Stanford Legal

Stanford’s Joe Grundfest discusses the reach of prediction markets, the risks of trading on inside information, and the legal battle over whether states or the federal government get to regulate them.

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Prediction markets allow people to wager on almost anything, including a game’s winner, a player’s stat line, an election, and the timing of a military operation. Some participants may have inside information, while others may be in a position to influence the very outcomes they are betting on.

Stanford Law professor emeritus Joe Grundfest, JD ’78, a senior faculty member w...

Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Sarah Polcz discuss their proposal to require leading AI firms to pay taxes in equity, reshaping how the gains from AI are distributed

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Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the economy, but two Stanford Law alumni argue that existing tax frameworks are failing to capture—or fairly distribute—the value it generates. Jeremy Bearer-Friend, JD '14, a professor at George Washington University Law School, and Sarah Polcz, JSM '12, JSD '20, a professor at UC Davis School of Law, join co-host Professor Richard Thompson Ford to discuss a proposal that would require lead...

Stanford’s David Sklansky discusses the search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home, the Justice Department’s election-timing rules, and what courts can do when prosecutions are challenged as retaliatory.

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Federal agents arrived at U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar’s door on October 12 and spent hours searching her home under a warrant a judge had approved. The search came three weeks before Election Day, and the Justice Department has a formal regulation against timing investigative actions to influence an election. Was the timing a coincidence, and were the department’s usual safeguards followed?

Stanford...

The ACLU’s Sophia Lin Lakin discusses voting access and the redistricting battles shaping political power

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Sophia Lin Lakin, JD ’11 (MS ’04, BA ’02), director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, challenges the stated premises behind many current voting restrictions, including claims about widespread non-citizen voting. “If we’re worried about the integrity of our elections,” she tells Stanford Law professor and host Pam Karlan, “we should be worried about making sure that more people are participating in our elections and not chasing a fantasy.”

That concern—how long-standing efforts to restrict voting access can make it har...

A sweeping Stanford Law study reveals how routinely federal courts seal records, sometimes concealing information with profound implications for public health and safety.

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Evidence of dangerous drugs, defective products, and corporate misconduct is often hidden from public view through sealed court records. And federal judges are granting requests to seal records at an astonishing rate, often without applying the proper legal standard, according to the largest-ever study of the issue.

Stanford Law professors Nora Freeman Engstrom, JD ’02, and David Freeman Engstrom, JD ’02, co-directors of the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Prof...

Deborah Sivas discusses the recent rollback of environmental laws, calls to streamline environmental review to speed up development, and the role communities should play in decisions about what gets built. 

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As the push to build more infrastructure gains attention, so does debate over the role of environmental protections and public participation. How can communities have a voice in development while still allowing needed projects to move forward?

Stanford's Deborah Sivas, JD ’87, environmental law expert and co-director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Stanford Law School, joins Pam Karlan to discuss the “climate abund...

Nate Persily joins Pam Karlan to discuss efforts to change the rules governing the 2026 elections and the legal battles over how those changes would affect voting. 

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As the push to build more infrastructure gains attention, so does debate over the role of environmental protections and public participation. How can communities have a voice in development while still allowing needed projects to move forward?

As the 2026 elections approach, questions about how Americans vote are increasingly becoming questions for the courts. Disputes over redistricting, mail-in voting, and how elections are run are raising broader q...

Stanford’s Anne Joseph O’Connell examines who can step in when a top federal position is vacant and what recent court decisions could mean for how those positions are filled. 

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When a top federal position is vacant, someone still has to run the office. But who gets to step in, and what powers can they exercise while the position remains unfilled? Those questions are at the center of recent legal disputes over how the federal government operates when permanent officials are not yet in place.

In this episode, Stanford Law School Profe...

The ACLU’s Anthony Romero unpacks a sweeping docket—from a Supreme Court showdown over birthright citizenship to voting rights and free speech—as the rule of law is tested.

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In a timely conversation about the ACLU’s massive docket of cases, Pam Karlan speaks with Anthony Romero, JD ’90, executive director of the ACLU, about the surge of civil rights and civil liberties battles facing the country right now.

Romero discusses major pieces of litigation spanning immigration, free speech, voting rights, and government accountability. A key focus is the Supreme Court showdown over birth...

The Declaration as a “promissory note”—and what it demands now
In the final discussion of The Declaration at 250 series, Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, argues that the Declaration of Independence should be read in the Lincoln–King tradition: not as proof that the American project was completed in 1776, but as a promissory note that sets enduring standards for justice. He confronts the central tension head-on—slavery alongside the Declaration’s equality claims—contending that the nation’s gravest wrongs were never the result...

Former state solicitors general Michael Mongan and Kevin Gallagher discuss the evolving role of state solicitors general and how states work together to shape legal battles before the Supreme Court.

