Faculty Commentary

When lawyers compare state juvenile justice systems, there is a natural temptation to begin with the visible rule: the minimum age, the availability of diversion, the possibility of transfer to adult court, or the existence of a restorative justice program. Those are important starting points. They are not always the rules that determine what actually [...]

The United States Constitution is the oldest written national charter still in force anywhere in the world, and the men who drafted it in 1787 worked in a predemocratic era, for a country whose leaders did not yet trust ordinary people to govern themselves. Some of what they produced is admirable. Other parts of it [...]

On September 30, a Delhi High Court bench dismissed the latest bail appeals of Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, the third such rejection for Khalid and the second for Imam. The bench did not weigh the evidence against them afresh. It held, in its own words, that it was “bound by judicial discipline” to follow [...]

Yesterday, Americans learned that their government plans to broadcast a killing. The Pentagon said Thursday that the December execution of Nidal Hasan, convicted of murdering 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, would be livestreamed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had vowed to make the execution public. The proposed spectacle would bring a firing squad into [...]

Medical personnel are protected persons. That principle—rooted in the Geneva Conventions and universally accepted—is now being tested in Iran with the case of Mozhdeh Hashemi Bazargani, a 27-year-old Red Crescent worker whose death sentence was recently upheld by Iran’s Supreme Court. Her prosecution is not only a human‑rights abuse; it is a violation of the [...]

The room is dark, and only a little light enters through the windows. A man stands in the middle of it. He is a dictator, and the fear that has taken hold of him is visible now in a way that the authority of his position has perhaps never allowed anyone to see. Outside, voices [...]

Speaking at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on September 9, President Donald Trump made a headline-grabbing commitment: should Republicans maintain congressional control (House of Representatives and the Senate) in the upcoming November midterm elections, he would authorize a $5,000 cash distribution to every American adult, to be called the “Trump Dividend.” The next night, [...]

It has been 80 years since the Nuremberg tribunal released its historic judgment, for the first time ruling that those responsible for the worst crimes known to humankind could be held individually criminally liable under international law.  The United States stood at the center of those efforts—establishing the tribunal, providing a judge and a chief [...]

Editor’s note: With the November 3 US congressional midterm elections a month away, JURIST is publishing this open letter from Gary J. Simson, a constitutional law scholar and two-time law school dean who has taught for more than 50 years. Writing directly to college, university, and law students, Simson argues that the federal executive branch [...]

“Where are you, Sepehr?” The question is not philosophical when it is first spoken. It is a question asked by a body that has been deprived of the body it seeks. Somewhere inside an unidentified warehouse, thousands of corpses lie beneath identical coverings, arranged without the distinctions through which the living ordinarily recognize one another. [...]