Faculty Commentary

When considering the comments in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, with the perspective of thirteen years since their landfall, I’ll paraphrase Mark Twain’s comment about an erroneously pre-mature 1897 obituary: “the reports of death are greatly exaggerated.” The perspective of time and the restoration of many services to the Hurricane Katrina and Rita-stricken Gulf Coast reveal that matters [...]

Since the 1960s, most plaintiffs challenging state restrictions on voting rights have relied primarily on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The 1966 case of Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections in particular played a key role in the rise of equal protection claims by aggrieved voters. In Harper the U.S. Supreme Court [...]

From degrading disabled people, women, LGBT individuals, and other minorities to the forsaking of the United Nation Human Rights Council, and from separating migrant families to the coddling of authoritarians and racists, this presidency consistently ridicules human rights. It follows that the State Department’s first international conference to Advance Religious Freedom might trigger a collective [...]

A recent Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) Advisory reiterated its message to those conducting Initial Coin Offerings (“ICO”) of security tokens within the country: register your security tokens or be prepared to face penalties. Just this month, the SEC declared that the Ploutos Coin is a kind of security which must be registered first [...]

President Donald Trump’s recent nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh as Associate Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court from a list of potential candidates has ignited immediate support and criticism from conservatives and liberals respectively. An undergrad and law alum at Yale University, Judge Kavanaugh clerked for the departing Justice Anthony Kennedy, practiced law privately [...]

To separate kids from their parents is an act that is so deplorable and so inhumane, it speaks to a complete corruption in morality of this administration. . . – Jagmeet Singh, Canada’s New Democratic Party Leader The US is violating its own human-rights obligations through some of its recent immigration-related actions, most shockingly its [...]

Among several noteworthy and interrelated Helsinki summit policy derelictions – most obviously, Vladimir Putin’s still unpunished aggressions in Crimea – US President Donald Trump chose to ignore America’s binding legal obligations regarding Russian war crimes in Syria. This sorely evident disregard reflects not “merely” willful antipathy to pertinent international law, but also a concurrent indifference [...]

Our phones are constantly searching for the greatest connection, updating our location, and often connect to multiple cell towers on any given day, divulging our whereabouts to service providers with relative ease. In recent years, the accuracy of this method to pinpoint a person’s current and past location has increased significantly. And given that there [...]

An inherent feature of democracy is majority rule. And with that, as you may recall from civics, comes the risk of tyranny of the majority—the danger that a controlling popular viewpoint will oppress opposing views in society. Foreseeing this, the Framers set up a number of constitutional mechanisms to protect minority interests. Among these early institutional protections [...]

In a bombing, the dust settles slowly over the strike zone. What emerges are grey images, living beings neutralized to monochrome. Bleeding from the ears, deaf, and dumb from the concussions the survivors walk about in a haze. These zombies are the first things you see staggering down the street away from the rubble behind [...]