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Sameer Ashar

@sameer-ashar.bsky.social
1.4K followers 638 following 123 posts

Clinical Professor of Law, UC Irvine | Workers, Law & Organizing Clinic | law & social movements, legal education, abolitionist futures | losing my edge

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Reposted by Sameer Ashar
David Kaye @davidakaye.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
it's evidently too much to ask the rw justices to consider the irreparable harm to individuals treated to such inhumanity. they are complicit in this criminality. shame on all six of them. and shame on us for having a system that allows this illegality.
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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
To me this is the crux of the public disconnect re: "The Law" - the second important point is that people believe that courts of law are courts of justice... and this really fucks people up. "This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice" - Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Sameer Ashar @sameer-ashar.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
“Legal systems…are under constant pressure to decide, to settle, to produce the determinate outcome that rule of law requires. That pressure is not always wrong. But it forecloses too early, and its foreclosures are asymmetrically distributed.“ Robert Herian criticallegalthinking.com/2026/09/25/m...
criticallegalthinking.com
Microtonal Jurisprudence
This is not a music review. It’s a proposal for a jurisprudential methodology that takes its organising metaphor from music theory but its critical object from law's refusal to register what its own c...
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Connect with Jacob Soboroff @connectwithjacob.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Between January and October of 2025, DHS data shows that 18 women were reported to have miscarried while detained by ICE. After that? Nothing. A new report from @us.theguardian.com shows that women have continued to experience miscarriages, ICE just stopped counting.
msnbc.com
REPORT: ICE LOST COUNT of miscarriages in detention
According to a new report from The Guardian, ICE has been detaining a record number of pregnant women since Donald Trump’s return to office. According to records obtained by the paper, the agency also...
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Josh Eidelson @josheidelson.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
In a Los Angeles courtroom this winter, after a back-and-forth with a judge about estimating the number of people likely to die from exposure to silica, Hyundai L&C lawyer Rey Yang mused, “You could live life without any risk, and then where would you be?” www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
bloomberg.com
‘Death Sentences’: Crafting America’s Favorite Countertops Is Killing Workers
Hundreds of workers who’ve contracted silicosis are suing the artificial stone industry for billions. While California weighs a ban on fabricating the product, the manufacturers’ defenders in Congress...
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Karin Wulf @kawulf.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
What’s missing: 1/ Any framing about what higher is or has been that misses the big public investment post-WW2 and then massive disinvestment starting in the 1980s which spirals into rising costs and student debt is disingenuous at best. 5/
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Center for Constitutional Rights @ccrjustice.org · 11/09/2026
Legal Director Baher Azmy in the Boston Review: following 9/11 "the United States’s totalizing military response has never come to an end." U.S. impunity "paved the way for rank authoritarianism and forever war—all of it enabled by an imperial Supreme Court." www.bostonreview.net/articles/sad...
bostonreview.net
Sadistic, Blatant, and Wanton
Impunity for U.S. atrocities after 9/11 paved the way for rank authoritarianism and forever war—all of it enabled by an imperial Supreme Court.
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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Some of you know that I co-founded Liberation Library in 2015 with great comrades in Chicago. The org is volunteer led and has continued it's amazing work. They are trying to raise $15,000 to send books to incarcerated children as a back to school fundraiser - mailchi.mp/cc51694705fc...
mailchi.mp
Stack the Books for Back 2 School
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Omri Marian @omrimarian.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Important: the court explicitly notes in the opinion that "[t]he government and its personnel face steep civil and criminal consequences for willful disclosure of information in violation of section 6103." A future DOJ MUST open a criminal investigation into the IRS/DHS information sharing.
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Sameer Ashar @sameer-ashar.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Reflections on labor/migration regimes, thinking toward immigration enforcement abolition. Thanks to @jamesbrandt.bsky.social for his work.
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Brian Beutler @brianbeutler.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
I have some frustrations... www.offmessage.net/p/elon-musk-...
offmessage.net
I Am Going To Lose My F****** Mind
Can someone make the madness end? Or are we simply doomed to demented discourse and intolerable double standards and spineless opposition forever?
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Place still matters. It’s probably about to matter a whole lot more.
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Luke Herrine @lookheron.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Jonathan Glater and my account of the Biden administration's attempt to restabilize the higher education system is now out in California Law Review! The core argument: www.californialawreview.org/print/studen...
