For all the tragic costs of colonization, the English, embodied by Pilgrims, brought with them the principle of freedom of speech and of conscience. Today, we have the privilege of looking squarely at history. History, if we’re willing to look, reveals life in all its ghastly, beautiful, messy, tragic, hopeful complexity.

The law rewards people who spot obstacles (we literally test for that on law school exams). That’s a good skill for protecting your clients — but a pretty terrible formula for 10x-ing your life.

Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act twenty years after the end of the Civil War.

Republican voters in 1885 were the same men who fought and saw their comrades die as they sang to the Union ideology of racial equality. Did they just miss the correlation?

We have the tools in place to revolutionize the immigration law bar in West Virginia over the next few years.

That’s important, because the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) regulates gaming on Indian lands, and nowhere else. And other casinos in Florida can’t do it, so it gives the Seminoles a big boost. Plus, treating the wager as occurring at the place of processing might violate the federal Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), which says that the bet occurs where the better is. Can the “Indian lands” exception create a loophole?

To rest, maybe it matters less what we do than how we do it.

This has many problems, but one arises directly from the conservative litigation attack on agency adjudication: Making a GS-9 asylum officer’s decision “final” would very likely violate the Appointments Clause.

Anti-immigration forces present a false dilemma: Either invite chaos or slam the border shut. We have a thousand options besides that Hobson’s choice. We are capable of better.

Dodge City has its Chinese launderer, Jau Dong-Sing, and at first he appears in the stereotypical role: called “China Joe” by the locals, alone and outside society but befriended by Doc. But halfway through the book, Russell lets us see Dodge through the eyes of Dong-Sing as well:

As a teacher, I don’t really care whether my students agree or disagree with the new architecture. But I want passionately for them to feel the drama, the stakes of the project we’re engaged in here. I want them to see themselves as architects too — with a choice in the kind of edifice they want to help construct.