Student Commentary

China is exerting an enormous amount of power and influence over American companies even to the point of potentially enforcing its own laws. This has been a slow and largely secretive expansion over a period of years. It is a circumstance modern law has not foreseen and seems largely ill-equipped to deal with. Let’s start [...]

Institutionalized by big law firms since the 1980s in the United States, pro bono today has become a global phenomenon. Given its strong legal profession and market, a unique outlier is Germany, where pro bono is not completely legal. The challenge is not the lack of need or supply of pro bono, but the ambiguity [...]

When I tell my friends that I developed an IOS app, they usually respond with a surprised, “I thought you were studying law and politics! Did you change to computer science?” When I explain that I did not switch but instead decided to study both, they often find the combination interesting but wonder how and [...]

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” ~James Madison In the years following the fall of the Soviet Union, Poland emerged as a nation poised to embrace [...]

Consideration of blockchain legislation is a growing trend amongst state legislatures. Blockchain, which is essentially a more secure form of internet, has been expanding into new markets. This has increasingly caught the attention of legislators, who hope to capitalize on the potential economic gains by allowing for the implementation of the technology within the state. [...]

On August 12, 2019, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a change to the interpretation of a statute known as the public charge rule. The statute under consideration, Section 212(a)(4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) states: Any alien who, in the opinion of the consular officer at the time of application for [...]

When the Delhi High Court sentenced a former parliamentarian to life in prison for his role in the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom in December, it ended an excruciating 34-year ordeal for victims of the hate crime that shook India’s national conscience and threatened to tear apart its social fabric. Spurts of sectarian violence are not uncommon in [...]

In the last 3 years, the Hungarian Government, especially with its support from the recently obtained 2/3 majority in the Parliament, has introduced several legislative changes which seriously undermine the essential elements of the rule of law. Criminalization of “facilitating or supporting illegal immigration”, banning homelessness and the Government’s continuing interference in the higher education are [...]

As the world turns inward, nationalistic perspectives are on the rise. It feels like 1930, where the international order laid out in the Versailles Treaty, was about to be turned upside down. Today, something terrible is lurking around the corner, sitting in the shadows of anarchy and fascism. The rule of law tentatively steps forward [...]

JUIRST Guest Columnist Oday Talal Mahmood of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law discusses the potential implications of judicial review in Iraq....In Iraq's Constitution of 2005, more than 67 of the 144 Articles include the language: "shall be regulated...