This Article explains how these initiatives came about, how the Biden Reforms were foiled, and how the conflicts around both have reshaped the law and politics of student loans moving forward. We argue that the federal student loan system that developed under the Higher Education Act of 1965 and matured by the 1990s enabled insider-driven politics that allowed for legislative compromise. Inside the Beltway, bargaining between the government and private sector actors in the aid system made incremental adjustments possible primarily via legislative amendments; outside the Beltway, student loans served as a necessary institution to promote individual investments in higher education as costs rose. This normal politics deteriorated as problems with the student loan system became increasingly obvious and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and then the COVID-19 pandemic, imposed massive disruptions to family finances. The Biden Reforms were an effort to return to something like the status quo ante by resolving the ambiguities in student loan law in favor of a more progressively structured and user-friendly system. Intense opposition to these attempts threw the system into disarray and left us with a more populist, partisan, and polarized politics of student loans in which previously unthinkable progressive and regressive extremes have entered the realm of possibility.
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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
"Democratic states have not particularly covered themselves in glory when it comes to higher ed. There’s no counter-movement in blue states that offers a robust counter-vision for higher ed — that it might, first of all, be actually good for society, or provide the kind of education students want."
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Jen Taub @jentaub.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Devastating
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Sameer Ashar @sameer-ashar.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
My father’s favorite Dolly Parton song, missing his own mother far away and then gone
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The Drift @thedriftmag.com · 19/08/2026
Andrew Baker was also a “token black professor” at Bates College. But his perspective on the events Tyler Austin Harper recounts in his Atlantic cover story is very different. Read Baker’s side of the story online today. newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p/racism-and...
newsletter.thedriftmag.com
Racism and labor at Bates: the other side of the story
Andrew Baker responds to Tyler Austin Harper
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The Associated Press @apnews.com · 22/08/2026
Dutch data protection authorities have fined Uber nearly $1 billion, saying the ride-hailing company used automated software to suspend driver accounts, sometimes permanently with no human review to check for mistakes.
bit.ly
Uber fined nearly $1 billion by Dutch regulators over automated suspensions of driver accounts
Dutch data protection authorities have fined Uber nearly $1 billion, saying the ride-hailing company used automated software to suspend driver accounts, sometimes permanently with no human review to check for mistakes.
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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Their intent was and is clear in their speech and their actions. We should be equally intentional in describing them as eugenicist--eugenics is the through line here--to their attitudes to USAID, vaccination, public health, all of it. Absolutely.
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Sasha Gusev has a great new blog post on faculty hiring during the DEI era. Remarkable how much backlash there has been to what was an tiny and temporary bump in hiring Black, Latino, and Native faculty of about 1 person per R1 campus theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/what-actua...
Demographics of R1 university faculty, 2001-2024
84.5% 80%
White 69.8%
60
40
20
8.9%
3.4%
2.9%
0.3%
2001
'05
'10
'15
'20
— Asian/PI 17.1%
lispanic 6.4%
Black 4.8%
'24 Other 1.9%Hiring counts for tenure-track positions at R1 universities
4,000 hires
3,797
• Non-URM 3,753
3,000
2,000
2,254
1,000
623
623
298
→ URM 788
Black 348
2018
2019
2020
322
2021
2022
2023
2024
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Ben Heath @jbentonheath.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
I've posted my first systematic attempt to make sense of the past 20 months, as well as what came before. It's a work in progress, so please do hit me up with comments, objections, and screeds. The abstract (w/ alt text) is here. Some acknowledgments & refs in 🧵.1/x papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
This paper argues that the second Trump administration is crystallizing a new phase of U.S. state-building-the Chokepoint State. In the Chokepoint State, state capacity is directed toward creating and controlling key nodes in financial and data networks, with the aim of using that control to punish adversaries, reward allies, and set new rules of the road. This stage in American state-making builds on earlier legal and administrative innovations, but it operates according to its own logic. In the Chokepoint State, actors that control nodes in economic and information networks can use their power to impose new, quasi-legal norms that do not derive from any ordinary lawmaking process. The second Trump administration's grab for power has depended heavily on the techniques of the Chokepoint State, but those techniques precede Trump and have been used by administrations from both major U.S. parties. The paper further argues that resistance in the Chokepoint State requires a combination of strategies to tame the state's discretion from within, while using countervailing power to build zones of sanctuary that exist outside the state's unbridled control.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7300179
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
But it is hopefully obvious how malicious actors could purposefully use this kind of setup. If you are a right wing neo-segregationist who finds yourself in a political culture where racism is already in circulation, you do not need to put forward an explicit segregationist agenda. 7/
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Sameer Ashar @sameer-ashar.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
”investors on Thursday expressed concern about the lack of growth in overall numbers of immigrants being monitored through ISAP“ www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
theguardian.com
ICE is now tracking nearly 54,000 immigrants via ankle monitors
Shift in monitoring methods has led to revenue boost for Geo Group, a private prison firm, that also makes the device
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Helena Fitzgerald @hellafitzgerald.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
yeah, this essay rules, read it defector.com/humanists-ha...
