Too often the catch-all term “intellectual property”— useful in describing practitioner specialty areas, law school courses, and text books, among other things— serves a subtly insidious function. It suggests that those discrete bodies of law which it encompasses—roughly, copyright, trademark, patent, and trade secret law—have fundamental commonality. Not only, it implies, do those legal areas…

This post originally appeared on the IntLawGrrls blog, available here. I teach transitional justice at New England Law | Boston, and this past week I began the unit on national human rights trials. This topic is one of my favorites due largely to my experience observing national human rights trials like that of former Peruvian President Alberto…

Judicial opinions are written to persuade. Perhaps this is the reason why Judge Hanen’s opinion in Texas v. United States resorts to truncated arguments, neglecting to discuss the opposing position. Furthermore, nowhere in the opinion does the judge indicate the devastating effect that the opinion will have on the people involved. Instead of focusing on the families…