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Law and Disorder is a weekly independent civil liberties radio program airing on more than 150 stations and on Apple podcast. Law and Disorder provides timely legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, right to dissent and practices of torture exercised by the US government and private corporations.
Law and Disorder January 19, 2026
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Federal Funding Capitulation: Northwestern Joins Columbia and Brown University
The day after Thanksgiving last year, in an deserved win for Donald Trump and a sad loss for higher education, Northwestern University joined Columbia and Brown universities by capitulating to Trump’s yearlong campaign to bribe American colleges and universities into paying ransom to restore millions of dollars of federal research grants he had illegally suspended on the pretext that the universities had failed to adequately monitor antisemitism on their campuses. Northwestern agreed to pay the Trump administration $75 million and entered into a three-year settlement agreement containing a host of provisions seriously impairing Northwestern’s educational independence and academic freedom.
Within days of the settlement, two law professors from Northwestern’s own law school, Heidi Kitrosser and Paul Gowder, went public alleging that the agreement was illegal and unconstitutional. They wrote: “Our analysis lays bare that the government’s extortion of Northwestern –unlawfully freezing funds to force the university to make a ‘deal’ – has nothing to do with actual legal violations at Northwestern (which, if they existed, could and should have been addressed through established legal channels), and everything to do with a campaign to encroach on the autonomy of Northwestern and other institutions of higher education, and to impose on them the Trump Administration’s reactionary political agenda.”
Guest – Heidi Kitrosser is the William W. Gurley Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. She is an expert on the constitutional law, government secrecy and free speech law. Her book, Reclaiming Accountability: Transparency, Executive Power, and the U.S. Constitution, was awarded the 2014 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law / Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize. She is a 2017 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Prof Kitrosser has been involved in drafting several amicus briefs in recent years challenging threats to free speech, academic freedom, and government accountability. She is also a founding steering committee member of the Free Expression Legal Network. FELN is a network of law school clinics, academics, and practitioners (including nonprofits) across the country that seeks to promote and protect free speech, free press, and the flow of information.
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Prairieland Case Labeled First Prosecution of Antifa
On July 4, a small group of people gathered in front of the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. They were protesting in solidarity with immigrants and ICE detainees, using noise and fireworks—ordinary tools on Independence Day. Police later claimed that an Alvarado officer was involved in an exchange of gunfire after arriving near the protest, sustaining minor injuries. Six months later, authorities have still not produced hospital records substantiating those claims.
Despite that, a federal grand jury in Fort Worth indicted nine people in connection with the July protest/ Seven others were charged separately. Charges include rioting, use of weapons and explosives, obstruction, providing material support to terrorists, and attempted murder of an Alvarado police officer and unarmed correctional officers.
The Trump administration has publicly framed the Prairieland case as the first prosecution of “Antifa.” On September 25, the White House issued a directive ordering federal law enforcement to prioritize so-called Antifa-linked activity as domestic terrorism. Kash Patel has echoed that framing, publicly labeling the defendants “Antifa-aligned anarchist violent extremists.”
Guest – Dario Sanchez, one of the defendants. A computer science teacher, Dario is caretaking for his injured partner since 2024. He was arrested at a pre-dawn raid on their home with no resistance. https://prairielanddefendants.com/
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Law and Disorder January 12, 2026
Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age
Being homeless is not a reflection on the inadequacy of a person. It is not a moral issue even though right wing figures such as President Trump‘s former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and Andrew Cuomo, the failed candidate for mayor in the 2025 election in New York City maintain that essentially cruel position. They were against giving people subsidized homes and treatment, if they required it, for health problems, addiction problems, or job training.
Homelessness is a consequence of housing affordability, inequality, systemic, racism and pro-capitalist government policies. It is more profitable for the real estate industry to build housing for the rich rather than the poor. There is more profit in luxury housing, not so much in working class housing. New York City is the greatest example of the homeless situation that exists throughout the USA. On any one night 130,000 people sleep in shelters. 90% of them are Black or Latino. One out of seven children in New York City public schools are homeless.