Our critics are really fucking stupid, and we’ve given them way too much leeway to conjure senile fantasies out of their own illiteracy.
Very smart people have already defended humanities scholarship for its difficulty as well as its sometimes intimidating specialization. Jordy Rosenberg, in the now-defunct AVIDLY section of the Los Angeles Review of Books, wrote a wonderful personal essay about the joys of struggling with Judith Butler’s ideas specifically. My point here is not to defend the alleged properties of our writing—which, as I’ve suggested, are mostly projections—but rather the specific reading practices already intrinsic to humanities teaching and research that attend to the difficulties of making thought manifest in language. Call it form, call it figuration, call it rhetoric; these are the features of communication that render its use irreducible to the simple transmission of data bytes and incompatible with the reactionary desire for immediacy.
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Jonathan Feingold @jpygold.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
1/ here to blurb all 13 essays from @bulaw.bsky.social “The University & Democracy” special issue. Incisive, sharp, provocative analysis abt why universities keep cowering & colluding w segregationists & authoritarians. @aaup.org #CLC #SNDHE long 🧵w highlights from each. www.bu.edu/bulawreview/...
It is this uncomfortable place—the recognition that universities might, in fact, be sites of antidemocracy—that motivated the Boston University Law Review’s 2025 Symposium on “The University and Democracy.” The thirteen essays in this Symposium issue help us begin to interrogate, struggle with, and perhaps answer why so many of our institutions have accommodated fascistic attacks on their own communities and commitments
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
I beat this drum for ten years. It won’t take. People don’t want to know this and so they don’t know it.
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ahilantoolong.bsky.social @ahilantoolong.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Wondering who to invite for your college or law school panel on immigration? Check out my piece offering some thoughts from UCLA Law's experience last semester.
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Will Beaman @greenbackbetter.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
“Open borders” starts from a basically unassailable moral intuition that immigrants are not inherently better or worse, or more or less trustworthy, than people whose families happened to arrive here earlier. But the debate is framed within thoroughly naturalized political economic premises. 1/
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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Tu Jhoom is one of those songs. Just pure delight to the ear, yet its lyrics are a profound philosophical exploration of the empty futility of striving for status/success, the inevitability of sadness and the ephemerality of happiness--so, abandon yourselves, dance. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D4v...
youtube.com
Coke Studio | Season 14 | Tu Jhoom | Naseebo Lal x Abida Parveen
YouTube video by Coke Studio Pakistan
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Ben K. @benjaminkabak.com · 07/08/2026
Congrats to all of the Democrats who voted to move Marks out of committee. Big day for you guys.
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Valena Beety @valenabeety.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
It’s book launch day for Pink Crime and here’s the first sighting out in the world - Books Are Magic in Brooklyn! If you see the book somewhere, please post or let me know! 🥳 @thenewpress.bsky.social
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tamara nopper @tamaranopper.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Dr. Johanna Fernández was writing a book on the historical roots of U.S. fascism. An article related to the book is here: manifold.umn.edu/read/ces0701... BTW, George Jackson, in an interview about writing in prison, noted he was working on a detailed study of fascism sweeping the Western world.
manifold.umn.edu
On the Historical Roots of U.S. Fascism | On the Historical Roots of U.S. Fascism | Manifold@UMinnPress
The University of Minnesota Press is known for its boundary breaking editorial program in the humanities and social sciences.
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Sameer Ashar @sameer-ashar.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
“It is as if school shooters are running the state.“
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Andrew J Douglas @ajdouglas.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
New piece by Jared Loggins and me in the Boston Univ. Law Review. Wide-ranging conversation on the uncertain role of the university in end times fascism, campus worker complicity in genocide and scholasticide, and missed opportunities of the Black University movement. www.bu.edu/bulawreview/...
