• DEMOCRACY WATCHPresidential Discretion and the Insurrection Act

    By George Croner

    The Supreme Court, in Trump v. Illinois, further diminished the president’s ability to use § 12406 to federalize the National Guard in order to directly interfere in domestic activities in pursuit of his most controversial policies. With § 12406 now unavailable, the likelihood of the current president resorting to the Insurrection Act, the statute affording him the most oppressive domestic suppression capabilities, has only increased.

  • COMPROMISED DOJThe Continuing Saga of Chief Judge Boasberg’s Contempt of Court Inquiry Involving Todd Blanche and Emil Bove

    By Marty Lederman

    Courts increasingly are expressing concern about the litigation conduct of the Trump administration’s Department of Justice attorneys. Courts have become reluctant to apply the “presumption of regularity” to Executive Branch actions, and many judges have often pointedly questioned the reliability and candor of DOJ’s written and oral representations. The result is that DOJ is in danger of seriously damaging its historic reputation for integrity, professionalism, and political independence in federal court litigation.

  • DIGITAL DISINFORMATIONEstimating the Effects on the UK of State Information, Influence, and Interference Threats Using Digital Disinformation, Distortion, and Deception

    By Martin Innes, Isabella Orpen, and James Ashford

    There is no adequate methodology or framework for estimating the impacts and effects of foreign state information, influence, and interference effects on the UK. Without such a framework it is difficult for decision-makers to prioritize which events and incidents require responding to because of the harms they are causing.

  • FAMILY BUSINESSAn Indian Billionaire Was Targeted by Trump. Then He Poured Money Into a Startup Secretly Backed by Donald Trump Jr.

    By Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

    America First Refining , an obscure Texas firm secretly connected to the president’s son, received at least $100 million from Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries. At the same time, the Ambani family secured major policy wins from the Trump administration. In December, Forbes estimated that Trump Jr.’s net worth had rocketed from roughly $50 million to $300 million since the election. But the Forbes figures were based on the investments that have been publicly disclosed. The America First Refining episode suggests there is much about the family business that remains secret.

  • TARIFFSThe Trump Administration’s WTO Filing Exposes the Bad Faith Behind Its Section 122 Tariffs

    By Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon

    On June 2, the Trump administration submitted a document to the World Trade supposedly justifying its Section 122 tariffs. The filing is revealing—not for what it gets right but for what it exposes about the administration’s bad faith legal theory. The administration desperately wants courts and trading partners to believe it is acting within the rules, but its bad faith filing at the WTO demonstrates otherwise.

  • AI SAFETYFrom Oversight to Coercion: How Authoritarian Governments Are Twisting AI Safety to Get Tech Companies to Fall in Line

    By Michael Gregory

    Authoritarian governance of technology often delegitimizes intended protections, poisoning any external regulation, and even voluntary self-regulation that deviates from the regime’s goals or values. Following the authoritarian playbook, the Trump administration has argued that AI safety standards and user restrictions are ideological impositions rather than sound engineering decisions. In the “Preventing Woke AI” executive order of 23 July 2025, the administration attached the “woke” label to basic ethics protections, making those protections politically costly to maintain.

  • DANGEROIUS SPEECHDangerous Speech in Disguise: The White House’s New “Aliens” Website Is Not a Joke

    By Susan Benesch and Rebecca Hamilton

    The official White House website has launched a new page titled, “Aliens,” which looks like a video game, with stars twinkling in a dark sky behind spooky neon green text. The page, echoing the rhetoric and the great replacement conspiracy theory, pushes inflammatory buttons familiar to experts on rhetoric, rhetoric which increases the risk of intergroup atrocities by instilling deep fear of members of another group. Such rhetoric, that one of us has named “dangerous speech” for its capacity to inspire violence, can demonize any human group.

  • AINot Regulation. Not Even Oversight. Trump’s AI Order Won’t Be Enough

    By David Wroe

    After a bruising tussle inside his administration, President Donald Trump has gone for a decidedly non-committal approach to AI safety and security that’s unlikely to survive sustained contact with reality.

  • 1984 ON THE POTOMACEditor’s note

    In 1984, the fictional totalitarian regime of Oceania maintains complete dominance over its population through the control of history and memory, specifically by erasing the past, rewriting it, and forging historical facts. This historical forgery enforces a collective reality onto the masses, ensuring that the Party and its ideology persist.

  • 1984 ON THE POTOMACThe Justice Department Erases History; Lawfare Restores It

    By Tyler McBrien, Michael Feinberg, Benjamin Wittes

    The Jan. 6 investigation was one of the largest investigations and collections of prosecutions in Justice Department history. This is the record the Justice Department is now trying to delete. Any effort to erase history and replace it with lies warrants concerted pushback.

  • 1984 ON THE POTOMACInto the Memory Hole: DOJ Is Trying to Bury the Past

    By Ben Frankel

    The Trump administration has altered webpages dealing with climate change and vaccine policy, but removing thousands of documents relating to Jan. 6 from DOJ website is different. Here the issue is not a theory, a model, or a contested policy projection. It is the documentary footprint of a past response to a past event. To remove these documents from easy public view is not to enter a new debate or indicate a change of policy. It is to try to edit the archive, to rewrite the past.

  • DEMOCRACY WATCHWhat Can Be Done About President Trump’s Slush Fund?

    By Robert A. Levy

    Others have examined the details and criticisms of Trump’s slush fund, noting that its aim is to financially reward people who have broken the law in order to serve Trump’s interests. Here, I focus on legal issues and remedies.

  • AIWho Is Accountable When AI Goes Global?

    By Tony Oweke

    The existing patchwork of AI standards and governance frameworks can both create and worsen cross-border harms from AI deployment. A central coordinating mechanism could help mitigate these risks. Can the United Nations play this role?

  • AICan an AI Chatbot Be Held Liable in Cases of Death?

    By Hannah Morse

    A growing number of lawsuits aim to hold OpenAI responsible for what plaintiffs say is their chatbot’s role in people’s deaths. Northeastern experts wonder if widespread change will occur because of them.

  • DEMOCRACY WATCHTrump Promises End to America’s Slush Fund Shortage

    By Dan Greenberg

    The whole idea of Trump’s $1,776 billion so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is grotesque on several levels: the funds are meant to go to the president’s political allies; these funds will be awarded by a committee staffed with the president’s allies; and the Fund is duplicative of a program that already exists—except that the new version lacks the minimal safeguards against awardee bias that judicial monitoring of settlements supplies. This cronyist subsidy flouts legal and constitutional norms.