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When states go to court, the battles are not always divided along party lines. State solicitors general often work across state lines to defend shared interests, coordinate legal strategy, and help shape cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In this episode, former California Solicitor General Michael Mongan, JD '06 (BA '01), and former Virginia Solicitor General Kevin Gallagher, now partners at...

The real crisis isn’t the Declaration—it’s what we’ve stopped teaching.

Peter Berkowitz, Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, contends that universities have failed at liberal education—the cultivation of citizens prepared to exercise freedom and responsibility. He attributes the breakdown to politicized classrooms, overreliance on narrow “scientistic” approaches in the social sciences, and a professional culture that trains future scholars instead of educating future citizens—leaving graduates with little serious exposure to the Declaration, the Constitution, and the moral logic of self-government. Stephen Haber, Stanford Professor of Political Science, History, and Eco...

"The Declaration meets the machine age"

In this episode of The Declaration at 250, Michael McConnell frames a question the Founders never confronted: if the Declaration grounds rights in human nature, what happens when machines can generate persuasive, human-like language at scale? Constitutional scholar Alexander Tsesis argues that the Declaration’s conception of rights is inherently human-centered—rooted in consciousness, moral agency, intentionality, and the capacity to participate in a constitutional republic—so AI systems are not and should not become First Amendment rights-holders. He warns that treating large language models as protected “speakers” would be a major break from...

Stanford’s Allen Weiner examines how the U.S. war with Iran raises questions about the president’s power to wage war and negotiate peace.

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The American war with Iran began with ambitious goals, including preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and potentially bringing about regime change. But the conflict may well be leading to a very different outcome, according to Stanford Law School's Allen Weiner, a scholar of international and human rights law and former State Department lawyer. Just prior to the recent collapse of the tenuous cease fire, Weiner joined podcast host...

“Two competing originalist instincts”

In this episode of The Declaration at 250, Michael McConnell introduces Randy Barnett, the Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center and Faculty Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution alongside Eugene Volokh, the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), and the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus (and Distinguished Research Professor) at UCLA School of Law.

Barnett and Volokh share respect for the Declaration’s importance but diverge on what that importance does in law. Barnett sees the Declaration as the...

This episode highlights an often-missed story: the Declaration of Independence didn’t just shape the U.S. Constitution—it directly shaped state constitutions, many of which echo its natural-rights language more explicitly than the federal charter. Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick argues that reading state constitutional provisions through the Declaration can strengthen enforceable limits on government power. The conversation reframes the Declaration from anniversary rhetoric into a practical interpretive tool in living state constitutional law.

Bolick traces a two-way influence between the Declaration and early state charters, pointing to founding-era texts like Virginia’s 1776 Declaration of Rights...

This episode reframes the Declaration of Independence as more than soaring ideals about equality and natural rights. Former California Supreme Court Justice Mariano-Florentino “Tino” Cuéllar argues the text contains an underappreciated architecture of government: accountability to citizens, managing political conflict across regions, and establishing legitimate authority both domestically and in the international order. The result is a Declaration that reads like a nation-building document designed to make a new state workable after revolution.

Responding to Cuéllar, Larry Kramer—former Stanford Law dean, a leading scholar of democratic constitutionalism, and now president of the London School of Econo...

Stanford’s Fred Smith examines the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision, its historical roots in the Fourteenth Amendment, and the questions the Court leaves unresolved.

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The Fourteenth Amendment opens with a simple constitutional promise: that anyone born in the United States is a citizen. In a closely divided Supreme Court decision, that understanding of birthright citizenship is once again tested through competing readings of text, history, and precedent.

In this episode of Stanford Legal, Professor Fred Smith, a leading scholar of the federal courts, joins Pam Karlan to examine the Court’s ruli...

Jeff Fisher discusses a term marked by major rulings across executive power, voting, and civil rights, and what they signal about the Court’s trajectory.

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The Supreme Court has wrapped up a consequential term, issuing decisions that could shape executive power, constitutional rights, and the balance between the branches of government for years to come. Rulings on birthright citizenship, independent federal agencies, voting rights, transgender athletes, and Fourth Amendment digital privacy all landed within weeks of one another, offering a rare, wide-angle view of where the Court is headed.

In this episode, Pr...

This episode of The Declaration at 250 discussion spotlights a striking—and often overlooked—line in the Declaration of Independence: when despotism becomes systematic, “it is their right, it is their duty” to throw off such government. Martha Minow probes why the text escalates from permission to obligation, arguing that the “duty” language radically reframes political resistance as a moral demand, not merely a justified option. The episode asks what that duty requires, who must act, and what it means for citizens facing injustice today.

Minow traces possible roots of this obligation in natural law and the “law of nations,” s...

Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Sarah Polcz discuss their proposal to require leading AI firms to pay taxes in equity, reshaping how the gains from AI are distributed

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Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the economy, but two Stanford Law alumni argue that existing tax frameworks are failing to capture—or fairly distribute—the value it generates. Jeremy Bearer-Friend, JD '14, a professor at George Washington University Law School, and Sarah Polcz, JSM '12, JSD '20, a professor at UC Davis School of Law, join co-host Professor Richard Thompson Ford to discuss a proposal that would require lead...

In the opening episode of The Declaration at 250, Michael McConnell introduces former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and historian David Kennedy to ask a deceptively simple question: what does it actually take for democracy to work?

Rice argues that the Declaration of Independence marks not the birth of democracy, but the end of tyranny—and that the real work begins afterward. Democracies flourish only when citizens build durable institutions: a workable balance of power among branches, an independent judiciary, and (often most crucially) a vibrant civil society that channels protest into law, governance, and everyday problem-solving. Drawing on...

00:00:00 — What new can be said about the Declaration at 250?
McConnell opens with the core question and frames 250 years of interpretation, celebration, and controversy.

00:00:58 — The big themes the series will test: democracy, critiques, duties, and constitutional influence
A preview of the agenda: what makes democracies flourish, modern challenges to founding principles, rights versus duties, and the Declaration’s impact on state constitutions and government structure.

00:01:19 — The forward-looking questions: law, AI, and America’s “promissory note”
The trailer highlights upcoming debates over whether the Declaration is law, how it applies to artificial intelligence, and its continuing...

Lucas Guttentag discusses the Trump administration’s immigration policies and the legal battles reshaping the U.S. immigration system

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The birthright citizenship case and immigration raids have drawn headlines and national attention, but Lucas Guttentag, who teaches immigration law at Stanford and Yale law schools, says some of the Trump administration’s most consequential immigration changes are unfolding with far less public scrutiny.

Guttentag, one of the nation’s leading immigration law experts and founder of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, joins host Professor Pamela Karlan for a wide-ranging conversation about current American...

Judge J. Michael Luttig on the Rule of Law in an Era of Executive Overreach

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In this special episode, recorded at the Neukom Center's Rule of Law Speaker Series, Judge J. Michael Luttig, former Fourth Circuit judge and ex-General Counsel of Boeing,  discusses a looming constitutional crises facing the United States. Drawing on Lincoln, Paine, and Churchill, Judge Luttig argues that the Trump administration's actions represent not the exploitation of constitutional vulnerabilities, but unconstitutional conduct that federal courts have repeatedly struck down. He expresses particular alarm over the Supreme Court's use of the shadow d...

Former Justice Department officials reflect on an institution at a crossroads

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Former Department of Justice pardon attorney Liz Oyer describes being pulled out of a meeting, told to pack up her belongings, and walked out by security the same day. Her offense, she said, was refusing to recommend that the attorney general restore gun rights to a politically connected celebrity without the information she believed was necessary to make that judgment safely. “Once you compromise your integrity, you cannot get it back,” she said.

That moment sets the tone for a candid conv...

Pamela Karlan and Nathaniel Persily on the Supreme Court’s latest decision on redistricting and minority representation.

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In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, two of the nation’s leading election law scholars dissect a ruling that could soon reverberate through elections at every level of government.

Nathaniel Persily joins Pam Karlan for a discussion about the Callais decision—what it means for racial representation, partisan gerrymandering, and anti-discrimination law. Karlan and Persily are longtime collaborators, including as co-authors of The Law of Democracy: Legal Structur...

The ACLU’s Sophia Lin Lakin discusses voting access and the redistricting battles shaping political power

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Sophia Lin Lakin, JD ’11 (MS ’04, BA ’02), director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, challenges the stated premises behind many current voting restrictions, including claims about widespread non-citizen voting. “If we’re worried about the integrity of our elections,” she tells Stanford Law professor and host Pam Karlan, “we should be worried about making sure that more people are participating in our elections and not chasing a fantasy.”

That concern—how long-standing efforts to restrict voting access can make it har...

Stanford’s Greg Ablavsky on the history behind the birthright case

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The 14th Amendment to the Constitution says: “all persons born are naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” But on his first day back in office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that changed that understanding. According to the President's executive order, going forward, the only people who will be U.S. citizens at birth are people who are born in the United States to parents...

Stanford Law Alum Darien Shanske on Wealth, Fairness, and California’s Proposed Billionaire Tax

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On this episode of Stanford Legal, host Professor Richard Thompson Ford talks taxes with Darien Shanske, JD '06, a UC Davis law professor and visiting professor at Stanford Law, who helped draft California’s proposed Billionaire Tax Act, which supporters hope to place on the November 2026 ballot. Shanske explains why he believes critics have often attacked a distorted version of the proposal, not the measure itself: a one-time 5% tax on net worth above $1 billion, payable over five years, aimed at help...

