Susan Navarro Smelcer

Charlotte-Mecklebburg Schools, according to reports, saw 15% of its students absent today amid Border Patrol operations in Charlotte. If that percentage of 15% happens Tuesday in Wake County due to the Border Patrol coming to Raleigh, 24.000 students could be absent from school. #nced #ncpol #wcpss

This echoes the conservative counterargument to union rights a century ago, the so-called "liberty of contract."

As FDR's Interior Secretary Harold Ickes noted, that kind of "liberty" merely gave helpless individuals the freedom to "drive a bargain with a great corporation."

UNC Chapel Hill Won’t Sign Compact The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill made clear Friday that it won’t sign the federal “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that has been extended to all institutions after ...

UNC Chapel Hill Won’t Sign Compact
www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

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More judges speak to the press (the NYT) about what a disaster the Supreme Court (specifically the shadow docket) has been - “incredibly demoralizing & troubling”; a “judicial crisis”; a “slap in the face to district courts.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/u...

Americans should not be able to opt into a legal system that’s alien to American values, arbitrary, riddled with dogma, deferential to power, and premised on unearned authority, and that’s why we’re banning … Sharia Law? Shit I thought you guys were going after arbitration clauses

(for the QR Code challenged)

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Wheat paste poster that says the all the world is dying and the new world struggles to be born now is the time of monsters. There's a picture of Elmo

Morning walk

When we get to pleading in my first-year Civil Procedure class, my students often ask me just how over the top a complaint would have to be for a judge to strike it without even being *asked* to do so.

Thanks to President Trump, we have an answer:

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Goebbels Ends Careers of Five 'Aryan' Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime (Published 1939)

These are precedented times and the precedent is a loud ass warning

www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/a...

Just so I'm clear:

TV host says we should kill every homeless person? No big deal

TV host says the right must "go to war" with the left? Pfft.

TV host says the government is cracking down on critics? Well, the government cracks down on him for the criticism.

Free speech, everyone.

How do I submit feedback for shows on ABC.com? To submit comments or suggestions for your favorite ABC shows, you can give us feedback by following the steps below: Using a supported web browser, go to ABC.com Select the Submit Programming Fe...

If you feel like yelling at ABC, you can always use the programming feedback portal to voice your opinion. I don't think ABC anticipated this particular use for the feedback portal, but that's what they're getting from me. Happy Constitution Day, y'all.
support.abc.com/hc/en-us/art...

The union representing the musicians from Jimmy Kimmel’s band releases a statement calling the FCC’s pressure on Disney “state censorship.”

WGA Statement on ABC's Decision to Pull ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ The right to speak our minds and to disagree with each other - to disturb, even - is at the very heart of what it means to be a free people. It is not to be denied. Not by violence, not by the abuse of governmental power, nor by acts of corporate cowardice. As a Guild, we stand united in opposition to anyone who uses their power and influence to silence the voices of writers, or anyone who speaks in dissent. If free speech applied only to ideas we like, we needn't have bothered to write it into the Constitution. What we have signed on to - painful as it may be at times - is the freeing agreement to disagree. Shame on those in government who forget this founding truth. As for our employers, our words have made you rich. Silencing us impoverishes the whole world. The WGA stands with Jimmy Kimmel and his writers.

The following is a statement from the WGA on ABC’s decision to pull ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’

Excited for Jonathan Turley’s testimony that murder is not one of the “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Opinion | Charlie Kirk Didn’t Shy Away From Who He Was. We Shouldn’t Either.

wrote on charlie kirk for the newsletter this weekend

I think a lot about a case from law school: Andrews v. United Airlines (9th Cir. 1994). Kozinski writes eloquently in support of an airline passenger injured by falling overhead bags. Explaining why the opinion so thoroughly favored the passenger, the professor said "judges fly on airplanes."

"From a boring, bureaucratic perspective, the key role of the Court is to settle a single interpretation of the Constitution that governs all lower courts, allowing individuals to conduct themselves with assurance as to what the law actually is."

lol

www.liberalcurrents.com/we-have-no-s...

Firing and demoralizing feminized jobs as enemies of the state while brazenly bribing men with violent jobs that almost instantly puts them into the middle of middle class is very basic gendered warfare. Fulfilling the manosphere’s promise.

Teachers and academics, enjoy the last week of summer. August is a lie we tell ourselves.

This is unconscionable. Our entire profession should be up in arms.

Masked law enforcement and now anonymous lawyers. Our courts are open as is our legal system. If you can’t put your name to your representation as a lawyer then you should not be allowed to appear in court. @americanbar.org

Read Justice Sotomayor's dissent. This decision is bad enough, but the majority's refusal to give any reasons for a decision of this magnitude is pure lawlessness. Infuriating.

I was adopted via closed adoption, born in North Carolina.

It was closed so I have no knowledge of or access to my biological mother’s details. It also means my biological mother isn’t on my birth certificate.

So if birthright citizenship becomes a patchwork right, what’s someone like me to do?

More and more I understand this moment as reverse Reconstruction.

If the Supreme Court thinks universal injunctions are unconstitutional, to wait until *now* to say that, in this of all cases, with this of all presidents, is a devastating indictment of both its impartiality and its prudence.

This is beyond cruel, especially for young folks who are going through it. Cutting off LGBTQ+ youth from specialized suicide prevention help is a death sentence disguised as bureaucracy.

Shame on every official who signed off on this. You’re not protecting children, you’re abandoning them.

Just some creepy armed Mad Max guys trying to gain entry to Dodgers Stadium.

ICE says it wasn’t them. DHS says they were Border Patrol. But honestly who the hell knows? They’ve given permission for any psycho to put on a ski mask, point a gun, grab people & throw them into an unmarked vehicle.

Ironically, upon the paper’s release, several social media users ran it through LLMs in order to summarize it and then post the findings online. Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to “only read this table below,” thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper. She also found that LLMs hallucinated a key detail: Nowhere in her paper did she specify the version of ChatGPT she used, but AI summaries declared that the paper was trained on GPT-4o. “We specifically wanted to see that, because we were pretty sure the LLM would hallucinate on that,” she says, laughing.

Amazing: MIT researchers revealed how ChatGPT etc are destroying our brains and booby-trapped the report to expose those who want to use AI to ostensibly summarize the results.

t.co/JXeTALBPds

I need all of #lawsky to see this video from a Colorado appeals court livestream yesterday. I am in actual tears. Sound *incredibly* on, the subtitles will not help.