In Terminiello v. Chicago, Justice Jackson famously commented that the constitution “is not a suicide pact.” His point was in response to the Court’s decision to invalidate Chicago’s disorderly conduct conviction of Arthur Terminiello, who had given a speech that threatened to breach the peace. Writing for the Court, Justice Douglas rejected Chicago’s assessment that [...]
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of President Biden’s speech criticizing the Supreme Court’s rejection of Roe v. Wade is that he gave the speech at all. Presidents historically have wisely refrained from commenting on Supreme Court decisions. Biden’s delivery of the speech on the very same morning that the Court delivered its opinion in Dobbs [...]
As a criminal defense attorney practicing post-conviction law for nearly twenty years, I’ve watched the Supreme Court whittle away convicted defendants’ right to contest their wrongful state convictions. The most recent example is the Supreme Court’s opinion in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, which prevents prisoners from entering federal court to litigate claims that were forfeited [...]
The Kerala High Court, while issuing an order in Anoop v. State of Kerela, recognized the fallacy of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO), 2012, and Indian Penal Code (IPC), 1856, in not distinguishing between consensual sexual activity and rape. The single judge bench remarked that these actions arise out of pure [...]
“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.” — Dante Alighieri The world came together almost as one on February 24, 2022, when the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine. This was a unique moment where the world order, based on the rule of law, rallied around [...]
Recently, Spain’s Parliament passed a new bill that seeks to make consent the determining factor in sexual assault cases, thus freeing victims from the burden of proving that they were intimidated, subjected to violence or that they physically resisted to show that they suffered a sexual assault. As per the Guarantee of Sexual Freedom law, [...]
The Turkish Foreign Minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, recently described the Russian ‘military operations’ in Ukraine as war and stated that Turkey would exercise its powers under the Montreux Convention to restrict the entry of warships into the Black Sea to restore peace. It was later announced that the Turkish Straits, linking the Black Sea to the [...]
On May 11, 2022, the Supreme Court of India (SC) passed a landmark order to put the sedition law in abeyance for the first time ever since India’s independence. This would suspend it until its re-examination or further notice. The SC order is extremely significant in light of the continuous misuse of section 124A of [...]
Now facing further rounds of terror attack, Israel must prepare itself along the intersecting dimensions of law and strategy. Law, the first dimension, is universal. It applies to all combatants, everywhere. Strategy, the second dimension, is integral to the creation and maintenance of any single state’s national security policies. From the beginning, a recurrent Palestinian [...]
For all the talk there has been of the huge increase in crime across the nation, not nearly enough attention has been put on the single greatest reason for the problem: recidivism. It has been fueled by a mindset in our criminal justice system in which levels of crime have arbitrarily been labeled low-level or [...]
