Compiled by Athena Smith.
Articles
Kim Christian Priemel reviewed Jessica Trisko Darden’s book, “The Accused: How Women Faced Justice for Nazi-Era Crimes,” praising her uncovering the lost names of female perpetrators and her account of how gender norms shaped both accusations and defenses. Priemel also noted that limited judicial records meant that the book reveals more about the deeds of the accused women than their trials and how they faced justice after the war.
But the lack of visibility, as political scientist Jessica Trisko Darden perceptively notes in her new book, was a result not only of relatively small numbers but also of the obscurity of their trials. Usually prosecuted before lower-level courts in cases that only rarely implied mass murder, their names were anonymized in official documentation, effectively preventing the women and their actions from entering collective memory and, indeed, history. Instead, lurid tales about the few notorious, frequently sexually charged cases, such as those of Grese and Koch, would come to dominate public perception of female perpetrators as even greater exceptions to the rule than their male counterparts and, essentially, the product of flawed femininity.
The Next Anti-democratic Threat From the Supreme Court
James Goodwin and Wendy Wagner warned how a case the Supreme Court will hear this fall, Suncor v. Boulder County, could allow a court already encroaching on the horizontal separation of power to erode vertical federalism. The case turns on whether federal law preempts local and state-law climate deception suits against fossil fuel companies, and the authors argued that a ruling in favor of the companies could give greater power to the president.
The office of the presidency would be the most direct beneficiary of this industry-driven expansion of federal preemption. That is because the president exercises authority over the federal agencies through the chief executive role and plays a primary role in foreign affairs. Expanding federal preemption on either ground therefore threatens to place a growing body of policy within the president’s domain. Such a shift in power away from state and local governments is especially significant because the policy issues involved—for instance, pollution and consumer protection—have traditionally fallen within the state’s police powers, their traditional authority to promote the general welfare of their inhabitants.
“Rogue” AI Isn’t Going Anywhere
In the latest edition of the* Seriously Risky Business *cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren broke down OpenAI’s recent revelation that its agents had been acting undesirably on government websites, ShinyHunters’ breach of the FBI jobs site, and more.
The string of bad behaviour from OpenAI’s models foreshadows the shape of things to come. Whatever the frontier labs do, open weight models will also exhibit the same monomaniacal goal-seeking behaviour as they develop.
How this shakes out is anyone’s guess. Better model alignment across the board could make a real difference, but another equally plausible outcome is this is going to be our new normal. Fun!
Podcasts
Lawfare Daily: The Trump-Xi Summit and U.S.-China AI Competition
Peter Harrell sat down with Martin Chorzempa to discuss President Trump’s Sept. 24 summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the balance of leverage in the geopolitical and economic relationship, and the countries’ differing perspectives on—and approaches to—artificial intelligence.
Videos and Webinars
Lawfare Live: The Trials of the Trump Administration, October 2
On Friday, Oct. 2, at 4 p.m. ET, Natalie Orpett sat down with Scott Anderson, Molly Roberts, Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, and Eric Columbus to discuss the latest developments in litigation surrounding the Trump administration—including a lawsuit challenging the Iran War, updates on litigation over the cancellation of foreign aid funds, and more.
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