“The resistance is spreading beyond California. Dutch university faculty have issued an open letter calling for a moratorium on AI in academic settings, warning that its use ‘deskills critical thought’ and reduces students to operators of machines.” www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

In the latest wave of terrorist attacks on Ukraine, Russia is again targeting public transport attempting to injure and kill as many civilians as possible. So far they have launched over 40 missiles and 500 drones at Kyiv. Nearly a third of the city is without power and heating.

The chief innovation of European colonialism was being ship bastards instead of horse bastards.

Seeing a performer successfully hype the crowd with "When I say constitutional, you say crisis!" makes me wonder if we're doing public law conferences all wrong

Trouble is, all these US de-regulators grew up in a world where’s there’s a button saying ‘Game Over. Try Again.’

The State Department has just banned five Europeans from entering the U.S., falsely alleging they are involved in censorship of American citizens. The only censorship here is coming from the Trump administration. My statement is below. www.state.gov/releases/off...

Check out the Kavanaugh FN 4; I think it's pretty clear that the Kavanaugh Stop thing has gotten to him:

The thing about SCOTUS justices is that even the real fire-breathing ideologues aren't idiots. Kavanaugh knows that it might already be too late to avoid having "Kavanaugh Stop" become a permanent term in constitutional parlance, even if the decision is overturned. He's terrified for his legacy.

I think bigotry has become a kind of loyalty ritual among young republicans, it’s how you show you’re one of them www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Short thread on my most-played song of 2025, The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station by CMAT (1/5) www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTWg...

Essential reading for those interested in the process of reform of the European Convention on Human Rights and the risks involved, by @drandrewforde.bsky.social and @alicedonald.bsky.social on @ejiltalk.bsky.social www.ejiltalk.org/countdown-to...

And the irrationality of this war is as important as the immorality--it reflects a MAGA movement that has effectively zero connection to reality and is lashing out violently in the belief that if they tantrum violently enough, they can *force* the world to be the way they want it through sheer will.

An academic disliked an Oxford Very Short Introduction (145 pages) in his field so much that he wrote a 200 page book review attacking it. www.pierre-legrand.com/ewExternalFi...

The @nihrc.bsky.social are today launching a major new report, by @anuragdeb.bsky.social, @sylviademars.me, @aoifemod.bsky.social, Eleni Frantziou and me, on the novel arrangements for remedying breaches of the UK's obligations for rights and equality in NI under Art 2 WF: nihrc.org/assets/uploa...

A symposium on my book 'Why Cicero Matters' has just been published online, with analysis by some of the most eminent classics scholars in the world: Victoria Rimell, Gesine Manuwald, Scott F. Aikin, Massimo Pigliucci, Lynn Fotheringham. syndicate.network/symposia/phi...

Conservative judges in 2025: "the founders did not understand the First Amendment to extend to aliens." James Madison, the author of the First Amendment, in 1800: "wtf are you talking about."

And then there’s the story about Alex Karp’s not-at-all-weird interview (for lack of a better word) with Oswald Mosley’s grandson for a senior position at Palantir.

What's happening to the ICC judges could happen to all of us if the US cuts off access to the basic infrastructure that Europe's economy runs on. As I argue in my new book The Owned Continent, Europe needs to urgently transition to sovereign economic infrastructure. www.TheOwnedContinent.eu

It's wild. We have so many real problems as a country, and instead a large chunk of our political class would rather hallucinate that one of the safest big global cities in the world is actually dangerous.

So this week shall I write about how killing unarmed civilians is murder or about how unwise it would be to limit the human right against torture. Western liberal democracies in 2025.

Donald Trump, the transactional president

The divergence between what the Master of the Rolls thinks AI can do for litigation (left) and the reality of it (right) is stark. I wish he spent more time dealing with cases infected by it. (The 2nd quote is from Re: D [2025] EWCA Civ 1570, handed down yesterday).

