Margalla Hills in Pakistan by Zach Khan (CC BY-SA 4.0). In early April 2026, Pakistan accomplished what few states in the contemporary international system have managed: it brought the United States and Iran, two nations defined by decades of mistrust, ideological divergence, and intermittent confrontation to the same negotiating table. This was more than an…
Intercultural Conference. Photo by provided by author. The following essay is reprinted and adapted on Canopy Forum in collaboration with the journal Derecho en Sociedad, a biannual electronic publication that is free and open access. Their issue 20(1) features full length articles in Spanish and English. Read Pinna’s long-form essay here.See other essays in this series here. Religion permeates every function…
Pete Hegseth’s confirmation as Secretary of Defense (US-PD). On February 27, 2026, President Donald Trump launched Operation “Epic Fury.” Within a day, the United States had killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 170 people at the Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, and, alongside Israel, begun a war with Iran. From the beginning, the…
Oxford MS Pride parade. Photo by Author. On the evening of her birthday in July 2022, Stephanie Lee called the Oxford, Mississippi Police Department to request a wellness check. Her child, Jimmie “Jay” Lee, a 20-year-old public policy student at the University of Mississippi, had not called that morning as he always did. Jay was…
Tara Cathedral and the Tara salt flats, Atacama Desert, Chile by Diego Delso via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). The following essay is reprinted and adapted on Canopy Forum in collaboration with the journal Derecho en Sociedad, a biannual electronic publication that is free and open access. Their issue 20(1) features full length articles in Spanish and English. Read Flores’ long-form…
Florence Nightingale. Coloured lithograph. Source: Wellcome Collection (Public Domain Mark). When we think of the story of human evolution, we often focus on the dramatic, “sexy” storylines: battles for physical or social dominance, hunting large game, and finding mates. But a significant subplot in our shared human story is cooperation. Our ability to cooperate toward…
Among the Sierra Nevada, California by Albert Bierstadt (US-PD). This article is part of our Book Review Roundtable on Andrea Pin’s book, Dignity in Judgement: Constitutional Adjudication in Comparative Perspective (2025).If you’d like to check out other reviews in this series, click here. Human dignity is ubiquitous in contemporary constitutional law. Courts across jurisdictions invoke the…
Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, Washington, DC by G. Edward Johnson (CC BY 4.0). At a Nashville rally in 2015, Donald Trump declared that mass shootings like one that had recently occurred at an Oregon community college would never happen if teachers were armed and able to defend themselves and their students. He went on to…
Sunset over Pangkor Island, Malaysia (CC0 1.0). Insurance forms the foundation of modern economies, transforming uncertainty into manageable obligations, allocating risk, and stabilizing market. Yet conventional insurance, built on secular commercial frameworks, often clashes with Islamic legal and ethical norms. In many, Muslim-majority societies, however, conventional insurance has religious concerns. Classical jurisprudence prohibits riba (interest),…
Anasuya Feeding the Hindu Trinity, painting on the wall of the Krishna-Sudama Temple of Porbandar (CC0 1.0). In The Illusion of the Repugnant Client: Hindu Ethics in American Legal Practice, I argued that the concept of an inherently repugnant client is incoherent from a dharmic perspective, that the Hindu-American lawyer’s svadharma demands zealous representation of…