University of Pennsylvania professor Marci A. Hamilton examines how the religious right and Christian Nationalist movement promote a narrow framework of “religious liberty” to influence American jurisprudence and public policy. Professor Hamilton argues that these groups misrepresent religious freedom to impose minority theological beliefs on the public, erode civil rights for women and LGBTQ+ individuals, and compel the government to fund religious discrimination.

Amherst professor Austin Sarat discusses the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. California staying a lower court injunction against an executive order that involves the Postal Service in regulating mail-in ballots ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Professor Sarat contends that the ruling abandons the Court’s established Purcell principle, needlessly injecting chaos into the upcoming election and undermining democratic integrity by favoring executive overreach.

UC Davis Law professor Vikram David Amar discusses the Fourth Circuit’s decision in Grant v. Belangia, which invalidated a South Carolina law restricting automatic absentee voting to seniors and created a federal circuit split on the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. Professor Amar contends that the bipartisan panel correctly applied originalist principles to hold that the Constitution strictly forbids age-based discrimination in voting procedures, establishing a sound textual model for eventual Supreme Court review.

Touro University, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center professor Rodger D. Citron discusses a recent podcast conversation with Professor Rachel Rosenbloom regarding the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara and the broader legal history of birthright citizenship. Professor Citron highlights that while the Court rightly reaffirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship, the surprisingly narrow margin and fractured, revisionist dissents underscore ongoing political threats to constitutional equality.

Michael C. Dorf discusses the extensive national news coverage to the University of Michigan’s decision to adopt a pass/fail grading policy for first-semester undergraduates. Professor Dorf argues that this routine administrative change became a national story because conservative culture-war narratives and the Trump administration weaponize such decisions to portray higher education as anti-meritocratic and overly permissive.

Amherst professor Austin Sarat discusses the Trump administration’s expanding use of arrest threats and criminal prosecutions against state and local officials to enforce federal immigration and election policies. Professor Sarat argues that this strategy marks a dangerous shift toward autocracy, weaponizing federal law enforcement to intimidate political opponents and coerce compliance when judicial avenues fail.

Illinois Law professors Lesley M. Wexler and Tony Ghiotto discuss the D.C. Circuit's Talbott ruling on the transgender military ban, covering judicial deference standards, the harsh reality of ongoing separation proceedings, weak reinstatement precedent from the COVID-19 vaccine mandate reversal, and the new testosterone-screening policy’s effect on the litigation. Professors Wexler and Ghiotto argue the ruling risks giving the Administration a roadmap to shield future exclusionary policies from real scrutiny, and that even a future reversal of the ban is unlikely to make separated servicemembers whole.

Amherst professor Austin Sarat discusses a lawsuit by two Idaho death row inmates challenging the secretive, unexplained process behind the state’s newly adopted execution protocol, which grants officials broad discretion to deviate from procedures at will. Professor Sarat argues that such vague protocols undermine accountability when executions go wrong, and urges Idaho courts to resist the troubling trend of relaxing administrative law norms whenever the death penalty is at stake.

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.