The leaked White Paper on the targeted killing of American citizens tells us many things we already knew about the Obama Justice Department. Though some headlines have referred to this as a brief, it is nothing of the sort: it is a talking points memo assuring that the...

We have now passed the period of mourning prescribed by all of the world's faith traditions and can start to ask ourselves hard questions about the massacre in Newtown.

And we should be clear that frenzied advocacy of gun control does not ask any hard questions at all. If we...

Of course, any reasonable person should object to Mohamed Morsi's constitutional declaration of November 22: it neuters the judiciary at a time when the president holds exclusive legislative and executive authority, and, in an article that recalls constitutions written in the finest Soviet style, declares that the president...

Here we go again. Another supposed affront to the Prophet, and another wave of barbarous mobs clamoring at the walls of American embassies. This time there is something of a twist: Unlike the Danish cartoon controversy or the desecration of a Koran by American military personnel, the offensive act in...

So we have an acrimonious presidential campaign on our hands. Big deal. Wringing our hands about the decline of civility in public life will not reveal how the particular mud being slung by the candidates tells us a thing or two about our political culture. We should all have grown...

Khaled Abou El Fadl is Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Professor of Law at UCLA, and an internationally recognized expert in Islamic law and human rights. Since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, he has consulted regularly with leading members of Egypt's judiciary on constitutional issues. He is the author of numerous...

What follows is an initial reaction to the Supreme Court's decision on the individual mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act. The Medicaid portion of the decision is somewhat more difficult to parse, and will have to wait for a later date.

For the Court...

Barack Obama has chosen quite a moment to realize that marriage is a basic civil right. Just as a kangaroo court is in session in the dungeon he promised to close, just as young voters are feeling less than enthused about his re-election, just as less than stellar job numbers...

In the Easter forum on politics and faith held by NBC's Meet the Press, Representative Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) articulated, though that is using the term loosely, exactly the wrong view of the relationship between politics and faith:

But going back to your question about Mormonism th-- everyone...

Appearing on ABC's This Week, Rick Santorum elaborated on his statement that watching John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association made him want to "throw up." Especially purgative, apparently, is the idea that a president should openly declare his reluctance to take advice from...

Stanley Fish addresses in his blog this week the rising currency of "digital humanities" and its strong presence at the convention of the Modern Language Association -- an academic conference, he rightly implies, to which one goes expecting more faddism than scholarship. I have previously voiced...

The University of Illinois issued its final report this week on the goosing of class profile data posted by the College of Law publicly and reported to the American Bar Association. This really does look like déjà vu all over again. The university's last admissions debacle...

The habeas right to demand cause for being detained is the only right explicitly named in the original Constitution. And though the meaning of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is often debated, it is seldom denied that citizens should have knowledge of the charges for which they...

After almost six months of uncertainty, Hosni Mubarak has found as of August 3 a residence befitting his dignity: the dock of an Egyptian criminal court, where he faces charges of killing demonstrators during the revolution leading to his ouster, using his power for personal profit during his reign, and...

"Prometheus: I stopped mortals from foreseeing doom.
Chorus: What cure did you discover for that sickness?
Prometheus: I sowed in them blind hopes.
Chorus: That was a great help that you gave to men.
Prometheus: Besides, I myself gave them fire.
Chorus: Do now creatures...

If George W. Bush was the torture president, Barack Obama's pet human rights violation is extrajudicial killing. As early as May 2009, the UN's Special Rapporteur on unlawful execution chided the Obama administration. And Human Rights Watch worried in an important letter to Obama last December that the...

An earlier version of this post appeared at AslanMedia.com.

Imagine that you are traveling in Washington, DC or New York. You take a few photos of the sights, perhaps even a few minutes of video. You make a couple of calls or jot off a few...

Republican politicians use the word "leadership" as though they expect it to have an aphrodisiac effect. For the arousal they perceive it to generate they part from their ethic of barking in monosyllables. And in the same stroke they reveal their ideal view of society: uncharitable souls might think of...

With Sarah Palin making headlines for a supposed gaffe on Paul Revere's Midnight Ride, and with her loyal adorers modifying Wikipedia to suit her version of events, it seems an apt time to pick up Jill Lepore's The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the...