Faculty Commentary

I remember that when I was a child, a platform had been built on a barren piece of land for executions. On nights when fog passed beside it, I would look at it with fear. I was afraid of it, yet I stared at it from a distance until we had passed it. Sometimes I [...]

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth began publicly referring to himself as the Secretary of War and ordered Pentagon signage to reflect the historic title, many Americans assumed the United States had officially resurrected the pre‑1947 War Department. The imagery was striking: new placards at Pentagon entrances, press releases bearing the “Department of War” masthead, and [...]

Two rival claims of control are hardening around the Strait of Hormuz. By Aug. 14, transit had almost ground to a standstill. Washington said it could maintain its blockade of Iranian ports indefinitely. Tehran continued to link a full reopening to steps by the United States, while Iran’s Parliament advanced a domestic framework for the [...]

The subway doors open, and a dense stream of people begins to pour out of the train. For a brief moment, every face appears strangely familiar, not because they are identical, but because the movement of the crowd, the architecture of the station, and the limitations imposed by the narrow platform dissolve individual differences into [...]

When the head of Iraq’s Federal Board of Supreme Audit brought the board’s annual report before the Council of Representatives last week, Parliament did something it had not done since 2003: it convened a dedicated session to examine how the state had handled the public’s money. The report ran to tens of thousands of pages, [...]

Many Americans learned how to recite the Pledge of Allegiance even before we learned how to read it. Recited hand over heart, it ends with a promise: liberty and justice for all. What most Americans don’t know is that for millions of people living within our borders, that promise is being tested every day in [...]

Two years ago, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo removed the interpretive buffer that once indirectly protected municipalities relying on federal agency interpretations. Last week, I argued that municipalities need a pre-adoption risk assessment tool—a way to evaluate regulatory text before it takes effect. But Loper Bright is not the only structural change municipal attorneys need [...]

India’s arrest safeguards are again under scrutiny after police arrested more than 100 students two days after the government promised in writing to withdraw cases against non-violent demonstrators, organisers said. The July 25 assurance had ended seven weeks of protests at Jantar Mantar. Such episodes undermine the legitimacy of law enforcement and erode public trust [...]

Mobs in South Africa have looted foreign-owned shops, forced migrants out of townships and displaced tens of thousands of African nationals, conduct that breaches the equality and dignity guarantees of the country’s own constitution and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and that repudiates the Pan-African solidarity that sustained the anti-apartheid struggle. At [...]

Machine-generated text reconstructed from brain activity is now accurate enough to approximate what a person heard, imagined or attempted to say. This is a capability that, offered as criminal evidence, would let prosecutors put words in a defendant’s mouth while bypassing nearly every safeguard the Federal Rules of Evidence builds around human testimony. Federal rulemakers [...]