Justice David Souter, Who Traded White Marble for the White Mountains Prof. Peter Spiro, who served as one of retired Justice David Souter’s first law clerks, joins other former clerks in remembering the Justice at his passing. “He was so old-school that it almost seemed like he never really caught up to electricity,” Professor Spiro said. “He wouldn’t turn on the lights in his office until it was pretty much dark.”

Trump’s Russia-Ukraine Deal Will Be Null and Void Prof. Duncan Hollis has an op-ed in Foreign Policy magazine on how the push for a Ukraine- Russian peace deal overlooks an important tenet of international law.

Yes, Oklahoma (and the Rest of Us), There Is a Due Process Evidence Rule In a January 2025 opinion the Supreme Court affirmed a due process protection against “evidence…so unduly prejudicial as to render a criminal trial fundamentally unfair.” Prof. Jules Epstein explains why the case matters in his regular column for The Legal Intelligencer.

Despite Historic Indictment, Doctors Will Keep Mailing Abortion Pills Across State Lines Dean Rachel Rebouché and collaborators David Cohen and Greer Donley helped to craft so-called shield laws that protect abortion care providers in safe states from prosecution in ban states. Efforts by Louisiana to prosecute a New York doctor “probably put New York and Louisiana in real conflict, potentially a conflict that the Supreme Court is going to have to decide,” she says.

Trump looks to target ‘sanctuary cities’ as Philadelphia gets ready for potential budget attacks As the Trump administration targets sanctuary cities like Philadelphia, Prof. Jennifer Lee looks to the 10th Amendment, which makes clear that”the federal government can’t coerce states and localities to do the federal government’s job.” While the use of funding as leverage is more complicated, Prof. Lee says that “there’s some good law out there that basically says that they can’t just willy-nilly cut all this funding from states and localities because they don’t like what they’re doing and try to make them do something else.”

Why does America have birthright citizenship? Restrictions on birthright citizenship, while common in Europe, are generally not found in the Americas. Prof. Peter Spiro tells The Economist that this Atlantic divide dates back to settler societies using birthright citizenship as “an engine of assimilation.”

Texas legislators have moved a step closer to passing legislation that would allow civil lawsuits to proceed against out-of-state abortion care providers. Dean Rachel Rebouché says the bill is similar to a pre-Dobbs statute that banned abortion at six weeks: “This is Texas legislators trying the same strategy to try to circumvent a federal constitutional challenge.”

To mark Law Day, the ABA’s Student Lawyer magazine asked several lawyers, including Prof. Jules Epstein, what inspired them to do their work and how law students and new lawyers can influence the future of the legal profession and uphold the rule of law. Here are their responses.

How does President Trump’s crackdown on sanctuary cities, delivered in an April 28th executive order, impact Philadelphia? Prof. Jennifer Lee updates her prior explanation of what being a sanctuary city means to include this new information.

Abortion advocates in states with so-called shield laws are finding ways to get mifepristone to pregnant people in states with abortion bans, which in turn are seeking ways to extradite and prosecute medication providers. As the stakes continue to rise, Dean Rebouché notes that “This is a conflict we might have expected to find ourselves in, because the abortion rate is higher now than before the Supreme Court overturned Roe.”