Faculty Commentary

Abstract: Ideas of Natural Law were crucial in drafting the US Constitution. These seminal ideas were made known to document “framers” largely by way of William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. The Commentaries represent the truest philosophic origins of America’s legal system. In these dissembling times of recurrent political manipulation, Blackstone’s work warrants [...]

On November 16 the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati  was randomly selected by the Multi-district Litigation Panel in Washington, DC to decide whether the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandate for American workers, promulgated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), is legal. OSHA’s rules, which are planned to take full effect on [...]

“Nothing is real that is not eternal.” Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life (1921) Though inconspicuous and easily misunderstood, there is no conceivably greater power in world politics than power over death. On its face, this preeminent form of power is problematic (how, after all, can one human being ever offer eternal life to [...]

Last week’s US Supreme Court arguments in Whole Women’s Health v. Jackson and US v. Texas challenging the Texas abortion ban revealed a startling vulnerability in the US system of federalism and constitutional supremacy. They laid bare that a state’s flagrantly unconstitutional six-week abortion ban, when structured to avoid effective judicial review, can flummox the [...]

North Carolina has an important connection to the “state secrets” at the center of an October 6 US Supreme Court argument. In this case, Guantanamo prisoner Abu Zubaydah seeks testimony from two former CIA contractors, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, on torture he suffered at a secret CIA prison in Poland. The contractors’ evidence would [...]

Abstract: For Israel, core issues surrounding Iran’s still-accelerating nuclear weapons program have been strategic and political, rather than legal. Nonetheless, if Israel should ever decide that it no longer has any reasonable alternative to launching a preemptive attack against certain Iranian military/industrial targets, this defensive first-strike would need to be justified under international law. In [...]

In April, a book I co-edited on the topic of how to integrate diversity, equity, and social justice skills and issues into the traditional American 1L curriculum was published. While it is certainly not the first book to tackle this subject, Integrating Doctrine and Diversity takes an innovative approach in its scope, organization, tone, and [...]

Amid Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s condemnation of the International Criminal Court’s investigation into cases of crimes against humanity involving the murder of 12,000 to 30,000 civilians, at least two major scenarios emerge. First is the institutional empowerment of the victims of Duterte’s so-called “war on drugs.” This is in terms of their active recognition by the [...]

As the novel coronavirus flew globally in 2020, triggering widespread infections of the disease labeled COVID-19, a fresh challenge arose concerning how governments and legal experts could face this plague, predominantly in terms of law and rights in the Middle East and the Muslim world. In Islamic law, the Qur’an and the Sunnah (Prophet Mohammad’s [...]

“History is an illustrious war against death.” – José Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis (1958) Afghanistan and “Palestine”: Newly Emerging Linkages At first glance, there are no obvious connections between the Taliban victory over the United States in Afghanistan and Palestinian terrorism against Israel. Upon closer inspection, however, the recent Taliban triumph reflects more [...]