Joshua Lake

May a Texas lawyer respond publicly to a former client’s adverse comments on the internet? If so, what information may the lawyer disclose?

In Texas, the attorney can post "a proportional and restrained response that does not reveal any confidential information." www.legalethicstexas.com/resources/op...

Judge Dennis has taken inactive status.

Kurt Vonnegut stop being so applicable to all time periods of American life, you can’t do that Kurt Vonnegut, your insights are too evergreen Kurt Vonnegut

Left, my story about how the right wing ex-Honduran president was given special treatment after he was pardoned for drug trafficking - and had his ICE detainer dropped.

Right, a story about a man who spent 43 yrs in prison for a wrongful conviction & was deported once his convicted was overturned

/3 I prepare clients by telling them “if I ever say to you ‘do you have the question in mind,’ I am telling you to shut the absolute fuck up instanter’”

They laugh and then I give them a look that I mean it and then it has a big impact when I say it.

This is very funny but also that’s exactly what the lawyer should be saying to the client

Mia Valentina Paz Faria A 7-year-old from Venezuela who was living in Austin, Texas Detained for 70 days “I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

UPDATE: Staff at the ICE concentration camp in Dilley, Texas have begun raiding the dormitories of kids and their parents to confiscate and destroy letters from the children. This is in response to the ace reporting by @micarosenberg et al for ProPublica:

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”

- 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas.

Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children.

www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

Perhaps the United States has more evidence than alleged in its criminal complaint, but as written, this appears to test the bounds of what conduct constitutes harboring an undocumented person.

The United States has charged a CBP supervisor with harboring an illegal alien because he was in a romantic relationship with a woman who overstayed her visa.

In the complaint, the US says he knew she was consulting an attorney about resolving her immigration status

www.justice.gov/usao-sdtx/pr...

Investigators wrangled video from Nancy Guthrie’s Google Nest camera out of ‘backend systems’ It’s not yet clear how the FBI collected the video. Experts said in some cases it’s possible to collect data from the complex infrastructure that has enabled cloud-based cameras.

This has a lot of implications well beyond this case. Many people put these devices in/outside their homes to see who is at the door or watch their pets becuase they think it’s livestream only and not recorded.

If companies like Google and Ring have magic backend data, we need to know about it.

Just hopped off a phone call with my grandmother. And she said something that I’m going to carry with me today: “God doesn’t care about how much people talk about you, but He does care about how often you talk for people who can’t.”

I can’t stress this enough. The state of 4th Amendment law is that the cops can’t force you to type in a passcode but they can force you to swipe your finger or present your face. Never stop using passcodes/passwords to unlock your devices. And consider additional code to unlock Signal.

Pro tip for the #legalwriting students out there who are starting to think about their 1L oral arguments: when the judge asks a question, try to immediately and directly respond to that question.

But see:

#Appellatejobs

YouTube video by Washington Post 'Democracy Dies in Darkness': Super Bowl commercial (2019)

Seven years ago yesterday, this ad ran during the Super Bowl.

Washington Post Raid Is a Frightening Reminder: Turn Off Your Phone’s Biometrics Now The search warrant to raid a Washington Post reporter’s home shows how authorities can open your phone without your consent.

I am begging y’all to turn off Face ID and fingerprint approval on your devices. If you’re a US citizen, cops & ICE & CBP can’t make you tell them your password but they can hold your phone in front of your face or stick it on your thumb to unlock it.
theintercept.com/2026/01/30/w...

I will simply never recover from reading this sentence:

"Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people."

A man carrying an assault weapon at the Michigan capitol in 2020 to protest COVID restrictions. Behind him are two people wrapped in Trump flags.

More arms anti-lockdown protesters

“You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple.” — FBI Dir. Kash Patel

Things worth really hammering to any family and acquaintances whose reflexive attitude is “but we gotta enforce the law”:
(1) Lots of the folks being targeted came here legally; the administration has retroactively declared them “illegal” despite having done nothing wrong

Speaking as a career criminal-defense attorney, "quaint" is incredibly charitable.

It's hard to pick favorites when there are so many viable choices, but allowing judges to sentence defendants based on acquitted conduct has to be a contender.

This makes perfect sense to me and I've often wondered how, say, lawyers who use AI to write briefs expect to effectively argue their positions in court.

Federal defense lawyers 'face financial ruin' after months without pay, memo says Last month, federal prosecutors told the court that judges could appoint defense attorneys to work without pay. In a memo this week, defense attorneys said months of nonpayment have "already taken a d...

Federal CJA defense attys haven’t gotten paid since July, now some are facing eviction as they continue to defend poor people for free

Prosecutors want judges to force attorneys to work unpaid, but defense lawyers say thats unconstitutional and “deeply insulting”

Reports @latimes.com
@nacdl.org

Fourth Circuit publishes an opinion to make a point that otherwise would go unseen.
www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/...

Washington. New Mexico. San Francisco. Los Angeles. Maine. Oregon. Massachusetts.

Just a few of the places where the legal system is breaking because public/private defenders have stopped taking new cases because of their unethical workloads.

A national crisis that few are paying attention to.

Yesterday, I had the great pleasure of joining Judge Gray Miller and Alaina King Benford on this panel entitled "The Art of Persuasion & Advocacy." Thank you to the UH Law Center Student Bar Association and The Advocates at UHLC for hosting a wonderful event.