Verfassungsblog

The legal traditions of Indigenous Peoples and of much of the non-Western world are characteristically oral, relational, etched in carvings, seasonal, performative, and place-based. Their normative content lives in narrative, genealogy, ceremony, and the deliberations of communities; their authority is constituted through relationships between people, land, ancestors, and the non-human world. An AI system built to learn from text does not merely fail to locate such law. It is architecturally incapable of recognising legal knowledge in the forms in which that law exists. The post What AI Cannot See appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

U.S. President Donald Trump is clear about his feelings about a free press. He despises it. His invectives against individual journalists and media outlets are legion. He has proudly proclaimed that his efforts to discredit the press have undermined public confidence in the news media. And now his mission appears to be to exclude from the White House any outlets he deems insufficiently supportive of him and his policies. The post Everybody Out of the Press Pool appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

In his recent post, Spieker criticises the “safeguard clauses” that would enable the suspension of voting rights in the Council and the freezing of EU funds if a new Member State seriously breaches foundational EU values or the principle of sincere cooperation. This contribution argues that the Commission’s plans would not direct us into a fundamentally new legal reality. Enlargement has always produced long-lasting inequalities between older and newer members. Some of these inequalities remain to this day and have even been endorsed by the Court. The post Wider Always Meant Unequal appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

The American electoral system divides authority between the states and Congress. The President, by contrast, has no formal role in election administration. The rule of law, though, has never deterred President Trump from plowing ahead in pursuit of his policy desires. One such yearning is to substantially reduce mail voting, which, against all evidence, Trump believes favors Democrats and is susceptible to widespread illegal voting by noncitizens. The post Politicizing the U.S. Postal Service appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

On October 9, 2026, Brazil’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office and a nonprofit environmental association, Instituto Preservar, sued Shell Brasil Petróleo Ltda. for damages caused by the April and May 2024 floods in my home state of Rio Grande do Sul. The filing now places Brazil among the jurisdictions where public enforcers sue fossil fuel producers, which the litigation over the 2024 floods had not previously included. It also offers a concrete setting for the interplay between the causal nexus of Brazilian environmental liability and the attribution of a climate disaster to an emitter. The post Carbon Majors in Brazilian Courts appeared first on Verfassungsblog.