22 August 2025
Trump’s Manufactured Emergencies
The Trump administration’s actions in Washington D.C. represent the continuation of interconnected political and rhetorical tactics that the president has used since his second inauguration that we should expect to see again and again – using misleading or downright fabricated information as the basis for declaring an emergency, relying on the fabricated emergency to invoke emergency legal authorities, and then relying on those authorities to take actions that exceed even the broad powers that such emergencies confer under the law. Looking ahead, we can expect the administration to run this same playbook in additional, predictable ways. Continue reading >>
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22 August 2025
Weaponising Disqualification
On August 20, 2025, the Indian Government introduced three constitutional amendment bills of massive implications in the Parliament. Together, the bills aim to establish a mandatory legal sanction providing that any minister can be removed from their ministerial office if arrested or detained for thirty consecutive days on charges carrying a potential sentence of five years or more. At first glance, the bills may seem laudatory, founded on the expectation of ethical standards for high constitutional office. Yet, one can clearly anticipate the gross impending misuse of this law towards establishing a hegemonic BJP rule in India. Continue reading >>
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08 August 2025
Anti-Feminism versus Abusive Feminism
Some of the world’s most powerful leaders have openly embraced an agenda that is overtly hostile to diversity, equity and inclusion, and often overtly anti-feminist. These discursive and behavioral attacks have been accompanied by a range of anti-feminist policy changes. As liberalism and democracy often erode together, it is no surprise that the growth of anti-feminism is associated with democratic backsliding. What is more surprising is that many of these anti-feminist, would-be autocrats have engaged in a parallel set of tactics that appear to endorse, rather than challenge, certain feminist ideas. Continue reading >>
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19 July 2025
Against Authoritarian Determinism
A tempting but corrosive thought about Israeli politics – and about many other places – is that we have already embarked on a one-way road to authoritarianism. This “authoritarian determinism”, sometimes presented as a kind of seasoned realism, assumes that political trajectories continue unidirectionally. There is a world of difference between the many political contexts in which authoritarianism seems to be on the rise. And yet, a common question seems to be asked: in the face of authoritarian determinism, what can be saved of the democratic process? Until when does it make sense to hold on? Continue reading >>
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18 July 2025
Progressives and the Supreme Court
The Case for Disengagement Is Misguided Continue reading >>
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14 July 2025
Turkey’s Gerontocratic Constitutional Moment
In less than a year, Turkish politics has undergone a profound realignment. It began in October 2024 with a remarkable speech by Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and President Erdoğan’s chief coalition partner. In one of the most cryptic U-turns of his career, Bahçeli—long a hardliner on the Kurdish question—proposed reopening the long-frozen peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the separatist armed group that has waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state. In short, the tectonic plates of Turkish politics are shifting, and at the center of this transition stands a cast of aging men, each well past seventy. Continue reading >>
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13 July 2025
Petro’s Schmittian Turn
On 11 June 2025, Colombian President Gustavo Petro issued a decree calling a national popular consultation on a package of long-stalled social reforms. The decree came after the Senate had explicitly rejected his formal request to hold such a vote – approval that is constitutionally required under Article 104 of the Constitution. This reveals something deeper and more dangerous: an increasingly Schmittian conception of democratic power, in which the president, claiming to represent a unified people, overrides institutional checks in the name of higher constitutional fidelity. Continue reading >>
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12 July 2025
The NGO’s Guide to Authoritarianism
It appears that whenever expert civil society organizations release a legal analysis of draft laws that restrict fundamental rights and freedoms, authoritarian governments learn from their mistakes and avoid them in the next round. One could witness such a situation when the Foreign Agents Registration Bill was introduced in the Slovak parliament last spring, and the public watchdog and advocacy organization VIA IURIS tried to stand against this legislation. In one year, the Slovak parliament considered three versions of the Bill, with each version making it more challenging to fight in court. Continue reading >>
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11 July 2025
Laboratories of Authoritarianism
In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded the 1st Amendment Free Exercise Clause to grant conservative religious parents a constitutional right to remove their children from any classroom where a teacher includes LGBTQAI+ people in the curriculum. In effect, the Court has allowed public schools to discourage mutual tolerance, parents to opt out of Equal Protection, and fringe legal strategists to continue to use children’s constitutional rights as a test case for authoritarianism. In doing so, the erosion of children’s rights becomes the foundation upon which other rights are eroded. Continue reading >>
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09 July 2025