Dear friends,

Three things today: some news I've been sitting on, a piece of writing I'm proud of, and work by other people you shouldn't miss.

As you read this, I'm inside a prison. Today I'm running a book club on Unlocking Justice with a group of incarcerated readers. I signed an agreement that keeps me from saying much more — not where, not who, not a word of what's said in the room — and I intend to honor it completely. But I want to share my excitement with you. I wrote a book about how the criminal legal system counts some people as less than others. That it might travel into that system and be read by the people living inside it was an outcome I secretly hoped for but didn't dare expect. Today it's real, and I wanted you to be the ones who knew.

A number that pushes kids out of college. A recent American Enterprise Institute essay made a striking claim: only 36% of Georgetown students receive "any financial aid," so the other 64% pay the full published price — all six figures of it. The number comes straight from federal data. The interpretation is nonsense, and the nonsense does damage, so I downloaded the data and took it apart. Picture a supermarket announcing that 36% of shoppers used a coupon. You can correctly conclude that the other 64% didn't. You cannot conclude that they all paid the same total, and you certainly cannot add their rent and bus fare to the grocery bill. That's the essay's method. The "36% with aid" counts only grant aid, not loans or veterans' benefits. Where the federal data actually measure any aid, the figure is 44%. The six-figure sticker is a cost-of-attendance estimate — housing, food, travel — not a bill Georgetown sends anyone. A budget is not a bill, and a coupon count is not a receipt. Believing the wrong number changes behavior: when a randomized experiment promised high-achieving, low-income students free tuition before they applied, applications jumped from 26% to 68%. Convince families the door is financially locked, and many quietly walk away. The students it harms most are the ones who believe the number and never apply. Read it at The EDU Ledger.

A few other things you may have missed. Three quick ones:

• The Supreme Court's big voting-rights ruling this year rests on a mathematical claim that falls apart the moment you look at it. I took the look. The Phony Math at the Heart of the Supreme Court's Voting Ruling, at the Election Law Blog.
• I got my hands on a dataset of roughly 20,000 Federalist Society events and asked what it reveals about how the conservative legal movement actually works. What 20,000 Federalist Society Events Reveal, at Religion Dispatches.
• And the peer-reviewed cousin to the academic-publishing essay I sent last time: a simulation of the law review market showing that authors from elite institutions come out ahead almost regardless of the rules. Read it in PLOS ONE.

Not by me, but worth your time. Congress requires ICE to publish detailed arrest, detention, and deportation statistics twice a month. On April 9, the reports simply stopped — the longest blackout on record, spanning months in which the administration claimed nearly a million deportations that nobody outside the agency could check. The Marshall Project told the story of the data going dark. After lawsuits and press attention, ICE released one batch of numbers in July. As I write, those remain the freshest the agency has published — a twice-monthly reporting requirement running roughly six weeks behind. Meanwhile, the Deportation Data Project, run by researchers at UC Berkeley and UCLA, keeps prying the underlying records loose through public-records litigation, most recently this week. Working from that fresh release, the Marshall Project found that ICE has detained more than 610,000 people since January 2025 — more people than live in Atlanta. When a government stops counting in public, it matters that someone else starts.

On my book. The most meaningful thing I can tell you about Unlocking Justice this month is the first item in this email. The most helpful thing I can ask of you hasn't changed: the book lives or dies by word of mouth. If a particular person came to mind while you read it — a colleague, a former student, the person who argues with you about the courts at dinner — please tell them. And if you've read the book and haven't yet left a rating on Amazon or Goodreads, two minutes there changes who the algorithms show it to next.

Amazon · Bookshop.org · Barnes & Noble · Princeton University Press · Goodreads

That's it for now. Thank you, as always, for being here — and for caring about justice.

With gratitude,
Chad

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