Cornell Law professor Michael C. Dorf discusses how incoming law students should approach AI use in law school, addressing academic integrity, exam and classroom policies, the Socratic method, and AI’s proper role in legal research and practice. Professor Dorf advises that students should follow institutional AI rules to avoid cheating classmates and clients, avoid using chatbots to shortcut genuine engagement with course material, rigorously verify any AI-generated legal research, and extend patience to instructors who are also adapting to unprecedented technological change.
In this second of a series of columns, Illinois Law professor Lesley M. Wexler discusses the differences between the Obama administration’s response to the 2015 Kunduz trauma center strike and the Trump administration’s response to the 2025 Minab school strike in Iran, examining operational tempo, the role of AI in targeting, the prevailing military legal culture, and accountability practices. Professor Wexler argues that while Obama’s administration moved relatively quickly to acknowledge responsibility, apologize, provide redress, and implement reforms to prevent recurrence, the Trump administration has been far less transparent and forthcoming—failing to clearly acknowledge U.S. fault, offer apologies, or announce concrete measures to prevent future civilian harm, and is instead dismantling prior civilian protection infrastructure.
Amherst professor Austin Sarat discusses the parallels between Iran’s aggressive use of capital punishment—including record execution numbers, hangings, and executions for drug offenses—and President Trump’s own enthusiasm for expanding and intensifying the death penalty in the United States. Professor Sarat argues that Trump’s fixation on capital punishment reflects an authoritarian impulse akin to Iran’s use of executions as a tool of control and intimidation, and warns that while global trends favor abolition, the U.S. under Trump risks moving in the opposite, regressive direction.
UC Davis Law professor Vikram David Amar offers his periodically updated advice to the incoming law school class of 2026, distilled into six tips covering work ethic, tolerance for legal indeterminacy, conversation with classmates, ideological engagement, strategic effort, and active reading. Professor Amar argues that law is an academic discipline demanding depth, discipline, and sustained reflection, and that students should resist undergraduate habits—and the temptations of AI-generated “answers”—because a lawyer’s value lies precisely in shaping ambiguity and advocating persuasively among plausible alternatives.
University of Pennsylvania professor Marci A. Hamilton discusses Delaware’s collapse of HB75, a bill that would have permanently revived time-barred child sex abuse claims, after Democratic senators added last-minute poison pill amendments, and links this to broader controversies over false claims in California’s mass tort litigation and reduced settlement caps in Maryland. Professor Hamilton argues Delaware’s retreat was unjustified given its successful history with prior SOL windows, and that fraud concerns should be addressed through a stronger certificate of merit requirement rather than by restricting survivors’ access to justice.
Illinois Law professor Lesley M. Wexler discusses parallels between the 2015 Kunduz hospital strike under President Obama and the 2026 Minab school strike under President Trump, examining shared legal and institutional failures in U.S. targeting practices. Professor Wexler argues both incidents reveal recurring patterns—misidentified but precisely-hit targets, missed chances to halt attacks, and likely absence of criminal accountability—pointing to systemic rather than isolated failures.
Cornell Law professor Michael C. Dorf discusses the Board of Immigration Appeals’ request for amicus briefs on whether it must follow U.S. Supreme Court and circuit precedent on constitutional questions even when doing so would require finding a statute or regulation unconstitutional, a power agencies otherwise lack. Professor Dorf argues that while the two obligations can often be reconciled through careful distinctions (such as those between facial and as-applied challenges), he warns that a BIA now dominated by Trump appointees may exploit this tension in bad faith to consistently rule against immigrants, leaving the courts to correct any opportunistic or inconsistent application of these principles.
University of Pennsylvania professor Marci A. Hamilton, in an open letter to Pope Leo XIV, discusses the legal and moral case for eliminating the priest-penitent confessional privilege when clergy learn of child sex abuse, situating the issue within recent state legislative efforts in Vermont and Missouri and the Church’s history of covering up abuse. Professor Hamilton argues that the First Amendment does not shield clergy from mandated reporting laws given the compelling state interest in preventing child sex abuse, and contends that continued secrecy—rather than protecting the Church—perpetuates harm to children and further damages the Church's credibility and moral standing.
Amherst professor Austin Sarat discusses King Charles’s recent posthumous conditional pardon of Ruth Ellis—the last woman hanged in the UK—situating it within the history of British royal posthumous clemency, including the cases of Timothy Evans, Alan Turing, and Derek Bentley. Professor Sarat argues that while Ellis’s pardon rightly acknowledges the injustice of her trial and sentence (given the domestic abuse she suffered), it falls short of true mercy because, unlike Evans and Turing who received full pardons, Ellis was merely left with a commuted “life sentence” that offers no meaningful redress beyond recognizing what she already deserved.
Amherst professor Austin Sarat discusses Pennsylvania’s anomalous status as the only Northeastern state retaining the death penalty despite a de facto execution moratorium, examining the system’s documented flaws—wrongful convictions, racial disparities, geographic inconsistency, and inadequate indigent defense—alongside Governor Josh Shapiro’s public shift toward abolition. Professor Sarat argues that Pennsylvania should abolish capital punishment and that Shapiro, having already refused to sign execution warrants, should use his remaining time in office to press the legislature toward abolition and pursue commutations for those on death row, despite the steep procedural and political obstacles to both paths.