Very honoured to deliver the FLAC Annual Lecture last night, talking about rights, legal activism & Daniel O'Connell's contemporary relevance - and to share a podium with Stephen Rea.

"In the vast majority of cases in which a journalist is killed, whether in peacetime, or in a democracy, or in a dictatorship, in the middle of conflict, wherever in the world — in nine out of ten cases they’re killed with total impunity.” @caoilfhionn.bsky.social www.thetimes.com/life-style/c...

Reform is also more hostile to the institutional foundations of the European system

Today's customs union vote is entirely symbolic, it's true. But what does it symbolise that no one is now arguing *for* Brexit? thecritic.co.uk/regr...

Blogged The EU Commission has finally fined X - the Digital Services Act's main character My analysis - eulawanalysis.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

The GFA provides for two types of unification referendum, the mandatory one we talk about often, and the little-discussed discretionary type. The refusal of the political establishment here to plan for a border poll is a strategic error that leaves us wide open to the threat described in this piece.

So there's a lot of lore here, but essentially the PQ went from being a social democratic pro-sovereignty party to turning into an anti-woke party that takes its strategy named Mathieu Bock-Cote, who is famous in French politics for being known as "Zemmour with a human face"

Very honoured to deliver the FLAC Annual Lecture last night, talking about rights, legal activism & Daniel O'Connell's contemporary relevance - and to share a podium with Stephen Rea.

Racing headlong down this particular slippery slope. Not really British unless you are only British.

Every legal story now is either Ancient Circuit Judge Delivers Crystal Clear 100 Page Rebuke To Trumpist Overreach or In Unsigned Shadow Docket Decision, 6-3 Majority Declares Trump Can Hunt People For Sport

my great-grandparents arrived in the UK in the 1890s with nothing. they sold pickles from the front room window, took in laundry, worked as tailors. their children were nurses, teachers, salesmen. their grandchildren were professors, designers, opticians, doctors, magistrates, entrepreneurs.

The defense is now “We were trying to commit murder, not war crimes.”

the elevation of “separation of powers” as the paramount value of the constitution is just rhetorical justification for presidential dictatorship, since that is what you have when the legislative branch cannot constrain the exercise of executive power through law.

On Monday. www.irishlegal.com/articles/pro...

On Monday. www.irishlegal.com/articles/pro...

It's the 174th anniversary of the 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (the event, not the pamphlet). But of course it's not relevant to our times: it's impossible nowadays to imagine the President of a large republic subverting the constitution to get around its prohibition on a further term in office.

The Home Office is clearly pushing for illegal migrants=asylum seekers. Interesting to see that many media didn't use the Home Office headline, and preferred 'asylum seekers'.

Today 15 brave smallholder Kenyan farmers who appealed a Seed Act which criminalised them for saving,sharing&selling their own seeds won their case in the High Court. Glad that my PhD findings were submitted in this case and assisted in the win.Here's a video of it! drive.google.com/file/d/1amIf...

How will FPTP cope with this?

It's weird to not only have lived through an information revolution but also now living through its undoing, all within less than a generation.

One finding in sociological research is that in cultures that "mass produce" children by enslaving women, the value of any individual human life plummets. To the degree that a society grants humanity to women, the value of any individual life increases in direct correspondence.

Reading about the bolsheviks and if podcasts had existed back then all these guys would've done that instead

After you help your boss convert a doc to PDF

Guy Baldwin, "Positive Obligations to Protect the Population under Human Rights Law" (Ahead of Print, Judicial Review) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

This (from: www.ft.com/content/75ce...) is something you can *feel* if you are in the UK, especially if you've experienced living abroad. But infuriatingly successive governments and our entire media are somehow absolutely committed to suggesting anyone who wants to change this is the devil...

Citizenship ceremonies are one of the most joyous celebrations of America that you can find. 100% patriotism vibes from people who believe in the American dream. So no surprise that these ghouls would cancel them.