Verdict

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.

Albany Law professor Meredith R. Miller and graduate Grace Ann Porter examine the growing circuit split over the evidentiary standard courts must apply when deciding whether to authorize notice to potential opt-in plaintiffs in FLSA collective actions, tracing the diverging approaches of the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Second, and Ninth Circuits. Professor Miller and Ms. Porter argue that the emerging trend toward heightened scrutiny at the certification stage will practically narrow workers' ability to pursue collective wage and hour claims, because requiring plaintiffs to produce more substantial evidence before discovery both suppresses opt-in participation and creates a circular barrier to gathering the very evidence needed to establish similarity.

Illinois Law professors Lesley M. Wexler and Tony Ghiotto discuss the D.C. Circuit’s June 1, 2026 ruling in Talbott v. Trump, situating it within the broader litigation landscape surrounding the executive order banning transgender military service and previewing a multi-part analysis of the three opinions issued by the court. Professors Wexler and Ghiotto argue that the ruling’s most significant contribution—shared across all three opinions, including the dissent—is its repeated affirmation of the dignity, honesty, and capacity of transgender service members, which they view as a meaningful judicial counternarrative to the administration’s animus-laden characterizations, even as they acknowledge the decision's narrow holding and limited broader implications.

Amherst professor Austin Sarat discusses a federal district court ruling permitting Alabama to execute Jeffrey Lee via nitrogen hypoxia despite the judge’s own findings that the method causes severe suffering, examining the decision’s constitutional implications and the broader erosion of Eighth Amendment protections. Professor Sarat argues that Judge Marks’s originalist interpretation effectively nullifies the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment by limiting its scope to methods the Founders would have recognized as barbaric, rather than applying the “evolving standards of decency” framework the clause requires to remain meaningful.

Cornell Law professor Michael C. Dorf examines the Democratic Senate primary in Maine, where progressive candidate Graham Platner—despite a compelling populist platform—has faced mounting scrutiny over a series of personal controversies including offensive social media posts, a controversial tattoo, and allegations of infidelity and abusive behavior. Professor Dorf argues that, while Platner’s character flaws are genuine cause for concern, Democratic voters can rationally support him in the general election against incumbent Susan Collins, because his flaws—more akin to Bill Clinton’s than Donald Trump’s—do not threaten constitutional democracy and should yield to the practical calculus of a binary electoral choice.

University of Pennsylvania professor Marci A. Hamilton discusses the breakdown of productive religious discourse in American public life, arguing that the religious right has seized control of the conversation through strategic framing, the appropriation of the undifferentiated label “Christian,” and the suppression of inconvenient facts. Professor Hamilton proposes three corrective rules: insist on factual accuracy in policy debates rather than deferring to religious framing, recognize Christianity as a diverse category rather than a monolith, and embrace open theological disagreement among believers as a legitimate and necessary form of public discourse.

Amherst professor Austin Sarat discusses Israel's recently passed legislation creating a dedicated military tribunal to prosecute approximately 400 Hamas militants for their roles in the October 7, 2023 attacks, examining the law through the lens of philosophers Hannah Arendt and Martha Minow. Professor Sarat argues that the tribunal risks becoming a politically motivated show trial that undermines fair trial guarantees and, rather than advancing justice or security, pulls Israel away from the difficult but necessary path between vengeance and reconciliation.