Faculty Commentary

“A government of laws, and not of men.” John Adams (1775) What if US President Donald J. Trump gives the order to launch nuclear weapons? If the order appeared incoherent or irrational to designated commanders, would these military officers still follow it without question, on decisional “autopilot”? Or would they correctly acknowledge that chain-of-command obligations [...]

“I’m scared of those women in chadors.” “There’s nothing to be scared of. Not all of them are supporters of the government. Look at my aunts. They dress like that.” “Yeah, but you can’t trust them. Look at the way they’re looking at me. I feel like they’re going to come and choke me. I’m [...]

Imagine the vast Pacific, with its rhythm of trade winds and currents, warming as though a fever were spreading across its surface. Fishermen along the coasts of Peru and Ecuador notice their nets returning empty, rains arrive where deserts once stood, and drought grips lands that once thrived. This recurring phenomenon is known as El [...]

There are evenings when I walk through my apartment as if the apartment were a badly designed republic whose entire constitutional order depends upon the imagination of one person, and I take upon myself, with a seriousness that is immediately undermined by the absurdity of the situation, the role of the president of the United [...]

On January 14, 2026, the US Department of State announced that it would suspend immigrant visa issuance to nationals of 75 countries beginning one week later. The stated concern was public charge: the State Department described the affected nationalities as at high risk of relying on public benefits. The instructions sent to US embassies and [...]

For most people, data privacy is an abstract concern—something that matters in theory but feels distant from everyday life. That perception is changing quickly, and the legal landscape of 2026 is the clearest evidence of it. Across the world, regulators are no longer just writing rules about personal data. They are enforcing them at scale, [...]

Orchestrated voices are laying the groundwork for a constitutional amendment required to partition the four provinces. The Interior Minister, close to the Establishment (a popular term for serving generals and top bureaucrats), declared that the current system has collapsed and cannot deliver. The military spokesman, who periodically holds press conferences on state affairs, opined that [...]

The mountain was colder than she had expected. She had imagined it many times before, but always through him: through the photographs he had brought home, the fragments of routes he described, the names he gave to rocks and ridges, and the particular change that came over his face when he spoke about climbing. He [...]

In August, 128 former state and federal judges, led by a retired chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, asked the Florida Bar to discipline the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security for social-media posts attacking four sitting federal judges. Within two weeks, the Bar declined, explaining that it does not investigate sitting [...]

The Trump administration argued to both the First Circuit Court of Appeals and Supreme Court in recent days that its new postal restrictions on election ballots are not electoral regulations at all. They are packaging regulations akin to those placed on “cremated remains and replica explosives.” The authority of the US Postal Service, President Donald [...]