Law Archives - Public Seminar

Politics

The Moral Right to Defend Yourself Against ICE

If constitutional constraints are real limits on government power, their violation must sometimes justify the same defensive responses that other rights violations justify

January 22, 2026 • by Michael Gregory

If you saw an armed stranger in body armor forcing his way into your neighbor's home at dawn, dragging a screaming mother away from her children while pointing a rifle at the family, would you have the right to stop him? By any means necessary? Now the forbidden version: What if ...

The Moral Right to Defend Yourself Against ICE

Capitalism

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Our first responsibility, always, is to preserve the world, and our second is to improve it

May 21, 2025 • by Jedediah Britton-Purdy

The following text was first presented on April 22, 2025, as a distinguished lecture presented by the Henry H. Arnhold Forum on Global Challenges and the New School for Social Research. I want to trace the outline of an era that has closed. It ran from roughly the end of the ...

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Corporations

The Evolution of America’s (Un)protected Consumer

From government oversight to “financial literacy”

April 30, 2024 • by Basak Kus

Consumer protection started to be seen as a responsibility that individuals, deemed rational and capable, were expected to shoulder themselves, assuming they were provided adequate information about the terms of exchange. ...

The Evolution of America’s (Un)protected Consumer

Past Present

The History of U.S. Divorce Laws

Episode 400: Natalia, Neil, and Niki discuss the history of divorce law in the United States

November 14, 2023 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

In Episode 400, Natalia, Neil, and Niki discuss the history of divorce law in the United States....

Gender

From the Vault: Labor Pains

“One classmate litigator closed up her practice, left a tape of bird songs on her office answering machine, and enrolled in art school.”

September 13, 2022 • by Joseph Matthews

Since I hadn’t been able to get Angela to talk about what trial lawyering may have done to her sense of herself, her “identity” as a woman, I shifted to a different lens: Did she feel, I asked, that the presence of more women lawyers was humanizing the criminal law?...

Politics

Brett Kavanaugh’s Right to Privacy

The legal right to privacy is very old. It’s just that privacy used to be an exclusively male privilege.

July 12, 2022 • by Jill Filipovic

All of a sudden, privacy rights matter to the same conservatives who just stripped women of ours—because powerful men are seeing their privacy violated....

Education

A Black Pedagogy Is an Engaged Pedagogy

How an American Studies professor went to law school and became a teacher for the twenty-first century

April 28, 2022 • by Duchess Harris

Why did I become a student again when I could have more easily turned my attention only to the research and writing that would have advanced my chosen academic career? The answer is simple: I felt it was time to apply my political and theoretical beliefs to action-oriented work that ...

Constitutional Politics

Imagining a Post-Constitutional Political Culture

Amid a racial uprising and calls for “political revolution,” why pretend that our political disputes turn on the “best” reading of an eighteenth-century text, the Constitution?

October 12, 2021 • by Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn

Aziz Rana’s genealogy of American constitutional veneration overturns the conventional wisdom, not merely about the chronology, but also about the reasons for this worshipful attitude towards a document drafted in the late eighteenth century. At the same time, his forthcoming book, Rise of the Constitution, is politically explosive: for it ...

Imagining a Post-Constitutional Political Culture

Politics

Democrats and the Conservative Supreme Court

Is there incentive to attack the court’s legitimacy?

September 28, 2021 • by John Stoehr

Last week, opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote about the sinking reputation of the United States Supreme Court. With respect to a new abortion law in Texas, which invalidates Roe v. Wade, the Post columnist said that, “The nub of the problem is not that (or not only that) voters are angry that the court allowed ...

Democrats and the Conservative Supreme Court

The Right

Creeping Fascism

The Texas law attacking reproductive justice is the antithesis of both law and democracy

September 8, 2021 • by Laura Briggs

_____ Is there any other phrase for the events that have activated the Texas abortion law other than “creeping fascism”? First, the ban itself is essentially an anti-law, designed to promote vigilantism. In itself, that’s not surprising. S.B. 8 is the culmination not just of numerous state-level laws that have narrowed abortion ...

Feminism

Why Does the Texas Legislature Believe That Embryos Have a Heartbeat?

Because fake science is part of the American conservative tradition

September 8, 2021 • by Claire Potter

____ The Texas statute that went into effect last week is one of many similar anti-abortion laws that have either recently cleared state legislatures or will clear them in the coming months. Using the weapon of a civil suit that can be filed by any private citizen, the law seeks to ...

Why Does the Texas Legislature Believe That Embryos Have a Heartbeat?

Democracy

On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law

An excerpt exploring the meaning of treason and the present-day prevalence of alleging treason

February 25, 2021 • by Carlton F.W. Larson

As a professor of American constitutional law and legal history, I regularly answer questions for the media about legal issues. But for the most part, those calls tended to focus on constitutional law more generally and on other subjects I have written about, such as the Second Amendment or the ...

Law

The Moral Right to Defend Yourself Against ICE

If constitutional constraints are real limits on government power, their violation must sometimes justify the same defensive responses that other rights violations justify

Ecology and Democracy in a World on Fire

Our first responsibility, always, is to preserve the world, and our second is to improve it

The Evolution of America’s (Un)protected Consumer

From government oversight to “financial literacy”

The History of U.S. Divorce Laws

Episode 400: Natalia, Neil, and Niki discuss the history of divorce law in the United States

From the Vault: Labor Pains

“One classmate litigator closed up her practice, left a tape of bird songs on her office answering machine, and enrolled in art school.”

Brett Kavanaugh’s Right to Privacy

The legal right to privacy is very old. It’s just that privacy used to be an exclusively male privilege.

A Black Pedagogy Is an Engaged Pedagogy

How an American Studies professor went to law school and became a teacher for the twenty-first century

Imagining a Post-Constitutional Political Culture

Amid a racial uprising and calls for “political revolution,” why pretend that our political disputes turn on the “best” reading of an eighteenth-century text, the Constitution?

Democrats and the Conservative Supreme Court

Is there incentive to attack the court’s legitimacy?

Creeping Fascism

The Texas law attacking reproductive justice is the antithesis of both law and democracy

Why Does the Texas Legislature Believe That Embryos Have a Heartbeat?

Because fake science is part of the American conservative tradition

On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law

An excerpt exploring the meaning of treason and the present-day prevalence of alleging treason

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