nina michiko tam
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ninamichikotam.bsky.social
nina michiko tam
@ninamichikotam.bsky.social
civil-rights lawyer. writer.
Reposted by nina michiko tam
Amanda Seyfried, I was not familiar with your game
December 13, 2025 at 12:36 AM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
I’m a law prof & a YLS grad and anyone familiar w elite law schools knows it is beyond laughable to describe these places as radicalism hotbeds. Cruz knows this, as does JD Vance. But they assume that their marks are too unsophisticated to know it too. It’s condescending as hell.
Ah yes. Harvard Law School in the early 1990s, well known for its Communist professors.
November 22, 2025 at 3:34 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
October 24, 2025 at 1:15 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
Du Bois basically did a version of this in his bibliography in Black Reconstruction
October 14, 2025 at 12:47 AM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
Well golly it sounds like you should let long-standing precedents stand until you rule on the merits, then. That is not what you’re doing!
Amy Coney Barrett defends heavy use of the shadow docket: "If we wrote a long opinion, it might give the impression that we have finally resolved the issue, and in none of these cases have we finally resolved the issue."
October 12, 2025 at 4:32 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
We will need Nuremberg-like trials
ICE secretly kidnap autistic boy during bathroom break—never notify parents.

Mother reported him missing a week ago—turns out ICE had him detained the whole time.

He was helping sell fruit and asked to go to the restroom—by the time she was done helping a customer he was gone.

Houston, Texas
October 11, 2025 at 5:34 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
I note the ruling emphasizes at the outset the enormous factual record the court assembled, which in normal times would read as boilerplate, but in the present context feels like a preemptive rebuke of a SCOTUS increasingly disposed to hasty and conclusory interventions on Trump's behalf.
BREAKING: Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, delivers the most scathing legal rebuke of the Trump era, ruling that Trump and his cabinet illegally targeted pro-Palestinian students for deportation to "strike fear" into First Amendment protesters. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
September 30, 2025 at 6:59 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
There is one tried and true way ordinary Americans can stop Trump’s political prosecutions: Jury Nullification. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
Trump’s Politicized Prosecutions May Hit a Roadblock
When the president puts his political enemies on trial on pretextual grounds, jurors have the option of refusing to convict.
www.theatlantic.com
September 29, 2025 at 12:20 PM
As a practicing civil-rights lawyer, this reminds me of one text that I've been returning back to frequently since November: "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." To me, TNC echoes that ethos here.
September 28, 2025 at 7:31 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
Reposted by nina michiko tam
I can’t tell you how much good could be done right now by average citizens socially cold-shouldering anyone tangentially working for ICE.
September 28, 2025 at 12:00 AM
Contrary to all the quote tweets, I hate this. This woman was pulled over for some dirt stuck to her license plate, and as a result of this dog sniff she faces a loss of her liberty. It's a fortuitous joke--but is this issue a joke?
"This is a case about Katz and dogs" -- opening line of a pending SCOTUS cert. petition about an allegedly unconstitutional search involving a police dog.
www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24...
September 11, 2025 at 11:10 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
I really think we're ripe for a revival of appreciation for Sister Mary Corita Kent's art these days:
www.artbasel.com/stories/sist...
The bold spirit of Sister Corita Kent
Known as the ‘Rebel Nun’ in the 1960s, she produced colorful serigraphs that blended Pop art, spirituality, and activism. Decades later, her work con (...)
www.artbasel.com
August 2, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
So important to remember. The deepest red or blue states are, what, 65/35? That’s millions of people.
There are no red states, no blue states, only purple, from Idaho fuchsia to Vermont violet. And in every state there are children, non-citizens, and prisoners who can't vote. In every state where one candidate won, a bunch of people voted for the other candidate. And so forth.
July 6, 2025 at 3:51 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
Instead of blaming children for their own deaths at the hands of a natural disaster, you could put that energy towards supporting a voting rights organization given that too many people in the south definitely do not have the power you seem to think they do
July 5, 2025 at 10:23 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
Also, when you do this red state/blue state thing, you sound like MAGAs who whine about places like California. 42% of Texans voted for Harris/Walz; millions of progressives live in red states and we fight like hell to make them better.
Folks, it's possible to detest the cruelty that some people vote for while simultaneously not wanting their children to die.
July 5, 2025 at 2:41 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home.

Happy Independence Day. No Kings in America.
July 4, 2025 at 4:14 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
A few folks have DM’d me abt the Frederick Douglass passage I excerpted at the rally. Here it is:

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; 1/
June 28, 2025 at 4:17 AM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
As one does when one is simply impartially applying the law in the obvious constitutional way with no underlying agenda
It’s pretty startling that it’s become a feature of the Roberts Court that they save the most outrageous and infuriating usurpations of the Constitution for the last day they are in session and then disappear for months onto the planes and boats of the billionaire friends safe from public scrutiny.
June 27, 2025 at 8:23 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
ICE is now changing tactics and arresting people who have been granted asylum hearings.
 
This is both a violation of US & international law that demands immediate attention from all New York elected officials & underscores the urgent need for legal service providers to be at all of these cases.
June 27, 2025 at 5:02 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
Before I moved to New York I thought the thing about the bagels being better there was kind of bullshit. Ten years later I can safely say that this bagel I got in Minneapolis is terrible.
June 26, 2025 at 3:21 PM
Reposted by nina michiko tam
Which is another reason why the Confessore article is so infuriating as an attorney who has done this work. The movement didn't abandon the slow methodical approach that won Bostock, they were forced to respond to an existential blitz on trans rights framed in far right terms.
June 21, 2025 at 4:17 AM
look how they massacred my boy
The NYC council voting for this downgrade was just such an own goal.
April 22, 2025 at 12:50 AM