Well, some say life will beat you down Break your heart, steal your crown So I’ve started out for God-knows-where I guess I’ll know when I get there – Learning to Fly, Tom Petty, and the Heartbreakers I was brought back to the numbers in this article by Dr. Katherine Simpson titled “ International Commercial [...]
Many state governors’ actions related to quelling the COVID-19 in Brazil appear to neglect constitutional provisions. So much so that many states’ Governors of the Brazilian Federation decided to adopt lockdown, despite the fact that the World Health Organization itself has already concluded that lockdown is not the primary measure aimed at combating the terrible [...]
In 2006 as the Human Rights Council was being set up, I wrote an opinion piece on this website in which I shared, among other aspects, my impressions as to how the Council would shape up. Experience thus far produced mixed assessment. The transition from the Commission to the Council took a couple of years, [...]
In a ground-breaking decision, the Islamabad High Court in Pakistan has explicitly recognized that animals have natural legal rights and are entitled to protection under the nation’s Constitution. Non-human animals are still commonly treated as “property” around the world, which places them in a similar legal category as inanimate objects. Although problematic for many reasons [...]
Governor Cuomo is in hot water on three fronts: the COVID-19 limitation of liability for nursing homes order he did, the undercounting/reporting of nursing home deaths, and the sexual harassment in the workplace and otherwise. This note will focus on the hypocrisy with respect to the first of these: the COVID-19 limitation of liability for [...]
Abstract: In principle, especially during a rare historical moment of extra-terrestrial exploration and immunological control, our species ought to render itself capable of managing nuclear threats. Prima facie, after all, the difficulties of transporting complex instrumentation to Mars and simultaneously fashioning effective vaccines against deadly pathogens should exceed even the most complex challenges of international peace. Nonetheless, [...]
Author’s Note: a longer alternative version of this article with footnotes and instructions for use as an education module is available here. Law students should consider the nature of the common law and why it failed to curb the advance of slavery in America. This suggestion follows both recent discussions in higher education about how [...]
The Brazilian Supreme Court delivered a very important decision related to compulsory vaccination to immunize the population against the coronavirus (Direct Actions of Unconstitutionality #6586/6587). During the judgment, Justice Lewandowski stated that “collective health cannot be harmed by people who deliberately refuse to be vaccinated, believing that they will still selfishly benefit from herd immunity”. [...]
Constitutions don’t always matter much in a coup. But the 2008 Constitution matters to Myanmar’s coup of 1 February. The military has created a constitutional fiction about the coup in a thin attempt to claim legality for its actions. I explain the legal disputes that the military claims are the pretext for exercising constitutional emergency [...]
“The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself’ is false and against nature.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man From time immemorial, world politics have been rooted in Realpolitik or power politics. Although such patterns of thinking are normally [...]