FROM THE ASHES OF THIS DESTRUCTION: A CONVERSATION ON BLACK STUDY AND THE POSSIBILITY OF THE BLACK UNIVERSITY

ANDREW J. DOUGLAS∗& JARED A. LOGGINS**

Jared Loggins: I feel compelled to open this discussion with Palestine and the failure of our higher education institutions on so many levels. There are no words to adequately capture the weight and scale of cruelty, destruction, suffering, and death at the hands of Israel’s despotic government. It is genocide. There are no universities standing in Gaza. It is epistemic violence and scholasticide. We are talking about complete decimation of Palestinian life and institutions. We are talking about the razing of libraries, schools, and heritage sites. Whole families wiped out. We have failed to “face the worst” as George Kateb once put it. Higher ed institutions are far from blameless.6 Students, staff, and faculty alike...
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A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Propounding a cause isn’t about winning an election. It’s about expanding the scope of social imagination, which expands the scope of practical possibilities, which changes many other things, including but not limited to what positions and candidates (and even slogans!) can and cannot win elections.
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
"Stop criticizing us or will keep murdering people" is just a jaw-dropping thing for a government official to say.
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Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Running out of body bags, using forklifts to transfer corpses into makeshift morgues, a mortician conducting 200 funerals in a month when he usually does 30, crematories running at double capacity… And these senators just want to memory-hole it all www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/n...
nytimes.com
‘We Ran Out of Space’: Bodies Pile Up as N.Y. Struggles to Bury Its Dead (Gift Article)
The coronavirus crisis is overwhelming New York’s system for burying the dead.
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Aurelius Raines II (He/Him) @aureliusr2.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
On this, Emmit Tills birthday, I want to share one of my favorite speculative Poems “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store” by Eve L. Ewing share.google/mWtwTI9NvriN...
share.google
“I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store” by Eve L. Ewing
Terrance Hayes explores how Emmett Till has become a haunting, powerful figure in Black poetry.
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David Kaib @davidkaib.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
For reading group, we are currently voting for which book that we already have done will be done again. Here are the options (you can only vote it you were already on the email list.)
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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
I remain surprised how few people credit Occupy Wall Street's ongoing impact(s) on U.S. politics. There's no Mamdani without Occupy etc... [some people are also irrationally anti-Occupy but that's for another day]
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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 24/07/2026
What an indignity to have your farm or house seized via eminent domain, to see it razed and replaced by a weed-choked empty field, a lonely foundation slab, or an abandoned empty building that could only ever be repurposed for laser-tag or an ICE concentration-camp: gizmodo.com/trump-on-dat... 6/
gizmodo.com
Trump on Data Centers: 'You Can't Fight It. You Have to Go With It'
Usually it's not great when a person in power tells others to just give up and do what they want.
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Murshed Zaheed @murshedz.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Los Angeles Bootlickers.
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Charlotte Clymer @charlotteclymer.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
This story is crazy. It would appear Trump admin officials rigged their nationally televised high school civics contest to keep a young man from a Sikh family out of the finalists. www.notus.org/national/ame...
notus.org
Suspicion and Doubt at the National Civics Contest
America’s finest young scholars competed to mark their country's birthday. It led to a disputed finish in the age of mistrust.
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Raffi Magarik @raphaelmagarik.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
For @jewishcurrents.bsky.social, I wrote about the Jewish Museum's Paul Klee exhibit, the angel of history getting held up in Jerusalem, and the vexed relationship between critique and aesthetic veneration in our present moment of danger. jewishcurrents.org/the-absent-a...
jewishcurrents.org
The Absent Angel
A reflection on the Jewish Museum’s Paul Klee exhibit
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LPE Blog @lpeblog.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Today, @matthewtbodie.bsky.social welcomes the appearance of a kinder, gentler, more ecumenical version of law and economics. Yet in corporate law scholarship, where shareholder primacy still reigns supreme, he finds scant evidence of any such shift.
lpeproject.org
Twilight of the Gods
Contemporary proponents of law and economics claim to have abandoned the idea that law is an instrument for maximizing economic efficiency and wealth. Corporate law scholars haven't yet heard the good...
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Silky Shah @silkys13.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
New interview I did with Amna Akbar in @jewishcurrents.bsky.social was just published. It's a bit of a synthesis on the how we got here and the current conditions on immigration. Always great to be in convo w/Amna & wonderful to work w/Aparna Gopalan at JC on this. jewishcurrents.org/unbuild-the-...
jewishcurrents.org
Unbuild the Cages
Silky Shah maps the vulnerabilities of the deportation machine.
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sarah thankam mathews @smathewss.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
newwwwwww ting out <3
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𝙽𝚊𝚜𝚑 𝙸𝚜 𝙷𝚎𝚛𝚎 𝙵𝚘𝚛 𝙸𝚝 @nashishereforit.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
This is how to speak to every single one of those sycophants.
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