Paul Gowder

RE: @nathell@mastodon.social

this sparks joy

I'm wearing a tie so you know that Trump did another fascism and it's time to explain that to the tv-viewing public

Following up on some very slightly oversimplified quotes in axios, preliminary notes on state capacity to resist ICE abuses: https://stop-authoritarianism.beehiiv.com/p/options-for-illinois-pushback-against-ice-abusiveness

The year is 2026. You heart a cat picture on Instagram. The cat's owner once disagreed with Charlie Kirk. ICE is here. You're guilty of material support, RICO, and structuring. Stephen Miller is burning you in effigy at halftime at the Superbowl. You're in CECOT. You pay Trump $100k. You're in exile.

It is inexcusable for a public university in a blue state to give a snitch list to Trump.

It's time to do sanctuary jurisdictions but for education. California (and Illinois, Massachusetts, etc.) should forbid its universities by statute from cooperating with any federal demands for information absent a court order.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/12/uc-berkeley-trump-administration-antisemitism

Here we go again. The president has threatened to wage war on an American city so I guess I have to do more press.

What I will tell them is that the constitution defines the crime of treason as levying war against the United States. Any soldier who obeys an order to wage a war of aggression against the city of Chicago is subject to court-martial.

Was on CBS this morning talking about Trump's threat to send troops to Chicago. TL;DR it's illegal for multiple reasons.

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/video/looming-national-guard-deployment-in-chicago/

Someone is clearly happy that the bullshit air and water show is over

our press team asked if I wanted to be included in a media advisory about trump's national guard dictator behavior. No clue if they'll actually dare to use what I sent them, but I'm just going to say how it is

(Please ignore the "that's" typo in p2)

Don't have enough characters here for alt text but the blue sky one has https://bsky.app/profile/gowder.io/post/3lwciftkn622g

Just in case you were wondering what to think about the various "originalist" attacks on birthright citizenship:

Evan D. Bernick, Paul Gowder & Anthony Michael Kreis, Birthright Citizenship and the Dunning School of Unoriginal Meanings, 101 Cornell L. Rev. Online 101 (2025)

https://publications.lawschool.cornell.edu/lawreview/2025/07/23/birthright-citizenship-and-the-dunning-school-of-unoriginal-meanings/

Threw the whole back-and-forth on the Rosie O'Donnell thing up on beehiv with a bonus excerpt from Plato

https://stop-authoritarianism.beehiiv.com/p/so-a-reporter-asked-me-about-trump-s-insane-threat-to-take-away-rosie-o-donnell-s-citizenship-c43b

Today in emails to reporters, I dropped Xerxes and Plato, because that's the level of crazy we're in right now

Being a law professor who keeps book manuscript drafts in git means that you end up with commit messages like "suck it Clarence Thomas" and I love that for me

My article about the Attorney General's utterly lawless self-referral power (yet another way immigration law just pees on the basic principles of the rule of law) with Stella Burch Elias (former Iowa colleague, wonderful human) is officially out, https://minnesotalawreview.org/article/against-attorney-general-self-referral-in-immigration-law/

Just realized this never got shared on Mastodon. If you wanna see Anthony Kreis, Evan Bernick and I explain why that godawful Barnett/Wurman oped on birthright citizenship is not only wrong but flatly unethical, here's the article: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5162760

🚨MY NEW BOOK IS OUT🚨: The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms is a polisci-based case for global direct democratic governance of big tech platforms. The paperback is reasonably priced, and there's an open-access PDF, so you have no excuse not to get it. https://networked-leviathan.com