85 yrs ago this morning, the synagogue in the Bavarian spa town of Bad Kissingen looked like this.
By the following morning, it was a burned-out shell, and the Jewish men of the town, like my great-uncle Leopold, were under arrest.
It was the pogrom we know as #Kristallnacht. /1 In 1950, the German government brought criminal charges against 14 Bad Kissingen men for the destruction of the synagogue. The judges acquitted 13 of them. They convicted just one, Emil Otto Walter, who was the local Nazi Party leader. /2 #Kristallnachtherdenking

A sorry story about the state of free speech at UNC:
In September a freelance writer interviewed me at length for a Carolina Alumni Review feature "about #AcademicFreedom and #FreeSpeech at #UNC, going beyond the @nhannahjones saga to explore larger issues." (freelancer's words) The topic of the interview was the @UNC_System Bd of Governors' booting me from long service on the governing board of the UNC Press last summer because they didn't like my public commentary on law, race, & the university.

Of #Kristallnacht and #MIGRATION: a🧵
My dad asked to be buried with his passport.
This was the one wish he expressed after his cancer diagnosis in May. We honored it when we buried him at the end of September.
Passport in his inner jacket pocket.
Strange, no?
Let me explain. In the summer of 1938, my grandparents took my dad & aunt from their home in Frankfurt to Switzerland on vacation.
That should have been impossible. Jews had been issued passports stamped with a big red “J” (for “Jude,” or “Jew”). They couldn’t just waltz out of the country.

This nutshell of _Korematsu_in @JeannieSGersen's piece on Dred Scott is lawprof-standard--but it's also mistaken and perpetuates misunderstanding of the case and the history. First, _Korematsu_ did *not* permit the detention of Japanese Americans, even tho everyone thinks it did.

https://twitter.com/JeannieSGersen/status/1402412216025034754

Korematsu "permitted" the *removal* of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. It said nothing about detention (or "internment" (on which more in a moment)). The Supreme Court did not uphold anyone's detention; in fact, it unanimously *condemned* detention the same day in _Endo_.

A couple of thoughts.
1) Korematsu didn't "permit the Japanese internment." (a) Korematsu said nothing at about detention. (b) Korematsu didn't concern "internment," a lawful form of detention of enemy aliens. This misdescription is so common w/lawprofs who should know better!

https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1402327577415532554

2. In my view, starting a core 1st-year law school course w/Dred Scott is like starting a core 1st-year medical school course w/a case of gross surgical malpractice. I understand the instinct to do it (& the article summarizes it well), but I find it pedagogically ill-conceived.

Lot of snark abt this from @NYMag Chua/Rubenfeld piece, but I'm gonna say it straight: this is @YaleLawSch's malignancy. I had 3 yrs of nauseous bafflement at the preening, scheming culture--the faux-chill battles for a rung on a supposed "natural hierarchy of achievement." /1 This is professional education--the *formation* of new generations of people as lawyers with access (due to the pedigree) to wide possibilities and deep responsibilities--and a prof's seemingly unashamed metaphor for it is ... a horse race. /2

History's rhyming at #OleMiss with the apparently politically motivated firing of @garrett_felber, a scholar of race & incarceration. 60 years ago they sent lawprof Bill Murphy packing for defending school desegregation & the @ACLU. historynewsnetwork.org/article/45227 Bill Murphy had tenure, so instead of firing him, @OleMissRebels drove him away.

OK, friends, in this thread I'm going to walk you through how to bake these #yummy lye pretzel rolls. #quarantineProject #recipe #baking #baker #bakingbread #homemade Here are the ingredients: 2 cups of lukewarm water, a scant 6 cups of bread flour, a packet of yeast, 1 tablespoon of canola oil, 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt, and 3 teaspoons of sugar.

Back at the Orange County Courthouse for #SilentSham, round 2. I'll be live-tweeting here. We're at the lawyers-milling-around-and-yuckin'-it-up stage of the proceedings.

Here at @UNC, a campaign is being mounted to convince Jewish students not to go on a free trip to Israel over spring break that is being offered them via UNC Hillel (@unchillel). dailytarheel.com/article/2020/0… @UNC @unchillel According to the article in our campus newspaper, students on a prior iteration of the trip reported that “75 percent of the trip was spent on the Israeli narrative and only 25 percent on the Palestinian narrative.”

Thread:
If you had 55 minutes to tell the 200-yr story of your state’s Supreme Court, would you devote 8% of it to profiling a judge who ruled that the renter of a slave must have the power to shoot her in the back as she runs from a brutal beating? To be more precise: would you use that time to argue that the judge was “one of the ten most influential common-law judges in American history,” an “important figure” who was “one of the truly great judges of his time, state and federal?”