On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court heard a challenge brought by parents arguing that a Maryland School Board violated the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause by not allowing children to opt out of exposure to books that portray gay, lesbian and trans folks as worthy of dignity and equality. There are numerous complex legal doctrines [...]
On March 25, Trinidad and Tobago’s Court of Appeal overturned a High Court ruling that the country’s colonial-era “Buggery and Serious Indecency laws” are unconstitutional. The decision brought worldwide scrutiny and criticisms about backsliding human rights and what many rights groups deem the “re-criminalization of homosexuality.” The Court of Appeal’s reasoning in the decision is [...]
After the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia faced a response from the international community in the form of sanctions. Since then, almost 22,000 sanctions have been imposed on the country to target various spheres of the Russian economy and complicate waging the war. Over the last three years, the EU [...]
Streets were silenced, businesses shuttered, and daily life reduced to hurried, masked visits to the grocery store. Such scenes seemed unthinkable, yet they became a reality as governments worldwide scrambled to contain the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020. While Western democratic leaders at first placed faith in isolating known infections, many ultimately followed in the [...]
“Fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics and lunatics have played great roles at all times in the history of mankind…Usually, they have wreaked havoc.” – Sigmund Freud, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study US President Donald Trump’s policies are not just matters of domestic law, but also international law in that the Trump administration’s harmful [...]
Part two of the series can be found here. When I read CNN’s piece about a pro-Israel group sharing with the Trump administration a Palestine activist “deportation” list, I immediately thought of Edwin Black’s foreword in IBM and the Holocaust, in which he questioned where the Nazis got their lists in the first place. That [...]
Part one of the series can be found here. Part two of the series can be found here. During the War on Terror, force drift was explained to me as the concept that increasing levels of force are seen to be reasonable, and there is an almost unstoppable trend toward the use of more and [...]
“In the end, we must depend upon creatures of our own making.” Goethe, Faust It’s clear and straightforward: the United States must avoid nuclear war or all other national obligations will become moot. It follows that all available fiscal and intellectual resources should be vested in this obligation. Prima facie, during the self-inflicted chaos [...]
If Prime Minister Mark Carney wins the Canadian federal election, new Attorney General and Minister of Justice Gary Anandasangaree — appointed by Carney on March 14 — will likely remain in the role as he now faces a moment that directly parallels his earlier career as an international human rights lawyer advocating for Tamil victims [...]
Hidden behind the United States’ largest produce supply is a crisis in farmworker housing, one that not only endangers workers but also poses a risk to consumers far beyond the fields. California grows more than a third of America’s vegetables and most of the country’s fruits and nuts. Thousands of farmworkers power this agricultural machine, [...]
