Ideas

Law

The Corruption Playbook

Donald Trump’s plan to destroy civil service protections if reelected is more than an employees’ rights issue. What’s at stake is democracy itself.

April 18, 2024 issue

David Cole

Who Should Regulate Online Speech?

A number of cases before the Supreme Court this term will determine the future of free speech on the Internet.

March 21, 2024 issue

Jeffrey Toobin

Circuit Breakers

Judges on the Fifth Circuit, many of them Trump appointees, are attempting to transform the law and challenge the very structure of American government.

March 7, 2024 issue

Sean Wilentz

The Case for Disqualification

The Supreme Court must decide if it will honor the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and bar Donald Trump from holding public office or trash the constitutional defense of democracy against insurrections.

February 22, 2024 issue

David Cole

Who’s Canceling Whom?

Conservatives often charge their opponents with “cancel culture,” but the right poses as significant a threat to free speech as the left.

February 8, 2024 issue

Linda Greenhouse

An Unhealthy Definition of Rights

For the new majority on the Supreme Court, religious liberty takes precedence over the government’s power to protect public health.

December 21, 2023 issue

Sean Wilentz

The Revolution Within the American Revolution

Supported and largely led by slaveholders, the American Revolution was also, paradoxically, a profound antislavery event.

October 23, 2023

Duncan Hosie

How DeSantis Packed the Florida Supreme Court

With his right-wing judicial appointments, the governor of Florida has been carrying out the mission of the Federalist Society and removing barriers to his political agenda.

July 20, 2023

Watching the Supreme Court

David Cole

The Supreme Court Picks Its Battles

June ended with far-reaching upsets for civil rights, but a closer look at the Supreme Court’s decisions across the 2022–2023 term suggests the justices are not immune to public scrutiny.

July 4, 2023

Murat Oztaskin

‘A Can of Gasoline Under Indian Law’

In their efforts to overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act, a constellation of law firms and conservative organizations have put tribal sovereignty in jeopardy.

June 7, 2023

David Cole

An Abortion Drug Tests the Supreme Court

How the justices resolve a case over the FDA’s longstanding approval of mifepristone will reveal whether they rule by personal ideology or by judicial restraint.

April 18, 2023

Liza Batkin

The Empty Words of the Religious Right

The legal group Alliance Defending Freedom has perfected a tactic for twisting the First Amendment: casting discriminators as visionaries persecuted by despotic laws.

February 10, 2023

The Latest

David Cole

Gender-Affirming Care & the Courts

The Supreme Court will rule this term on whether a Tennessee law denying minors treatment for gender dysphoria discriminates on the basis of sex.

December 19, 2024 issue

John J. Lennon

Tangled Justice

A new book examines the complex relationship between forgiveness and justice through the story of Paula Cooper, who was sentenced to death at the age of sixteen.

December 19, 2024 issue

Jed S. Rakoff

FDR’s Compliant Justices

The Supreme Court’s deference to FDR during World War II resulted in unjustifiable ethical breaches, but its new code of conduct has not resolved the question of when a justice should be disqualified from a case.

December 5, 2024 issue

Steven Simon

The Peril of Civil Breakdown

The US political situation radiates instability. How likely is extremist violence in the aftermath of the election?

November 7, 2024 issue

Laurence H. Tribe

Where Freedom Ends

Law can oppress as easily as it can liberate, and it is the everyday life we lead at our kitchen tables and in our bedrooms that is most dangerously threatened by a return of Trump to power.

November 7, 2024 issue

Jessica T. Mathews

The Race That Can’t Be Won

A new nuclear arms race is beginning. It will be far more dangerous than the last one.

October 17, 2024 issue

Linda Colley

A Constitution Nowhere and Everywhere

Despite the absence of a single codified document, there is a long tradition of writing about the United Kingdom’s constitutional history.

October 17, 2024 issue

Linda Greenhouse

Are Sheriffs Above the Law?

County sheriffs are useful to the right. They appear regularly as talking heads on conservative media, especially on the subject of immigration. Many vignettes of sheriffs in action are dramatic and alarming. But how representative are they?

October 3, 2024 issue

Jed S. Rakoff

The Most Conservative Branch

In his new book, Reading the Constitution, Stephen Breyer criticizes recent Supreme Court decisions on issues such as abortion and gun rights as the product of rigid and imperfect reasoning rather than of ideology, and he argues for a more pragmatic jurisprudence.

September 19, 2024 issue

Lynn Hunt

In Search of Steady Reform

Fareed Zakaria seeks lessons for the present in various European revolutions, but the “liberal” English and Dutch examples he singles out as exemplary barely qualify as revolutionary at all.

September 19, 2024 issue