Professional Commentary

David Seymour, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In July, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) released an updated Youth Justice: A Guidebook for Legislators and refreshed its Juvenile Justice Toolkit. The timing matters. State lawmakers continue to confront questions about age of jurisdiction, diversion, transfer to adult court, restorative justice, and data reporting while trying to balance rehabilitation, accountability, and public [...]

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The Department of Justice has moved to enter a Minnesota assault case on the side of the defendant. Hennepin County charged Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. with two counts of second-degree assault for allegedly pointing his gun at two motorists. Morgan sought to move the case to federal court, claiming [...]

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An Iranian court has announced that crude removed from the US-owned Advantage Sweet tanker has been sold for $36 million to $37 million. The proceeds, held by Iran’s judiciary, are intended to satisfy a damages judgment for 771 Iranians with epidermolysis bullosa (EB) over sanctions-related barriers to medical supplies. The vessel was released in 2024. [...]

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Allegations of sexual violence in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) keep making international headlines: a UN mission’s finding of reasonable grounds to believe rape occurred during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks; Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column detailing accounts of sexual abuse, including alleged gang rape, of Palestinian detainees; a Gaza flotilla activist’s [...]

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A website called RentAHuman now lets artificial intelligence agents post tasks, pick workers, and pay them—an arrangement no contract or labor law was written to govern, because no legal system recognizes the hiring party as a person. Forty years ago the Israeli-American legal theorist Meir Dan-Cohen, a longtime professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, [...]

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Around the world, algorithms are increasingly being asked to do something once reserved for human judgment: help decide who should remain free and who should be deprived of liberty. In recent years, algorithmic risk assessment tools have grown more deeply embedded in criminal justice systems worldwide. From bail decisions to sentencing recommendations, predictive technologies promise [...]

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An estimated 89,000 lives lost; 30,000 arbitrary detentions; 3.4 million people displaced. In the five years since the February 2021 coup, these ever-rising figures have come to define Myanmar. From a legal standpoint, the military, operating as the State Administration Council (SAC), asserts de facto control through territorial occupation and administrative force. On the other [...]

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In the first week of February 2026, the geography of human intelligence officially detached from the Earth. With a landmark filing to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on February 4, SpaceX proposed a network of one million solar-powered satellites designed not for communication, but for computation. This “Orbital Data Center” system, bolstered by the recent SpaceX-xAI [...]

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