Kennedy School Review

How difficult is it to get a legal abortion in Bolivia? Well, as shown by a recent ordeal an 11-year-old child had to go through, it took weeks of mass national protests, government intervention, and international media attention. In October 2021, an 11-year-old Bolivian girl, unnamed due to privacy concerns, became pregnant after repeatedly being […]

AI presents a perfect regulatory storm. Like nuclear weapons, it can end humanity. Like bioweapons, non-state actors can develop and deploy the technology. Like social media, regulators and policymakers appear unwilling or unable to understand the seriousness of the short- and long-term risks posed by AI. This storm will not subside; AI development will continue […]

Harmonized data lies at the heart of the climate agenda, but do we pay enough attention to the development of the figures that we see? Do we ever question how the figures are calculated? May there be elementary discrepancies compounding into a distorted representation of supposed facts? And could this all possibly contribute to sub-optimal […]

History presents a clear lesson: when judicial independence and competence wanes, it’s time for meaningful reform.

Privacy and Policing When law professors or judges discuss a right to privacy, they mean something narrower: a Griswoldian right to privacy; it’s from the famous 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, where the Supreme Court found1 a right to privacy not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. Along with the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona and […]

“For every dollar and every minute we invest in improving AI, we would be wise to invest a dollar and a minute in exploring and developing human consciousness.” —Yuval Noah Harari1 In June 2020, the veritable explosion of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic prompted more than 130 countries to issue a statement on the burgeoning […]

“Humanity is waging war on nature. This is senseless and suicidal.” These are the beginning words of the United Nations’ seminal report, “Making Peace with Nature.”1 The consequence of this war is the “triple environmental crises.” Greenhouse emissions continue to exceed safe limits, biodiversity loss rivals periods of mass extinction, and pollution kills more people […]

“We don’t go anywhere or do anything without the National Guard. We can’t do what we do as an Army without the National Guard. Every time we have asked, the National Guard has been ‘Always Ready, Always There.’” – General James C. McConville, August 27, 20221 “There’s no sugarcoating it: all three components of the […]

Introduction The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that a record-breaking 339 million people will need humanitarian assistance in 2023. Eighty-six million of those people live in countries currently sanctioned by the United Nations—a number that grows to 208 million living under U.S. sanctions. These include internally displaced Venezuelans, civilians living in […]

In Viktor Frankl’s bestselling book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” he writes, in the context of the post-war era: “the existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century.” The vacuum itself is described as a state of meaninglessness, in which a person does not know exactly what they want, or what they want to […]

More than 400 days ago, 39-year-old Petro Buriak was driving a truck abroad and dreaming about playing dolls with his 5-year-old daughter when his route brought him home to Ukraine. That all changed for Buriak and 41 million Ukrainians when Russian President Vladimir Putin did the unthinkable and launched a full-scale war in Ukraine on […]

The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) was signed into law over a year ago – a bipartisan accomplishment that felt akin to winning the lottery. With the big checks inbound, are state and local governments actually prepared to spend them? Can government administrators avoid fraud, waste, and abuse? The trillions of dollars […]