Guest – Patrick Markee has written a powerful, moving, common sense account of a social problem whose solution is entirely possible. His book Placeless: Homelessness in the New Gilded Age is an eloquent rendering of the plight of human beings who I don’t have a home, they don’t have a place in our world. Mr. Markee has had more than 20 years of experience working as an advocate for homeless people in New York City and his work with housing across the country. He is the former Deputy Executive Director for advocacy of the Coalition for the Homeless., New York’s premier homeless advocacy organization and a member the Board of Directors with the National Coalition for the Homeless. He is the author numerous research studies on homelessness and housing policy and has written for The Nation and The New York Times book review.
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Hard Regime Change In Venezuela
Barely into the new year in the early morning hours of January 3 the Trump administration successfully and brutally and illegally attacked Venezuela kidnapping the president and his wife. 80 people were killed including 32 Cuban soldiers. They flew Nicolás Maduro and his wife attorney Celia Flores to a Brooklyn jail. The plan is to try them in an American court in lower Manhattan on the laughable pretext, they were drug runners whose country “stole” American oil. And further, according to President Trump, hordes of Venezuela killers and murderers and rapists were released across American borders to savage American citizens.
That next morning, we woke up to arrogant boastings of Trump and his his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, whose body is tattooed with a huge crusader cross, that they plan to “run” Venezuela, “make lots of money” reclaim “their “ oil and give it to the multi-national corporations such as ExxonMobil to exploit.The United Nations was organized after World War II to prevent precisely what has happened. Aggressive war was outlawed. The War Powers Act-was passed by the U.S. Congress, a half century ago, precisely to prevent secret aggression against foreign countries and required congressional approval, which was not sought or obtained prior to the invasion.
Protest against this invasion continue across the United States. People took the streets, remembering how the war on Iraq, which killed 1 million people was fought allegedly that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which is known to be a lie.
Guest – Jeff Mackler is the National Secretary of the U.S. political party, Socialist Action and its candidate for the U.S. presidency in 2016 and 2020. He is a member of the Administrative Committee of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) and the Director of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal in Northern California. He was a national leader of the defense committees of Julian Assange and Lynne Stewart. Jeff was the Coordinator of the “Dialogue With Cuba” conference in 2000 at the University of California at Berkeley, the first institutionally-sponsored Cuba conference in U.S. history. Attended by 2000 U.S. social justice activists and leading scholars representing a broad range of academic and social fields, the dialogue saw 30 leading Havana-based Cuban scholars and social and political leaders exchange views with their U.S. counterparts.
Jeff is the author of some 20 books and pamphlets including “CIA/Crack in America,” a detailed history of the U.S. government and its agent, Oliver North, importing tons of crack cocaine from the Columbia Medellin cartel. to sell in Los Angeles to illegally raise funds for the Nicaraguan Contras. Other books and pamphlets by Jeff covered the Mexican Chiapas Rebellion, Ukraine, Syria, Nicaragua, Libya, the South Africa anti-apartheid struggle and, most recently a critique of the NYC Zohran Mamdani Democratic Party/DSA mayoral election campaign.
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Law and Disorder January 5, 2026
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Early in his second term, after addressing a joint session of Congress, as he shook hands walking down the aisle, President Donald Trump turned to Chief Justice John Roberts, patted him on the back, and said, “Thank you again. Thank you again. I won’t forget.” What had Roberts done to deserve such gratitude? A lot.
In her withering and revealing new book, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote The Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, Lisa Graves describes in detail how Roberts “has established himself not as a fair referee but as a diabolically effective player rewriting the Constitution and remaking America in accord with his reactionary political agenda, as he strategizes how to move the ball forward and disarm the opposition.” Sound too hyperbolic? Read the book.
Guest – Lisa Graves – before her work as Deputy Assistant Attorney General under Attorneys General Janet Reno, a Democrat, and John Ashcroft, a Republican, she was Chief Counsel for Nominations for Senator Patrick Leahy on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, where she investigated the careers and ideologies of judicial nominees, including John Roberts. She also learned how to examine the finances of sitting judges as Deputy Chief of the Article III Judges Division of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts with oversight of the Financial Disclosure Office. She was an adjunct law professor at George Washington University Law School and worked as the Senior Legislative Strategist for the ACLU on national security and civil liberties. From 2009-2017, she led the Center for Media and Democracy. Most recently, she co-founded Court Accountability and is also the Executive Director of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group that describes its mission as exposing “the dark money fueling regressive agendas targeting vital institutions in our republic, such as our courts and public schools.”
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