US under Trump Series

Will a conservative Supreme Court give new life to the death penalty?

Apr 20, 2017 02:39 am UTC| Insights & Views Law

For years now, the death penaltys days have seemed numbered. Death sentences and executions are in decline. And some current Supreme Court justices have been pushing the court to revisit the constitutionality of capital...

Budget explainer: the federal-state battle for funding

Apr 19, 2017 02:45 am UTC| Insights & Views Law

There seems to be an ever present struggle for a share of the revenue government collects, not only between states but also between the different levels of government. In each years budget, the federal government...

Migrant Crisis Series

Is the US immigration court system broken?

Apr 18, 2017 06:00 am UTC| Insights & Views Law

In the U.S. today, a single immigration case takes an average of 677 days simply to get to the initial scheduling hearing. There are more than half a million cases in the system, and just over 300 judges working on...

When it comes to euthanasia, not all slippery slope arguments are 'bullshit'

Apr 17, 2017 02:20 am UTC| Insights & Views Law

The Twittersphere went into meltdown on Monday night after a spat on ABCs QA between bioethics professor Margaret Somerville and 81-year-old audience member Patricia Fellows. Somerville defended, at some length, her...

Will we reverse the little progress we've made on environmental justice?

Apr 17, 2017 01:15 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature Law

The Flint water crisis was perhaps the most high-profile example of the social inequalities tied to environmental issues. But it is hardly the first. There is ample evidence that hazardous waste facilities, Superfund...

Is the Supreme Court acting less like a court?

Apr 16, 2017 14:30 pm UTC| Insights & Views Law

As the pinnacle of the judicial branch, the U.S. Supreme Court is necessarily involved in some of the highest-profile, most controversial and most political cases across the country. And it is one of the most widely...

How pop culture can (and should) change legal views on swearing

Apr 12, 2017 15:13 pm UTC| Insights & Views Law Entertainment

Warning: The following article contains explicit language. A bedtime storybook urges children to Go the F . . k to Sleep! The Wolf of Wall Street, one of the sweariest movies of all time, contains 506 f-bombs. And in...