Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Law

Sarah Lustbader

Making Room for Forgiveness

Even if victims or their families decide to forgive, the law rarely does.

November 18, 2021 issue

Sarah A. Seo

Reimagining the Public Defender

For the poor, who are disproportionately people of color, the criminal justice system in the United States is essentially a plea-and-probation system.

December 2, 2021 issue

Jed S. Rakoff

Sentenced by Algorithm

Computer programs used to predict recidivism and determine prison terms have a high error rate, a secret design, and a demonstrable racial bias.

June 10, 2021 issue

Jenny Uglow

Contagious Constitutions

Linda Colley shows in her new book that written constitutions developed both as a means of shoring up entrenched rulers and of turning successful rebellions into legitimate governments.

June 10, 2021 issue

Alexandra D. Lahav

Medicine Is Made for Men

In medical research, drug regulation, and product design, the male body is too often considered as the default—which can have dangerous, even fatal, consequences for women.

February 11, 2021 issue

Madeleine Schwartz

Criminalizing a Constitutional Right

For many Americans, Roe v. Wade might as well have been overturned already.

December 3, 2020 issue

Noah Feldman

The Battle Over Scalia’s Legacy

The late justice advocated judicial restraint, textualism, and originalism, but conservative jurists will have to choose among them.

December 17, 2020 issue

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

The Latest

Jake Bernstein

Loopholes for Kleptocrats

The term “tax haven” may conjure images of Caribbean islands and palm trees, but two recent books make the case that the world’s leading tax haven is America.

December 2, 2021 issue

Leah Aronowsky

The Limits of Climate Change Litigation

For two decades, climate scientists have been developing tools to pin the blame for hurricanes, floods, and heatwaves on fossil fuel companies. But judges say climate change is too big for court.

November 3, 2021

David Cole

Let the Decision Stand

Every argument against Roe was squarely rejected in the Supreme Court’s 1992 Casey decision, and nothing has changed since then except the composition of the Court.

November 4, 2021 issue

John J. Lennon

A Canon for the American Prisoner

“There’s something critically important that books do for us that we can’t get anywhere else—because so much of prison is trying to master the art of becoming.”

October 5, 2021

Sue Halpern

The Human Costs of AI

Artificial intelligence does not come to us as a deus ex machina but, rather, through a number of dehumanizing extractive practices, of which most of us are unaware.

October 21, 2021 issue

Robert L. Tsai

The New Abortion Vigilantism

The abortion bounty law is novel and thus far unique to Texas, but similar civil enforcement regimes have a much darker history.

September 23, 2021

David A. Bell

Whose Freedom?

Tyler Stovall demonstrates the potent and noxious ways that people have conflated freedom with whiteness but pays too little attention to the force of freedom as a concept.

September 23, 2021 issue

Liza Batkin

The Supreme Court’s Originalist Evasions

The justices’ spring session was widely commended for rulings that seemed to check abuses of police powers. But they did so only by studiously ignoring America’s contemporary realities.

August 13, 2021