Jennifer Chacón discusses how immigration crackdowns are reshaping policing and public life

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The Trump administration came in promising mass deportation. What has followed goes well beyond border control to matters of local policing, detention, federal power, and the limits of the law inside the United States. On this episode of Stanford Legal, co-host Professor Richard Thompson Ford talks with immigration expert Jennifer Chacón, the Bruce Tyson Mitchell Professor of Law, about the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agenda and the profound consequences it is having in cities and communities across the country. They...

Supreme Court limits IEEPA tariff power in a 6–3 ruling as Al Sykes and Pam Karlan explain the impact on Congress, trade, and what’s next

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When President Trump declared a national emergency and imposed sweeping tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), businesses challenged the move, arguing the president did not have authority under that statute to impose tariffs. The Supreme Court recently agreed. 

On this episode of Stanford Legal, co-host Professor Pamela Karlan sits down with international trade expert Alan Sykes, professor of law and Warren Christopher Professor in the P...

Deborah Sivas on the EPA’s Rescission of the Endangerment Finding

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The Environmental Protection Agency recently announced it was rescinding the 2009 endangerment finding, the legal foundation for federal regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The administration has called the move the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history. What does it actually do? And what happens next?

On this episode of Stanford Legal, Professor Deborah Sivas, an expert in environmental law, joins co-host Pam Karlan to unpack the legal strategy behind the repeal, the role of recent Supreme Court de...

The ACLU’s Anthony Romero unpacks a sweeping docket—from a Supreme Court showdown over birthright citizenship to voting rights and free speech—as the rule of law is tested.

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In a timely conversation about the ACLU’s massive docket of cases, Pam Karlan speaks with Anthony Romero, JD ’90, executive director of the ACLU, about the surge of civil rights and civil liberties battles facing the country right now.

Romero discusses major pieces of litigation spanning immigration, free speech, voting rights, and government accountability. A key focus is the Supreme Court showdown over birth...

Stanford’s Robert MacCoun shows how scientific habits can sharpen judgment and strengthen civil discourse in a polarized society.

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In a world where confidence is rewarded and humility can feel like a liability, Stanford Law professor Robert MacCoun argues for something radical: fewer unwavering opinions, more critical reflection, and a better way to disagree. On Stanford Legal, MacCoun joins co-hosts Pamela Karlan and Diego Zambrano for a conversation about how “habits of mind” borrowed from science can help citizens, lawyers, and policymakers think more clearly and function more effectively in a pluralistic society.

MacC...

What happens when the legal tools meant to protect democracy are used to weaken it? Kim Scheppele explains.

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Professor Kim Scheppele has spent much of her career watching democracies rise and fall. She went to Hungary in the early 1990s expecting to study democratic optimism after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead, decades later, she found herself documenting how constitutional democracy can be dismantled from the inside out.

That experience frames a wide-ranging conversation on the latest episode of Stanford Legal, where host Professor Pam Karlan speaks with Scheppele, the Lawrence...

Stanford Law’s Allen Weiner explores developments in Venezuela and the role—and limits—of international law

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Can the United States arrest a foreign head of state by sending FBI agents—and military troops—into another country? On the latest episode of Stanford Legal,  Professor Pam Karlan sits down with international law expert and Stanford Law lecturer Allen Weiner to discuss the recent extraction of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. Their wide-ranging conversation focuses on the uneasy space where U.S. law collides with the constraints of international law.

Weiner, a former U.S. State Dep...

Political Violence, Hate Groups, and the Rule of Law

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What are the legal implications of the unprecedented mass pardoning of the January 6th rioters? What does it say about American rule of law? 

President Biden’s DOJ prosecuted nearly 1,600 of the January 6, 2021, rioters—many for acts of shocking violence against police and government offices. On January 20, newly sworn-in President Trump, in one of his first official acts, issued a sweeping grant of clemency to all of the rioters charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol attack. He pardoned most defendants and c...

Urgent legal questions about privacy protections of the nation’s largest collection of personal data and unprecedented influence of Silicon Valley in Washington

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A coalition of privacy defenders led by Lex Lumina and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit on February 11 asking a federal court to stop the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) from disclosing millions of Americans’ private, sensitive information to Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). As the federal government is the nation’s largest employer, the records held by OPM represent one of the largest collection...

Mila Sohoni on the New Legal Landscape

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When a single federal judge can freeze a president’s policy nationwide, it raises big questions about checks and balances and democratic accountability. That’s one reason nationwide injunctions have become central to some of today’s most consequential legal battles—and why the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. CASA matters.

At a live recording, Stanford Legal host Diego Zambrano sat down with Professor Mila Sohoni, one of the country’s leading scholars on federal courts and administrative law, for a conversation that moved f...