Joanna Schwartz

My forthcoming @uclalawreview.bsky.social article reports officers paid <.05% of settlements and judgments against them from 2018-23. This is consistent w/my earlier study, though I also find subtle differences that should inform policies/practices. Comments welcome! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

veritenews.org/2026/08/28/p...

Today we launch the first episode of my podcast. I interviewed Whitney Mitchell, whose fiancé and caretaker Garrett Foster was murdered at a BLM protest in 2020. Foster's killer was convicted by a jury and given a 25-year sentence. Then Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pardoned him.

Former IRS attorney raises new Q's: "I wonder where the transfer of the activities are recorded. If they were ever in the hands of the nonprofit then the charity needs to have received fair market value for those assets or else there is likely a 4958 application." lailluminator.com/2026/10/19/i...

🧵After I reported in July about a new ICE facility for kids set to open in Louisiana, the facility contractor, for-profit prison company LaSalle Corrections, pulled a slick move. In August, nonprofit LaSalle Family Foundation established as a for-profit LLC. www.thequeenzone.com/a-private-pr...

For almost 2 years now, DHS has repeatedly told me they're not detaining U.S. citizens It's simply not true So @propublica.org published the receipts: a searchable database of the 500+ citizens detained by immigration agents during this Trump administration projects.propublica.org/american-cit...

I am in Cap Haitien interviewing people deported from the United States. I have been doing this kind of work for almost a decade and it literally does not get more dire than this. People have lost everything they built in the U.S. and are terrified and have no place to go or way to live.

🚨BREAKING: Voting rights groups are citing recent ICE activity near voting sites and new evidence of intimidation as they expand a lawsuit seeking to keep armed federal agents away from polling places during the midterm elections. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

A quick video on our victory over qualified immunity on a wrong-house raid in NC: www.tiktok.com/t/ZPLYARPWM/ www.instagram.com/reel/DeKvuZz...

The government *still* isn’t tracking how often immigration agents detain U.S. citizens. We are. 500+ Americans have been handcuffed, held at gunpoint or held against their will in Trump’s second term. Our tally is almost certainly an undercount. THREAD (content warning: violence) ⬇️

Marissa Roy, the first-place finisher in June’s primary for LA city attorney, has vowed to turn the office into the “largest public interest law firm in the city.” Her opponent has focused more on prosecuting gun crimes and homelessness-related offenses.

🚨NEW by me: New ICE facility for unaccompanied migrant kids is about to open in Louisiana. While ICE is sanitizing optics, calling it the "Alexandria Family Staging Center," lawmakers and child advocates are raising the roof warning of child trafficking risks. www.thequeenzone.com/new-ice-faci...

🧵 ICE is about to open a new facility for unaccompanied kids in Alexandria, Louisiana -- inside an airport to speed deportations. ICE plans to pack kids into planes, fly them into risk of trafficking. CEO of the new ICE facility contractor says kids are 'voluntarily departing.' I call bullshit.

Attn: @umichlaw.bsky.social and @mdefenders.bsky.social is hiring a Clinical Assistant Professor of Law/Associate Director for the new MDefenders Center for Public Defense. Job posting here: careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2.... Come work w/me to train the next generation of public defenders!

Trump is raging at news orgs for refusing to cover his reception of Xi after he banned three from the White House. The real lesson here: When institutions join together to resist his abuses of power it actually works, sending him into a helpless fury. New from me: newrepublic.com/article/2158...

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Latest: Last month I reported on extreme overcrowding at an ICE field office in Miramar, Florida. Now an ICE whistleblower has provided House Oversight Democrats with photos of detainees being held in the facility's sally port reason.com/2026/09/22/w...

This will make it nearly impossible to file habeas petitions, because attorneys won’t even know what federal district their client has been moved to to stage for their removal. Something like a third of all people in ICE custody. apnews.com/article/ice-...

NEW: In rural, red Florida, a sheriff put up a network of Flock surveillance cameras without in any way informing residents. Just as we were reporting on what's going on, poof, the tide turned & he announced he was disbanding it. A fascinating window on sudden rush to oppose Flock in some of GOP.

In 1971, the Supreme Court opened a small legal window to sue federal law enforcement in the case of Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents. www.themarshallproject.org/2026/09/08/m...

@pamelacolloff.bsky.social’s Catch the Devil and @praddenkeefe.bsky.social’s London Falling are two of the very best explorations of the criminal justice system’s pathologies - and two of the best nonfiction books, period - that I have read in a long, long time.

Supremacy is out today! Join @nikobowie.bsky.social and me for a virtual book talk with the great @adamserwer.bsky.social tonight at 7 pm EST.

