Ambiguity has an odd and oddly underexamined place in law. Judges talk about it constantly, define it carefully and treat it as the trigger for major interpretive moves. Yet when it’s time to decide a case, they’re remarkably reluctant to say that the disputed text is actually ambiguous.
The United States has long claimed a kind of exceptionalism in relation to international human rights standards, supporting their development, funding their enforcement elsewhere, and exempting itself from their application at home. Civil society organizations, including many that work on the rule of law, have often accommodated that posture, treating international mechanisms as tools for other contexts, rather than as standards that apply universally.
When I find myself in a particularly contentious discovery dispute or a rancorous hearing, it’s often not the skills I learned in law school or honed as a federal prosecutor that I rely on first. Instead, I draw on something older and more deeply ingrained: the lessons I learned growing up on my family’s organic farm in California.
As always, this time of year is filled with major decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court. Some of the most important cases of the term already have been decided, including Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump, which invalidated President Donald Trump’s tariffs; and Louisiana v. Callais, which significantly lessened protections under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But many likely blockbuster decisions remain.
Ari Kaplan recently spoke with Nik Reed, the chief executive officer of Knowable and vice president of AI product at LexisNexis, and Roland Vogl, the executive director and co-founder of CodeX at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, about their participation in the 2026 LexisNexis AI Symposium at the Harvard Club.
In just a few years, generative artificial intelligence has already had an enormous impact on the practice of law. Far from a novelty, it’s become a proven tool in the day-to-day work of legal professionals.
I decided to check out the HBO Max series The Curious Case of … and the title proved more than just a clever bit of alliteration; it got me thinking about how and why our legal system excuses some crimes over others.
Poor legal writing often isn’t a failure of knowledge, but a failure of nerve. It’s anxiety dressed up as thoroughness. The lawyer more or less knows the point, but it looks exposed on the page and easy to test or attack. So the writer starts stacking sandbags around it, adding background, caveats, and citations until the draft feels safer, even as it becomes harder to read.
Although the government has developed many ways of using new technologies to gather information about people, the U.S. Supreme Court has only begun to consider how the Fourth Amendment applies to them.
Law firms should remain committed to their diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Although the profession has become a particular focus of the Trump administration’s efforts to curtail DEI initiatives across the U.S. workforce, firms that overcorrect in response to present political pressure risk undermining their long-term stability. The demographic forces that drove the rise of DEI programs have not slowed. When structured carefully and grounded in authenticity, these initiatives can continue to be the ship that weathers these turbulent seas.
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