In the Media

By Kimberlé Crenshaw
The death of Ms. Jefferson has mobilized activists, community members and commentators to demand sweeping changes. But if history is any guide, the masses will not recognize her name, as they do Eric Garner, Michael Brown or Tamir Rice. It’s not that we lack stories of black women killed by the police; rather, it seems that we don’t know what to do with them.

But what exactly is “dark money,” and why is it considered a problem? As a law professor who studies campaign finance, I’d like to answer those questions and explain how improved disclosure laws could shed some light on dark money.

NPR's Ailsa Chang speaks with Tim Wu, a professor of law, science and technology at Columbia Law School, about how to break up big tech and increase competition.

By Mishi Choudhary and Eben Moglen
In India, and in other advanced societies, governments and courts are beginning their reckoning with the extraordinary difficulties posed by presently existing centralised “social media” and the “platform” companies that, by operating these media, are changing human civilisation.

As Hurricane Florence moved across the Atlantic in early September of 2018, state officials issued evacuation orders for communities along the Virginia and Carolina coasts. The writer and law professor Jedediah Purdy, who was teaching at Duke at the time, was situated well inland, where the Atlantic coastal plain meets the Piedmont, and in his new book, “This Land Is Our Land,” he writes about his own surge of disaster preparation.

Jedediah Purdy’s 2015 book After Nature is about what we talk about when we talk about nature. Breaking the concept apart—historically, legally, philosophically, even aesthetically—Purdy makes us see that there’s nothing “natural” about nature, that the world is what humanity has made it. . . . Purdy is currently a law professor at Columbia University.

In short, three decades after the supreme court recognized that workplace decisions based on stereotyped views about men and women run contrary to our sex-discrimination law we may be on the cusp of taking a giant step backwards. 

The first morning of the term showed a welcome moment of camaraderie on the bench, as justices from both sides of the ideological spectrum seemed to join in their skepticism of the government’s position in Peter v. NantKwest. 

If the race for powerful A.I. is indeed a race among civilizations for control of the future, the United States and European nations should be spending at least 50 times the amount they do on public funding of basic A.I. research. 

By Philip Bobbitt
Executive privilege remains crucial. But the failure to vindicate such careful and rigorous efforts to follow the whistleblower rules would only lead to workarounds and more-reckless leaks.