Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Law

Chino State Prison, Chino, California, 2010

David Cole

Less Punishment, More Justice

We need to rethink the institutional structures that will determine criminal justice policy for years to come.

July 23, 2020 issue

Honoré Daumier: Le Défenseur, circa 1862–1865

Janet Malcolm

A Second Chance

A trial jury is like an audience at a play that wants to be entertained. Witnesses, like stage actors, have to play to that audience if their performances are to be convincing.

September 24, 2020 issue

Judge Antonin Scalia in his office, shortly before his confirmation to the Supreme Court, Washington, D.C., July 28, 1986

Laurence H. Tribe

The Scalia Myth

The selection of a justice to serve for life on the nation’s highest court is far too consequential to be treated either as an abstract referendum on legal methodology or as a game to be played for partisan advantage.

February 27, 2016

Claudia Dreifus

An Interview with Russ Feingold

Russ Feingold: It’s not that I think that Neil Gorsuch isn’t otherwise qualified to be a justice, but his seat was obtained illegitimately. It was not Donald Trump’s to fill. This was a theft of the Supreme Court.

July 14, 2020

Linda Greenhouse

The First and Last of Her Kind

Evan Thomas’s ‘First: Sandra Day O’Connor’

November 7, 2019 issue

Adam Tooze

How ‘Big Law’ Makes Big Money

Katharina Pistor’s ‘The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality’

February 13, 2020 issue

Roger Stone celebrating outside his Florida home after President Trump commuted the sentence of his ally, Fort Lauderdale, July 12, 2020

Ankush Khardori

Rule by Law

The threat that faces the country is of an increasingly dominant rule by law that could include a more comprehensive deployment of the criminal justice system against perceived opponents of the administration.

September 25, 2020

A Victim Offender Education Group meeting organized by the Insight Prison Project, a restorative justice program at San Quentin State Prison, California, 2017

Michelle Kuo

What Replaces Prisons?

What would a world with a vastly reduced reliance on prisons and police look like?

August 20, 2020 issue

The Latest

Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court shortly after being sworn in, Washington, D.C., August 1993

Pamela Karlan

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1933–2020

The late justice not only wrote about the connection between sex equality and liberty; she lived it.

October 22, 2020 issue

David Cole

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1933–2020

Her career illustrates that one can be radical and incrementalist at the same time; indeed, as she argued, it may be the only way to achieve enduring change.

September 20, 2020

Natalie Pattillo

Family Court Amid Pandemic

With Covid-19 putting additional strain on people and an already overtaxed system, one has to wonder, would victims be facing these grave dangers amid a pandemic if an abuser’s parental rights weren’t competing with a child’s safety in the first place?

September 2, 2020

International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda addressing the court, The Hague, December 2019

David Luban

America the Unaccountable

The Trump administration has declared war on the International Criminal Court—the world’s only permanent court whose mandate is to pursue cases of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

August 20, 2020 issue

David Cole

The Court’s Declarations of Independence

In the end, the Supreme Court’s 2019–2020 term was much less conservative than anyone had expected.

August 20, 2020 issue

In the field where Dr. Samson Orusa’s clinic used to stand, a sign directing patients to a local Suboxone clinic, Clarksville, Tennessee, July 15, 2020

Rebecca Haw Allensworth

Licensed to Pill

Prescribing for profit takes many forms, but unethical prescribers are commonly self-employed solo practitioners who cultivate a reputation as the local “candyman.” These cases revealed how self-regulation can go terribly awry.

July 21, 2020

New York State Police officers stopping a black family during the Rochester race riot, July 1964

Sarah A. Seo

Racism on the Road

In ‘Driving While Black,’ Gretchen Sorin examines the struggle to abolish segregation on the highways and byways in Jim Crow America.

July 23, 2020 issue

Former inhabitants of Chagos Archipelago, the last British colony in Africa, claiming compensation for being exiled from their homes, High Court, London, October 31, 2002

Philippe Sands

Britain’s Colonial Legacy on Trial at The Hague

Never more clearly than now have I seen how the untaught, unspoken legacy of colonialism has rendered the UK unable to confront the perceptions of others, and the realities of its racist past and their continuing legacy.

June 23, 2020

A message chalked on the road during a demonstration protesting the police shooting death of Philando Castile after a traffic stop, St. Paul, Minnesota, July 7, 2016

Annette Gordon-Reed

People Living While Black & the Police

There is no doubt that our country’s troubled racial history has helped shape current attitudes. It should not surprise us that the police more often apply that discretion to black people in degrading and dangerous ways.

June 13, 2020