falling for it.