Law & Court Cases
Major trials, Supreme Court decisions, European judgments, privacy law and legal analysis.
About this list
This reading list brings together items from the sources selected for Law & Court Cases. Open each item at its original source for the complete article, episode or video. This is a selection of current coverage, not a complete archive.
Stories from English Articles Archives - Verfassungsblog. Show all stories · All sources
Latest stories
Newest first
A Mere “Academic” Exercise
Last week, in N. Ravi v Speaker, Legislative Assembly Chennai, the Indian Supreme Court dismissed a 17-year-old challenge to the constitutionality of the exercise of legislative privilege under Article 194 to curtail a citizen’s freedom of speech. The issue arose from a resolution passed by the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly ordering the prosecution of 15 journalists of The Hindu for remarks against the then Chief Minister Jayalalithaa.
Everything Must Change to Stay the Same
As the Italian government led by Giorgia Meloni prepares to enter the final year of its term, the longest running executive of the 80 years old Republic, its latest move has been the approval of new electoral legislation. This reform had been long awaited as one of the predominant electoral promises. However, the final text is both a far cry from the original aspirations and a potential political misfire. Ultimately, the reform seems to fail on one of its main promises: a more stable party system.
Beyond Boulder
The making of climate law is a distinctly global exercise. Perhaps more than in many other areas of law, climate litigation develops through a conversation across jurisdictions, as litigants borrow arguments, evidence, and strategies from proceedings elsewhere, while judges engage with decisions from vastly different legal traditions. And so, when one of the world’s biggest players in the legal landscape speaks, the rest have particular reason to listen.
The Extractive State: Or, Peter Thiel in Argentina
Much of what lies ahead for Brazil, should Bolsonaro defeat Lula in the second round, can be studied in Argentina. In Thiel’s own words, his visits to Argentina are a journey to the end of the world – a perfect spot to bunker up in the event of an Apocalypse.
The (Currently) Uneven Intelligence of AI in Comparative Constitutional Law
Our results suggest that LLMs’ usefulness for comparative constitutional data collection depends on what researchers ask them to code. They may be able to produce datasets that simply code constitutional facts, but current versions of LLMs do not perform well when asked to create datasets that require interpreting abstract constitutional concepts or reasoning about law. However, since the models make errors in systematic ways, researchers should always be cautious about treating LLM-generated data as interchangeable with expert-coded data.
National Regulatory Sandboxes
On 9 September 2026, the Commission proposed a Council Recommendation on regulatory sandboxes. A regulatory sandbox is a supervised space in which companies can test an innovation products in real-world conditions before it goes on the market. Published alongside the European Innovation Act, the Proposal looks like a modest, non-binding exercise in administrative coordination.
Between Student Expectations and Institutional Questions
The spread of AI systems appears increasingly central to the evolution of work and professions, and lawyers are not exempt. However, what remains rare, almost everywhere, is a broader strategy taken at the institutional level about the mission of academic institutions in the age of AI.
What AI Cannot See
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.
Everybody Out of the Press Pool
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.
Wider Always Meant Unequal
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.
Politicizing the U.S. Postal Service
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.
Carbon Majors in Brazilian Courts
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.
Pillars of Society
Thirteen men and two women make up the Christian Democratic Union’s group in the newly constituted state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt. On Tuesday, four of them helped elect a right-wing extremist as President of the Landtag. In protocol, and in politics too, this office carries exceptional weight. What interests me is the fact that in a state governed by CDU Minister-Presidents for a quarter of a century, one in four Christian Democratic MPs gives their vote to a right-wing extremist.
Too Young for Rights, Old Enough to Be Maimed
For weeks, French students taking to the streets for better schools have faced relentless police crackdowns near their classroom gates. Emergency bans and mass arrests have replaced open debate, exposing a glaring contradiction at the heart of French law: a system that uses youth as a pretext to curtail freedom, while offering zero protection from state force.
Preparing for a Wider (But More Unequal) Union
On 6 October 2026, the Commission presented its Communication “Preparing for a wider Union”. At the centre are so-called institutional safeguard clauses. These resemble an Article 7 TEU procedure for the late arrivals – but at a discount, featuring a much broader scope and much lower thresholds. I argue that this is not the way.
A New Frontier for Project-Based Climate Litigation
On 7 October 2026, the High Court of Australia held, by three judges to two, that a New South Wales (NSW) planning authority must consider conditions to limit a coal mine’s scope 3 emissions. This meant the authority could not simply say they had considered those emissions, representing 98% of the project’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – they had to show they had considered planning conditions that would minimise them.
Institutional Ethics of AI in Legal Scholarship
Responding to the influx of AI into scholarly writing, in the legal domain and elsewhere, poses real challenges. It will be neither possible nor appropriate to develop a set of determinative rules covering all possible uses. Ethical frameworks do not operate in this way. Instead, they should be principles-based, allowing them to accommodate both the evolution of the technology and developments in scholarly practice taking place in the light of shared commitments to research integrity.
Thinking Machines, Thinking Lawyers
This symposium explores the relationship between AI and the production and delivery of legal knowledge. It also interrogates how emerging AI-based capabilities are shaping the way lawyers think, research, and act. It does not claim to present perfect answers, but is an attempt to initiate conversations on the multifaceted changes posed by AI-assisted capabilities to our traditional ways of doing legal research and teaching.
Vulnerability as a Barrier to Eviction
In the final days of September 2026, the eviction of María del Carmen Abascal, an 87-year-old resident of Madrid known to everyone as Maricarmen, shocked Spanish public opinion. The cries of solidarity with the elderly woman, which also reflected growing public frustration over the worsening housing crisis in Spain, resonated far beyond the country’s borders. Within ten days, Spain has moved from public outrage over a highly publicised eviction to the calling of a general election. The key concept behind this trend is vulnerability.
You have reached the end of this list.
Showing 19 of 19 articles
Know a source we’re missing? Tell us about it