Pulitzer-worthy reporting here from Minnesota immigrant news @sahanjournal.bsky.social.
70+ children detained during Operation MetroSurge.
30 sent to Dilley. Two dozen held >20 days, a Flores violation.
7 still detained as of March 10. ~20 have been deported.
sahanjournal.com/immigration/...
@bentarnoff.com and I went long on the Muskism-Fordism comparison, drawing on the Regulation School to ask what social settlement is being offered alongside the Big Tech regime of accumulation and whether they aren‘t perversely harmed by the absence of counterparty.
lpeproject.org/blog/muskism...
There's no legal basis for these boat strikes, and US officials involved in them should be prosecuted for attempted murder and murder. The OLC memo green-lighting the strikes is still secret, but there's nothing it could say that would make these strikes lawful. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
Download of the Week: “Historical Practice Theories” by Ahmed
The Download of the Week is Historical Practice Theories by Ashraf Ahmed. Here is the abstract: Contemporary constitutional law and theory is preoccupied with the question of practice. Over the last decade, across a range of issues—from…
The most daring & imaginative rising scholars are being cast aside systematically, abandoned by the very system that needs their ideas the most: the loss is profound, for everyone. And as in other cases of underinvestment the scale of damage will only become visible after it’s too late to fix.
"House Democrats will introduce five articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday accusing him of abuse of power, war crimes and other serious wrongdoing."
www.axios.com/2026/04/15/i...
At its core, the political economy of scholarship was never supposed to rely on ~$50k from a smelting fortune. Institutions have hollowed out their support, the feds have done the same, and all that's left is inadequate private funding.
Pope Leo aka "The TWAIL Pope" in Algeria today:
"respecting the dignity of everyone and allowing yourselves to be moved by the pain of others ... is more urgent than ever in the face of continuous violations of international law and neocolonial tendencies."
Screenshot of a post from Donald Trump: A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!
The President of the United States is openly threatening to commit genocide against 90 million people.
Prime Minister Carney: if there was ever a moment to denounce this illegal war, withdraw your support, and call for accountability for war crimes—it’s now.
The Yale Review published twenty-eight poems by Robert Frost. In a new essay, Kamran Javadizadeh goes into our archive and finds a poet reckoning with mortality, rivalry, and the limits of form.
This is a threat to commit an atrocity crime of extraordinary proportions.
The statement appears to be designed to spread terror among the Iranian population, which would render the threat itself a violation of international law, as recognized in the DoD Law of War Manual.
“Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.”
Geneva Convention Additional Protocol I
and
Department of Defense Law of War Manual, § 5.2.2
"Academic freedom protects scholars’ right to challenge the orthodoxy; it doesn’t insulate them from charges of bad faith in doing so. But the problem here is one of both supply *and* demand. And ... #SCOTUS bears at least some responsibility for the latter."
Me in today's issue of "One First":
These strikes would be war crimes on a massive scale and any military personnel who carried them out would be subjecting themselves to possible prosecution. Of course Trump is approximately as concerned about those military personnel as he is about Iranian civilians. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/u...
There's a handful of tickets left for Osgoode's Annual Constitutional Cases Conf (online also available). A fantastic set of speakers will unpack the recent jurisprudence.
Jeremy Waldron will deliver the Laskin Lecture, "Time now to write it in the books of law".
Join us: yorku.ca/osgoode/conc...
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
It’s not strange. Grown Americans in positions of power & authority called the police on to campuses, and threatened the future work and livelihood of 20 year olds because they dared to stand against the mass bombing of women and children.
And they will never forget it.
Don't get me wrong: I'm relieved that this case is shaping up as either 8-1 or 7-2 against the Trump executive order. But the case is a gift to the Supreme Court. By rejecting an outlandish position, it will earn credibility as apolitical, even as the Overton window moves far to the right.
Adam means that she is the daughter of immigrants, but it is worth emphasizing that *every* U.S. citizen who has not been naturalized is a birthright citizen, either by the 14th Amendment or by statute.
Please join us on April 10th, 2026 for the 29th Annual Osgoode Constitutional Cases Conference.
An exceptional program of speakers will critically engage with the recent caselaw, and the peerless Jeremy Waldron will deliver the annual Laskin Lecture.
Registration: www.yorku.ca/osgoode/conc...
Live your life so someone writes of you like this. So much love, so much wisdom. And unexpectedly, so much hope.
Lorna Finlayson on Basim Musallam for @newleftreview.bsky.social.
I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't had any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since typical grants are for three years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.
At the SCC today the gov’t interveners are making submissions on the NWS clause. Only the feds, BC & MB support courts’ power to grant declarations of Charter violations while s 33 applies. AB, SK, ON & QB say no, and released this letter on judicial appointments yesterday www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.
Consideration of the application for stay (25A952) presented to Justice Sotomayor and by her referred to the Court is deferred. Consideration of the application for stay (25A999) presented to The Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is also deferred. The applications are also treated as petitions for a writ of certiorari before judgment (25-1083, 25-1084), and the petitions are granted. The cases are consolidated, and a total of one hour is allotted for oral argument. The cases will be heard during the second week of the April 2026 argument session. Petitioners’ brief on the merits, and any amicus curiae briefs in support or in support of neither party, are to be filed on or before Monday March 30, 2026. Respondents’ briefs on the merits and any amicus curiae briefs in support, are to be filed on or before Monday, April 13, 2026. The reply brief, if any, is to be filed on or before Monday, April 20, 2026.
#SCOTUS just granted certiorari before judgment in *both* the Syria and Haiti Temporary Protected Status (TPS) cases—and will hear argument on the merits in April.
But it *deferred* the Trump administration's stay applications in both cases, so the DHS actions in those cases remain blocked for now:
Really looking forward to the annual Modern Philosophy conference at NYU this coming fall!
My PhD supervisee, Xiang Zhang, did a lovely job writing up this year’s thought-provoking Grafstein Lecture by Jessica Silbey @jessicasilbey.bsky.social: “Copyright’s Edges and the Ethics of Expression in the Digital Age”.
Read about it on the #IPOsgoode #IPilogue:
www.yorku.ca/osgoode/ipos...
I’m happy to share my latest - “Data is Nothing Like Oil” - an editorial just published in the IIC: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
We should see data not as oil but rather as an ocean— shifting our regulatory focus from commodification and private control to governance of the knowledge commons:👇
