In the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning a half-century of abortion jurisprudence, Justice Samuel Alito repeatedly argued that this difficult issue should be decided by the people through their elected representatives. Such calls for democracy to work, however, should be looked at with great skepticism by the American people, given how often and how [...]
Search Results for: 2013-05-08
In his epochal, controversial and highly polarizing essay, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits,” published in the New York Times Magazine some 70 years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman argued against the social responsibility of businesses, and explicitly declared that “the business of business is business.” The shareholder value theory of the [...]
US Supreme Court upholds death sentence of Boston Marathon bomber
The US Supreme Court Friday upheld the death sentence for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Tsarnaev was originally sentenced to death in 2015 for the attack, which killed three people and left hundreds seriously injured. However, in 2020, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals [...]
Picture a swarm of drones entering a village programmed to fly without a human operator with instructions to shoot or immobilize anyone it deems to be holding a weapon. While this might sound like a scene from Lana Wachowski’s latest Matrix film, the technology to build these killer robots is already here. Unless states act [...]
Hungarian Anti-LGBTQ+ Campaign: Restricting Portrayals of Homosexuality to Minors
In June 2021, the Hungarian Parliament passed certain amendments to several acts, which curtailed the dissemination of information concerning homosexuality and sex reassignment (“H&SR”) among minors and school-goers. Inter alia, the legislation: (1) bans the availability of any material portraying or promoting H&SR or any other forms of deviation from one’s sex assigned at birth [...]
Egypt president ends state of emergency amidst global criticism of human rights abuses
President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi announced on Monday via his social media accounts that a state of emergency decree, which has been renewed every three months since 2017, will finally be lifted. Since its original implementation in April 2017, the current state of emergency has granted security forces wide discretionary powers to quash political dissidence and suspend constitutionally [...]
US Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Boston Marathon bomber and Social Security cases
On Wednesday the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in US v. Tsarnaev, a case involving Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who, accompanied by his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was convicted of planting pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon in 2013 and sentenced to death. The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit overturned Tsarnaev’s death penalty sentence, [...]
Law and Strategy after Afghanistan: The United States, Israel and Iran
Abstract: Following US withdrawal from Afghanistan, America’s security focus will turn more expressly to Iran. The core problem with America’s Afghanistan withdrawal was not one of timing or tactics, but of original misconception. In essence, the “Afghanistan Problem” stemmed from an initially underestimated and misunderstood military operation. Looking ahead, Afghanistan’s incoherent conclusion means, inter alia, [...]
How Belarus’ Migrant Controversy Reveals a Weakness in International Law
At the end of May, Alexander Lukashenko, the President of Belarus, announced that his government would no longer prevent migrants from illegally entering Lithuania through Belarus. Throughout July, evidence emerged that Belarus had even taken active measures to encourage the flow of migrants, such as using government vehicles to escort migrants over the border. From [...]
The United States has a long history of anti-monopoly sentiment. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fighting big business was a major issue in politics, with leaders across the political spectrum promising to take on large corporations. Fed up with child labor, dangerous working conditions, low wages, political corruption, and ruthless business practices, [...]