Cornell Law professor Michael C. Dorf discusses Chief Justice John Roberts’s characterization of citizenship as “the right to have rights” in his Trump v. Barbara opinion, tracing this formulation’s origins through Chief Justice Earl Warren’s 1958 opinions back to Hannah Arendt. Professor Dorf argues that Roberts’s claim is correct despite non-citizens holding many constitutional rights, because citizenship uniquely secures the right to remain in the United States and to avoid the harms of statelessness—making the phrase especially apt given the Trump administration’s attempts to strip birthright citizenship and its aggressive termination of protections like Temporary Protected Status.
Cornell professor Joseph Margulies discusses the student backlash against outgoing Bard College president Leon Botstein over his fundraising relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, using the WilmerHale investigation’s findings to explore competing moral rationales Botstein offered for that relationship. Professor Margulies argues that while he strongly supports the principle that convicted sex offenders deserve a presumption of rehabilitation like any other offender, he condemns Botstein’s separate rationale—that money should be accepted regardless of its source or the donor’s conduct—because Epstein never showed contrition and instead tried to buy his way back into elite society without acknowledging wrongdoing or respecting society’s legitimate demand for accountability.
UC Davis Law professor Vikram David Amar discusses three unexpected aspects of the Supreme Court’s end-of-term decisions from its 2025-26 term, focusing on the late-arriving ballots ruling in Watson v. Republican National Committee, the Court's departure from constitutional avoidance in three separate cases, and its mootness ruling in Little v. Hecox. Professor Amar argues that the Watson outcome was correctly decided despite media mispredictions based on oral argument, that bypassing narrower statutory grounds was justified in the birthright citizenship and Federal Reserve cases given their pressing national importance, but that the Court’s refusal to dismiss Hecox as moot—despite the plaintiff's dismissal with prejudice—was legally unjustified and appeared driven by suspicion of strategic litigant behavior rather than sound doctrine.
Amherst professor Austin Sarat discusses the contrasting positions of Pope Leo XIV and President Donald Trump on capital punishment, set against the backdrop of the Justice Department’s April 2026 announcement to restart and expand federal executions. Professor Sarat argues that the Pope’s moral condemnation of the death penalty as an affront to human dignity—offered without anger or political calculation—exposes the cruelty underlying the Trump administration’s embrace of capital punishment and should reinvigorate the abolition movement in the United States.
In this keynote excerpt from the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing Conference, Chief Tarrick McGuire draws on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail to argue that “order without justice is not peace”—and that protecting democracy demands moral, not merely operational, leadership from those who wear the badge. Chief McGuire calls on his colleagues to confront the hard truths facing modern policing, from immigration enforcement and officer trauma to disinformation and public trust, and to lead boldly enough to help form the “more perfect Union” the Constitution promises.
Cornell Law professor Michael C. Dorf examines the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Landor v. Louisiana, which held that individual prison officials cannot be sued for damages under RLUIPA even after knowingly violating a Rastafarian prisoner’s religious freedom rights. Professor Dorf argues the majority opinion is constitutionally flawed and urges future litigants to plead the Commerce Clause as an independent basis for RLUIPA and similar Spending Clause statutes.
Amherst professor Austin Sarat discusses the Supreme Court’s recent decision to leave in place an injunction blocking Alabama’s execution of Jeffery Lee by nitrogen hypoxia—the first time the Court has ever obstructed a state’s chosen execution method—and places that decision in the broader context of the Court’s strong pro-capital-punishment record. Professor Sarat argues that while the ruling did not resolve the underlying Eighth Amendment question, it is nonetheless historically significant, as it signals a potential crack in the Court’s near-uniform deference to states on execution methods, particularly given disturbing evidence that nitrogen hypoxia causes severe suffering rather than the painless death its proponents claimed.
UC Davis Law professor Vikram David Amar and Illinois Law professor Jason Mazzone examine the federal district court’s rulings on Judge James R. Brown’s lawsuit against Illinois Supreme Court Justices who terminated his recall appointment allegedly in retaliation for partisan public statements. While Professors Amar and Mazzone find the court’s bottom-line decisions to abstain and deny a preliminary injunction defensible, they argue the court’s reasoning was seriously flawed—particularly its cursory abstention analysis, its logically inverted First Amendment irreparable-harm rationale, and its mistaken treatment of a stay as functionally equivalent to a dismissal on qualified immunity grounds.
Igor De Lazari, a PhD candidate at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a state judge; and Antonio G. Sepulveda, professor of law at Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) and at the Fluminense Federal University, discuss the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Mirabelli v. Bonta regarding parental rights in public education, drawing extensive structural and substantive parallels to recent constitutional jurisprudence from the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court. The authors argue that both the American emergency docket and Brazilian monocratic decisions exhibit a distinct procedural malfunction where expedited, unilateral judicial actions improperly displace the considered, multi-voice institutional judgments required to legitimize judicial authority.
Arbitrator and mediator Barry Winograd analyzes the Supreme Court’s unanimous May 2026 decision in Flowers Foods v. Brock, tracing its holding that “last mile” delivery drivers fall within the FAA Section 1 transportation worker exemption and placing it in the context of a four-case line of rulings progressively narrowing employer access to mandatory arbitration. Mr. Winograd argues that while workers and unions are the clear winners, significant questions remain unresolved—particularly whether courts will recognize exceptions for drivers operating through corporate or title-holding business arrangements, and whether the Court will eventually engage more systematically with parallel federal labor and employment statutes rather than relying primarily on dictionary definitions of FAA text.
