#rule-of-law

#rule-of-law

Mueller, who died on Monday at age 81, had been FBI director from 2001 to 2013 but is more famous for being the special prosecutor who oversaw from 2017 to 2019 the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign in 2016 and the Russian government.

Our partnership is proud to have stood firm on behalf of its clients. The DOJ's decision to withdraw its appeals makes permanent the rulings of four federal judges that the executive orders targeting law firms were unconstitutional.

I think that's a matter for the police. They will conduct their own investigations, but one of the core principles in our system is that everybody is equal under the law and nobody is above the law. It's a very important principle of our country... and it has to apply in this case in the same way it would in any other case.

Panama's President Jose Raul Mulino has rejected China's threat to make the Central American country pay a heavy price after a Hong Kong company was evicted from two ports on the strategic Panama Canal amid pressure from United States President Donald Trump. Writing on social media on Wednesday, President Mulino said he strongly rejected the Chinese government's threat against his country, which followed after Panama's Supreme Court invalidated a contract that had allowed the Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison to operate two ports on the canal.

While we are waiting for the final decision from Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia, I want to present some thoughts on the least resolved of the case's many issues, the hard parts the judge will be pondering. Actually, one hard part: trust. But I need to tell you a little about the case to make the trust issue clear.

"Co-equal branches of government, the rule of law, popular sovereignty," he said. "Tell me that that reflects the America you read about today." "There's no rule of law. It's the rule of Don," he added.

No country in the European Union has stricter immigration laws than Hungary. Nowhere in the bloc is it more difficult to attain refugee or protection status: EU statistics show exactly 10 people received either in 2025. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is proud to claim that there are "zero" refugees, or as he generally refers to them, "illegal migrants," in his country. That was how he framed his immigration policies and their impact during a November 2025 White House meeting with US President Donald Trump.

The "prosecute the former regime at every level" candidate has my vote in 2028.

It's not only law firms and legal departments that are adopting GenAI systems without fully understanding what they can and cannot do - court systems may also be tempted to adopt these tools to short circuit workloads in the face of limited resources. And that poses some risks and concerns to the rule of law, a notion that hinges on accuracy, fairness, and public perception.

It began on the first day of his second term, with instructions to the Department of Justice (DOJ) to end the "weaponisation" of prosecutorial power. But with those first strokes of his pen, President Donald Trump instead launched a year of dramatic changes to the Justice Department, the government body responsible for enforcing federal law in the United States. Traditionally, the Department of Justice has cultivated an aura of "prosecutorial independence".

Courts play an important role in authoritarian regimes. They legitimize the actions of despots by declaring them "legal" or "constitutional." They ensure institutional compliance with the regime's rules. And they make politically unpopular decisions that align with the authoritarian's goals while giving the authoritarian political distance from those goals. Quite simply, you can't instigate a strongman takeover of a constitutional democracy without having a robust judicial power that's willing to play along.

In our hour, 2026 now looms as the critical moment, the time in which we will continue to have free and fair elections or not, will continue to have courts that uphold the rule of law or not, will continue to enjoy constitutional rights of citizenship and free speech and free press or not. For all Americans, very much including for journalists, the question for the year ahead is whether we will rise to the occasion.

Europe's leaders cannot stop talking about democracy. President Emmanuel Macron says he wants to kickstart a democratic resurgence, and Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, has warned of an axis of autocratic states targeting liberal democracy in Europe. Having promised to fight for what she calls European values, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, has just announced a new democracy shield and a Centre for Democratic Resilience to prevent foreign interference and deal with external threats.

As a senior citizen on Medicare and SNAP, I feel like I can speak to both issues. Our country is now being run by a narcissistic president. He does not care about the poor, working people, homeless people or poor immigrants just trying to make a living. He is letting these people go hungry, and he is trying to take away medical assistance for them, and deporting almost all immigrants.

Perryman said the stakes go beyond courtroom victories. The real challenge is demonstrating that the public truly holds the power to counter and often stop the White House's seemingly unstoppable march toward authoritarian rule. "The real thing for us was, how are we going to show people that you actually still get to be in charge in your country-the people get to be in charge," Perryman told moderator and host of the podcast Pod Save America, Jon Favreau.

Taft's critique centered on a bedrock legal principle: ex post facto law. The charges brought at Nuremberg-particularly "crimes against peace" and "conspiracy to wage aggressive war"-were not established crimes under international law when the defendants allegedly committed them. The tribunal represented victor's justice dressed in legal robes, establishing retroactive criminality to punish the vanquished. As Taft argued in an October 1946 speech, "The trial of the vanquished by the victors cannot be impartial no matter how it is hedged about with the forms of justice."

My reason is simple: I no longer can bear to be restrained by what judges can say publicly or do outside the courtroom. President Donald Trump is using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment. This is contrary to everything that I have stood for in my more than 50 years in the Department of Justice and on the bench.

I spent more than 20 years leading U.S. government-sponsored justice projects in countries with weak to nonexistent democracies, including Albania, Mongolia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Republic of Georgia, and Armenia. Those of us who have worked in nations like these don't have to imagine what it looks like when a place's leaders demonstrate no regard for the rule of law. What we've seen overseas looks a lot like what we've started to watch unfold in this country over the course of the past 10 months.

It's beneath [Graham] to say what he just said. He knows, as well as I do, there is no legal authorization for these strikes. There isn't, Himes started off by saying. He continued: If Lindsey Graham and other Republicans want to go the route of saying it's okay to kill people illegally, just so long as the American public supports it,' the American public needs to really think that through, you know? There will be a Democratic president someday.

As he was transported to La Sante prison in Paris on Tuesday, Nicolas Sarkozy posted a message brimming with defiance on X, writing It's not a former president of the republic who is being jailed this morning, it's an innocent man. A court of appeal will eventually give its view on the veracity of the second clause of that statement. But unfortunately for Mr Sarkozy, the drama and significance of his fall cannot simply be wished away.