ArcaMax

By now, it has become clear that President Donald Trump's hopes that the appointment of a special master would derail the Justice Department's investigation of him have proven to be short-lived. The Mar-a-Lago nightmare continues for the former president, and nothing about the appointment of the Special Master will derail it.

The president ...Read more

This might be the first time the Conference of Chief Justices, the group representing the top courts in all 50 states, has weighed in to an ideologically charged Supreme Court case. And with good reason. The issue is whether state courts and the state constitutions limit the role of state legislatures in election law cases. If North Carolina ...Read more

The Supreme Court, it turns out, is even less popular than the inflation-battered Joe Biden. By a 60-40 margin according to the latest Marquette University Law School poll, Americans disapprove of the Supreme Court. While the Court isn't responsible for interest rates, it is responsible for overruling a decision that was supported by the ...Read more

It is a once in a generation opportunity.

The Republicans, who have owned the crime issue in national politics since 1968, are losing it, turning themselves into pretzels to try to defend Donald Trump by attacking the FBI. If such rhetoric didn't pose real dangers for law enforcement, it might actually be an amusing spectacle.

And the ...Read more

Chances are that you don't approve of the job Joe Biden is doing as president. The polls are consistent: according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll completed last Tuesday, only 39% of Americans approved of Biden's handling of his job, which is close to the low point of 36% earlier this summer. Some context: The Democratic base in this country ...Read more

Is Columbia University one of the best colleges or universities in the country?

Absolutely.

Last year, U.S. News and World Report, probably the most influential ranker of such things, put Columbia at No. 2 in the country, and no one questioned whether it belonged there. No one, that is, except for one Columbia math professor who questioned ...Read more

It feels strange, as an American, to admire a queen, but there is nothing strange about admiring Queen Elizabeth II. It is precisely because of how human she has been, how human her life has been, that a nation of anti-monarchs such as we are should mourn the passing of this great woman.

Because she was a great woman in so many ways, but ...Read more

Her grandmother was the one who suspected. Too long in the bathroom with the phone. She even missed making cupcakes with her sister and me. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.

"Check her phone," her grandmother told her daughter. She could not believe what she saw. And read. From a man. He sent pictures. He asked for pictures. Yes, those ...Read more

She is a medical student at Kabul University. On the video, widely shared on social media this week, she cries as she describes being forced to marry the Taliban's Interior Ministry spokesman six months ago. "(He) beat me a lot. Every night he raped me." She tried to escape and was turned back at the border and confined to an apartment by the ...Read more

For decades, law and order has been a Republican issue, a staple of race politics and, even apart from that, a weakness for Democrats. Only last year, Democrats were struggling with calls to "defund the police," one of the worst slogans I've ever heard. Now, with Republicans ready to defund the FBI because they searched for documents that were...Read more

It was during the bull-running festival in Pamplona in 2016 that five men -- calling themselves a "manada," or wolf pack -- gang-raped an 18-year-old girl. They taped it on a cellphone, where the woman appeared still and with her eyes shut.

The Spanish court initially refused to convict for rape, because of the absence of evidence of violence...Read more

The latest news about President Donald Trump's secret stash of documents comes from the National Archives, which reportedly recovered some 700 pages of the most secret stuff from boxes they retrieved from Mar-a-Lago last January. That's separate from what they collected in the most recent search, and one of the reasons the FBI knew there were ...Read more

Mar-a-Lago is the wrong fight for Donald Trump to be in with the attorney general.

On one side, Merrick's, you have the FBI doing its job. And the principle that no one is above the law.

On the other, you have a president whose insistence on keeping records he never should have taken in the first place has left the chattering class without ...Read more

Every once in a while, there is someone who stands up for what is right at a huge personal cost. Rep. Liz Cheney did that. She knew that she would pay for opposing the Big Baby of the Republican Party, and she did. That's how it works in politics. Most Americans may think favorably of her, but most Americans don't vote in Republican primaries....Read more

Bert Fields was, as The New York Times put it, the "lawyer to the stars" -- from Dustin Hoffman to Warren Beatty to Tom Cruise to John Travolta, not to mention industry heavyweights like Jeffrey Katzenberg. In Hollywood, he was almost as famous as his clients.

He was also my lawyer.

And as much as any lawyer I've known, he taught me what it ...Read more

The case for Joe Biden's presidency has always turned on two things: experience and character.

Experience in politics has, in recent elections, been a mixed blessing. Unlike in things that really matter, like picking a plumber and electrician or someone to color your hair, all of them choices made better by experience, the outsider argument ...Read more

Two days after Kansas voters overwhelmingly rejected a ban on abortion in their state, the other front-runner for the Republican nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, went out of his way to cement his hardcore anti-choice stance. On Thursday, he issued an order suspending a county prosecutor who had signed a pledge not to prosecute doctors or...Read more

On the same day that Kansas (yes, Dorothy, it was Kansas) voted against allowing the legislature to ban abortion, the Justice Department announced that it was bringing suit against Idaho, which has the near absolute bar that Kansas rejected. In explaining the Justice Department suit, Attorney General Merrick Garland emphasized that federal law...Read more

On Wednesday, just as the bad news was coming on the economy, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin announced that he had reached an agreement with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the president's signature legislative package. Build Back Better has now become Stop Inflation Now, or some such name, but what it really is is America's signature move to...Read more

The shocking revelations of the Jan. 6 committee, and the news that Vice President Mike Pence's top aides are testifying before a criminal grand jury investigating the matter, have given new urgency to the question of whether the Justice Department will try to prosecute the former president. Ultimately, that is a decision that must be made by ...Read more