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.