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 [...]
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 [...]
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: [...]
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 [...]
For the first time since Congress created it in 1996, the Justice Department has invoked the Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC), a specialized tribunal that may consider classified evidence a respondent never sees, and order a noncitizen accused of terrorism removed. What the statute does not say is who decides whether that removal will deliver [...]
Weapons that select and engage targets without a human pulling the trigger are no longer hypothetical, and the legal architecture governing who bears responsibility when they kill the wrong person has not caught up. US Department of Defense doctrine defines autonomous weapon systems (AWS) as systems that, “once activated, can select and engage targets without [...]
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, [...]
The Gambia’s Supreme Court is weighing whether the country’s 2015 ban on female genital mutilation is unconstitutional — a challenge brought by religious traditionalists who say the prohibition violates their rights to culture and religion. The outcome in Almamy Gibba and Others v. Attorney General will test whether a cultural practice can claim constitutional protection [...]
The international system stands at an inflection point. The simultaneous rise of strongman leadership in China, Russia and the United States—three states whose power shapes global order—has accelerated a worldwide retreat from liberal democracy, multilateralism and the rule of law. This trend is not isolated. It has emboldened authoritarian figures across the globe, weakened international [...]
“The report of my death was an exaggeration.” —Mark Twain Friday, July 17 was the annual World Day for International Criminal Justice, chosen to commemorate the adoption of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). This year, that commemoration was, at best, overshadowed by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s pledge to “dismantle” [...]
