In the wake of a bitterly divisive election campaign, American citizens officially go to the polls on Tuesday, November 5.
This is the seventh US election that JURIST has covered since 2000, when for 36 days this university-based legal news non-profit, then not even five years old, chronicled the highs and lows of the recount that only ended when the US Supreme Court effectively stopped the count in Florida and awarded the election to George W. Bush.
Since then our law-student staffers from the US and abroad have in the course of their general legal news coverage followed the ebb and flow of successive American administrations, from Bush to Obama to Trump and to Biden. Now in 2024, we are witnessing what can only be described as an epic struggle between a resurgent Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris to determine who will lead the United States and, in key respects, the world over the next four years or longer.
What might have been a purely political battle has in the hyper-partisan and polarized context of our times become a profoundly ideological one, raising concerns that go to the heart of American democracy and the very rule of law.
In this environment, some US-based press outlets have chosen to stay silent on the merits of the contest, even as their own reporters and correspondents have chronicled in shocking detail threats and plans articulated by one candidate that if realized would greatly challenge the legal norms of fairness, impartiality, accountability, transparency and due process long deemed to be fundamental to the Republic. Like The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and other publications, JURIST is a journalistic enterprise, but we are uniquely powered by law students and guided by legal academics and legal professionals — and therefore any threat to the rule of law in particular is existential for us. We cannot be silent.
This is not the place or the time to rehearse yet again the specific dangers we are facing at this moment. Those have been flagged by many veteran politicians, journalists and legal scholars. There is ample documentation of the endless legally and even morally repugnant statements repeated by Donald Trump in his campaign, his unrepented incitement of an unconstitutional attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and revival of the rhetoric of notorious leaders and political movements in 1930s Europe that Trump has expressed open admiration for.
This is, however, a time for us at JURIST to reflect on just who we are and what this moment means, for ourselves and for others. JURIST reports the rule of law in crisis around the world. By doing so, our law student staffers from over 50 law schools in more than 20 countries also inevitably stand up for it, pointedly and publicly taking a personal stake in the great issues of their lives.
In the past four years alone, as JURIST has expanded internationally in the wake of Covid, our brave and dedicated correspondents on the ground have raised their voices against military rule in Myanmar and the oppression of women in Taliban Afghanistan. They have resisted Russian aggression in Ukraine. They have spoken out against crimes against humanity in Israel and Gaza. They have documented brutality and authoritarian overreach in multiple countries in Asia and Africa, including some claiming to be democracies. Several of JURIST’s own correspondents in Myanmar and Afghanistan in particular – most of them women – are now in hiding or in exile abroad because of their principled stands.
Today the rule of law is under threat in the United States itself, where JURIST was born and where it is still based. Since 1996, JURIST has flourished here because of the openness and freedom of this society, and the stability of its political foundations. In our reporting we have sought to extend the benefits of that openness, that freedom, and that stability to millions of our readers around the world.
If the United States takes an authoritarian turn after November 5, we will all be the poorer, and all of our young law students, in the United States and elsewhere, will have to bear the inevitable social and personal burdens of that turn. Given what is at risk, not to mention the specific threats that have already been made to US major media and general press freedom, there is no guarantee that JURIST itself would long be able to continue operating from a US base in a second Trump administration.
The choice before Americans in this election is therefore not a standard one between different sets of policy preferences or political parties. It is between the rule of law and its awful alternatives.
We at JURIST have seen those alternatives up close. Our law students have repeatedly and insistently chronicled what happens when power and hate overcome principle and process, leaving behind repression, injustice, destruction and death. We urge our American readers to stand with us and with our law students when it counts. On Tuesday, defend the rule of law with your votes.
This editorial is part of a new initiative launched by JURIST’s Editorial Board In these turbulent times. As a non-profit legal news organization, we remain committed to providing authoritative, objective and consistent coverage of worldwide rule of law-related news, but we feel it our responsibility to speak out at least occasionally on critical events and matters having the potential to undercut the core values that we collectively subscribe to as law students and lawyers who are not and must not be mere disinterested observers.
