Faculty Commentary

Saxotango, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The subway doors open, and a dense stream of people begins to pour out of the train. For a brief moment, every face appears strangely familiar, not because they are identical, but because the movement of the crowd, the architecture of the station, and the limitations imposed by the narrow platform dissolve individual differences into [...]

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When the head of Iraq’s Federal Board of Supreme Audit brought the board’s annual report before the Council of Representatives last week, Parliament did something it had not done since 2003: it convened a dedicated session to examine how the state had handled the public’s money. The report ran to tens of thousands of pages, [...]

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Many Americans learned how to recite the Pledge of Allegiance even before we learned how to read it. Recited hand over heart, it ends with a promise: liberty and justice for all. What most Americans don’t know is that for millions of people living within our borders, that promise is being tested every day in [...]

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TheChunky, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Two years ago, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo removed the interpretive buffer that once indirectly protected municipalities relying on federal agency interpretations. Last week, I argued that municipalities need a pre-adoption risk assessment tool—a way to evaluate regulatory text before it takes effect. But Loper Bright is not the only structural change municipal attorneys need [...]

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India’s arrest safeguards are again under scrutiny after police arrested more than 100 students two days after the government promised in writing to withdraw cases against non-violent demonstrators, organisers said. The July 25 assurance had ended seven weeks of protests at Jantar Mantar. Such episodes undermine the legitimacy of law enforcement and erode public trust [...]

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Mobs in South Africa have looted foreign-owned shops, forced migrants out of townships and displaced tens of thousands of African nationals, conduct that breaches the equality and dignity guarantees of the country’s own constitution and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and that repudiates the Pan-African solidarity that sustained the anti-apartheid struggle. At [...]

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Machine-generated text reconstructed from brain activity is now accurate enough to approximate what a person heard, imagined or attempted to say. This is a capability that, offered as criminal evidence, would let prosecutors put words in a defendant’s mouth while bypassing nearly every safeguard the Federal Rules of Evidence builds around human testimony. Federal rulemakers [...]

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When the dead of a war are sorted into political categories before they are mourned, something more basic than compassion is lost: the condition that makes legal judgment possible at all. I heard that loss in a Telegram voice message from a friend, recorded as the ongoing conflict reached Iran’s southern provinces and people around [...]

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Mubarakansari, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Men in plain clothes swung lathis—the long wooden batons Indian police carry for crowd control—at student protesters on New Delhi’s Parliament Street on July 20, striking them alongside uniformed officers while wearing nothing that marked them as police. Indian law conditions a police officer’s immunity from a citizen’s right of private defense on precisely that: [...]

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Mojnsen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The UN Security Council lent Chapter VII authority to a body it cannot oversee when it adopted Resolution 2803 on Nov. 17, 2025, and the entity that emerged, the Board of Peace, is chaired for an indefinite term by Donald Trump personally rather than by the US government.   That raises a question international lawyers [...]

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