After reading this, I wanted to know what the numbers would look like with more recent draft law review articles posted to SSRN. So I put a sample of 200 of them through Pangram 4, and found 57 papers with some AI use, 36 of which had >5% of their text from AI: wilftownsend.net/how-many-rec...

THANK YOU to everyone who packed @harvardbookstore.bsky.social last night to help @daphnarenan.bsky.social and me launch Supremacy. It's out today! Buy it at your local bookstore or readsupremacy.com.

Breaking: Supreme Court, with Justices Thomas and Alito Publicly Dissenting, Continue Block on USPS Rule Through the Midterm Elections [Now updated with Analysis] electionlawblog.org/2026/breakin...

When future President John Adams walked into court to defend the British soldiers who committed the Boston Massacre, he knew he was laying down a marker for future generations about what the rule of law is. Julio Frenk, chancellor of my university, unfortunately missed that lesson and a few more.

There are so many outrageous qualified immunity decisions out there - but this one, ruling officers who pinned a woman down on a hill of fire ants while handcuffed were entitled to qualified immunity because there was no other case in which officers were so depraved, is beyond the pale.

Here's a gift link to my 9/11 essay in the NYT. Civil libertarians long warned that before giving government new powers, we should consider how an administration with authoritarian ambition might abuse them. We were told that America was too exceptional to elect such a person. Well here we are.

My giant cover story for the latest issue of Reason is online! My goal was to write a readable history of US prisons. I visited the Angola prison rodeo, interviewed a guy whose life sentence was overturned, and talked to historians about our shifting attitudes about crime reason.com/2026/09/08/t...

In a newly published essay in Northwestern U. L. Rev., @miriamseifter.bsky.social & @bgodar.bsky.social examine how state constitutional principles inform permissible state court reforms and highlight recent legislative efforts at odds with these principles. go.wisc.edu/g3786t

Thus far dozens of state and metro bar associations, AmLaw 200 firms, and smaller firms have signed up for the PracticalScholarship.com digest. I'll send out the first digest later this month. If you'd like to present your practice-relevant scholarship to practitioners, please submit at this link!

I received an influx of new followers so now's a good time to reintroduce myself. I'm a freelance investigative journalist that covers policing and injustice here in Los Angeles. Over the past ~5 years, I've reported on jails, police violence, surveillance, and protests.

whether it's mail ballots, the godforsaken ballroom, or one of Trump's other lawless schemes, the GOP justices have the same move: shield Trump from substantive review by keeping lower courts mired in procedural BS, thus prolonging lawbreaking as long as possible ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/trump...

BREAKING: Devastating new report from @humanrightswatch documents the dismantling of civil rights enforcement in the year and a half since Trump took office. “This report documents what was lost and what it is costing the victims of discrimination.” www.hrw.org/report/2026/...

Apologies for the self-promotion, but I wrote a cool short essay on how Batson v. Kentucky was decided (in 1986) based on the papers of 7 of 9 justices involved. We can learn a TON when these archives are open. kb.osu.edu/server/api/c...

Buckingham Palace band playing 9 to 5 for Dolly Parton

90% of biomedical papers published in December and archived in PubMed now show signs of AI help, according to a new preprint It’s important we realise it but are we really surprised? 🧪 @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

My article, Qualified Immunity’s Safety Valve: The Obvious Violation Exception, is forthcoming in the Fordham Law Review. The abstract is below, and I hope to post the draft to SSRN soon. I am happy to send it to anyone interested.

Publication day. Data Distortions @texaslr.bsky.social demonstrates how data presentation is often just as important as data production using the case of medical device adverse event reporting. texaslawreview.org/data-distort...

@uwlawdemocracy.bsky.social has a terrific explainer about how states can legally pass legislation to create a right to sue federal officers (and terrific explainers about all sorts of other stuff, so take a look): statedemocracy.law.wisc.edu/our-work/sta...

The gloves, manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies, have been described by groups like Amnesty International as “readily misused for torture.” And this week, ICE published a plan to order $20 million worth of them.

🚨EXCLUSIVE: Military families and service members are now describing horrific conditions across MULTIPLE ships: human waste flooding bathrooms, virtually no food, water or soap, months without port calls, exhausted crews, and no end in sight. This crisis is far bigger than just the Lincoln.

No QI on unlawful frisk claim, per CA7: No officer could believe there was reasonable suspicion that the suspect was armed and dangerous on these facts. media.ca7.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/Opin...

Thanks to @lsolum.bsky.social for the "Highly Recommended!" You can read the paper here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

A hugely consequential disaster for the country: The Trump administration has gutted federal civil rights enforcement in the United States, leaving the people the laws were built to protect without adequate remedies, @hrw.org reports. www.hrw.org/news/2026/08...

More info on those Kavanaugh stops:

🤨⚡🧊 Well this will make Kavanaugh Stops much, much worse. #kavanaughstops