CAMBRIDGE : Kamala Harris was not alone in suffering a decisive loss in the 2024 US presidential election. It was also a defeat in the “battle for the soul” of the rule of law – an institution that has defined American democracy...
CAMBRIDGE: Each fall, a telephone call from Stockholm launches one or a few scholars to international fame with the bestowal of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences – a process that Irving Wallace dramatized in his 1962 potboiler The...
CAMBRIDGE :After 14 long years of Tory rule, the United Kingdom’s general election on July 4 could determine the political fate of the Conservative Party. While Prime Minister Rishi Sunak may have hoped to capitalise on declining inflation...
CAMBRIDGE: If the British computer scientist Alan Turing’s work on “thinking machines” was the prequel to what we now call artificial intelligence, the late psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow...
CAMBRIDGE: The Pulitzer-nominated play Other Desert Cities, set in Palm Springs, California, tells a tale about a fractured family’s struggles to establish dialogue across political divides. More than a decade after the play premiered in 2011...
CAMBRIDGE: William Shakespeare’s 1597 comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost tells the story of four Frenchmen as they navigate the tension between commitment to intellectual development and the quest for domestic bliss. Some four centuries...
CAMBRIDGE: This year marks the 30th anniversary of the European Union. When the Maastricht Treaty took effect in 1993, Europeans embarked on a historically unique experiment in supranational governance and shared sovereignty. The EU’s single...
CAMBRIDGE: Fifteen years ago, I watched in rapt attention as a resplendent, yet surreal, scene unfolded: the election of the first-ever African-American US president, Barack Obama. In the past week, the Supreme Court, in a landmark 6-3 ruling,...
CAMBRIDGE : In 2008, University of Chicago economist (and future Nobel laureate) Richard Thaler and Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein published their book Nudge, which popularised the idea that subtle design changes in the architecture of choice...
CAMBRIDGE: It has been 10 years since an eight-storey commercial building housing several textile factories on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed on April 24, 2013. The collapse of Rana Plaza claimed the lives of 1,134 people and...
LONDON: The internet has recently been flooded with AI-generated images of Russian President Vladimir Putin being put on trial or incarcerated. But while the images are fake, international criminal justice is becoming a reality. On March 17, after...
CAMBRIDGE: In April 2022, the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, asked, “Is Twitter dying?” Five days later, he launched an apparently whimsical bid to buy the social media platform. It took months of legal wrangling to complete...
CAMBRIDGE: Following the brutal market backlash against her plans for unfunded tax cuts and tens of billions of pounds in additional spending, Liz Truss resigned as British prime minister, succeeded by her Tory rival, Rishi Sunak. The international...
CAMBRIDGE: In 2017, just when the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus closed after almost 150 years, the political extravaganza of Donald Trump’s presidency became the “Greatest Show on Earth” – or at least the...
CAMBRIDGE: On a celebratory night in late 2016, the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower were lit up in green to remind the world to implement the Paris climate agreement. Yet in recent years, climate legislation in the United States has been stuck...
CAMBRIDGE : It used to be that who you were at birth defined who you were for the rest of your life: slave or owner, emperor or subject, aristocrat or serf, man or woman, black or white. But, over time, moral revolutions have chipped away at the...
CAMBRIDGE: Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation as a justice of the US Supreme Court has been hailed as a breakthrough for black Americans and other minority communities, for women and mothers, for public defenders, and even for those who...
CAMBRIDGE: In an October 2013 address at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law lecture theatre, I showed students a “class photo” of the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court and challenged them to “spot the difference...
CAMBRIDGE: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is currently embroiled in a very British scandal. As in the recent eponymous BBC television miniseries based on the infamous 1963 Argyll v Argyll case, at stake is a high-profile divorce. But, this time,...
CAMBRIDGE : The coronavirus is everywhere: in the air, on surfaces, in our respiratory tracts, and, over the past week, at the US Supreme Court. On January 10, key elements of US President Joe Biden’s controversial “vaccine-or-test...
