NULR Of Note

“The East is waiting to be understood by the Western races, in order not only to be able to give what is true in her but also to be confident in her own mission.”  – Rabindranath Tagore, “Creative Unity” (1922). * * * I came to law school because I seek nirvana. Because in my meditations three and four summers ago, I felt my country’s law, and indeed, its language itself, blocking my way to myself. This conflict of mine…

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Qualified immunity is getting a lot of well-deserved attention these days. The doctrine protects individual state actors—and by extension, their government employers—from liability when they have violated a constitutional right if that right was not “clearly established in law.” Protests over police brutality and demands for accountability have brought qualified immunity into the public spotlight. These conversations about individual accountability are important. But as necessary as they are, we cannot ignore the legal mechanisms for and barriers to institutional accountability…

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Many will remember 2020 for the various panics it revived: America’s second greatest toilet paper shortage since the 1970s, its first great pandemic since 1918, and another financial crisis. The year also brought back another moral hysteria commonly visited in America’s past: child porn panic. Tech companies caught flack for announcing a surge in child pornography being traded on their platforms, while simultaneously planning to encrypt messages that would prevent detection of those very same materials in the name of…

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To the disappointment of many of us who have served in the U.S. military, current and former servicemembers participated (in disproportionate numbers) in the well-documented January 2021 insurrection in our nation’s Capitol. Active members of the Armed Forces may face consequences in the military justice system, including punishment by the court-martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice as well as administrative sanctions such as less than honorable discharge. As the US Department of Justice prosecutes the insurrectionists, a question…

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In November, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, in which it will decide whether states with voucher-like schemes must allow those funds to be used at religious schools. Writing for SCOTUSBlog on September 17, Jim Kelly highlighted an underappreciated aspect of this debate: that private religious schools are not the only schools with moral education on the agenda. Rather, public schools across the country have been, since the 1990s, engaging in what is…

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