Lawyers spotlight persecution of profession in Iran

Taymaz Valley via Flickr CC BY 2.0

Yesterday the International Law Section (ILS) of the American Bar Association (ABA) recognized the International Day of the Endangered Lawyer with a spotlight on Iran in a webinar, "Iranian Lawyers: Risking Their Licenses, Their Liberty, and Even Their Very Lives."

U.S. Court of International Trade Judge Delissa Anne Ridgway moderated a discussion with Margaret L. Satterthwaite, NYU law professor and U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, and Stuart Russell, a Canadian lawyer and co-director of the International Association of People's Lawyers Monitoring Committee on Attacks on Lawyers, based in Bordeaux, France.

To suppress opposition to the ruling regime, especially since the 2009 "Green Movement," the speakers explained, the government of Iran has persecuted lawyers who dare to represent dissenters. Lawyers themselves have been imprisoned, and bar organizations have been disempowered in their regulatory oversight of the profession, Russell reported.

Judge Ridgway lauded a documentary, Nasrin (2020) (IMDb), which is available for $3 on multiple platforms. I'm adding it to my watch list (trailer below). Exemplary of Iranian lawyers' travails, Nasrin Sotoudeh, an activist and advocate for the rights of women and children in Iran and subject of the documentary, has been imprisoned multiple times, sentenced to lashes, and severely beaten. Voice of America reported Sotoudeh's most recent release from prison, on bail, in November 2023.

I note, DW also published a documentary piece on Sotoudeh, Protecting Human Rights in Iran (2023), available on YouTube.

The ABA ILS program was co-sponsored by the Middle East Committee, the International Human Rights Committee, and the Women's Interest Network. I am a member of the ABA ILS Legal Education and Specialist Certification Committee.

TORTZ volume 2 unpacks duty, causation, damages, introduces nuisance, defamation, privacy

Tortz volume 2 is now available for affordable purchase from Lulu.com and for free PDF download from SSRN.

Tortz volume 2 follows up volume 1 (Lulu, SSRN, The Savory Tort), published in 2023 and pending update this year. I am using Tortz volumes 1 and 2 with students in my American tort law classes in the United States and in Poland this academic year.

The two-volume Tortz textbook represents a survey study of American tort law suitable to American 1L students and foreign law students. In volume 1, the first eight chapters cover the fundamentals of the culpability spectrum from intentional torts to negligence to strict liability.

Volume 2 comprises chapters 9 to 15: (9) damages, (10) res ipsa loquitur, (11) multiple liabilities, (12) attenuated duty and causation, (13) affirmative duty, (14) nuisance and property torts, and (15) communication and media torts. 

Contemporary content in Tortz volume 2 includes exercises in pure several liability; treatment of opioid litigation in public nuisance law; recent criticism of New York Times v. Sullivan in defamation law; and exposure to common law developments in privacy law, such as the extension of fiduciary obligations to protect personal information.

Three final chapters will be added to Tortz volume 2 for a revised edition later in 2024: (16) interference and business torts, (17) government claims and liabilities, “constitutional tort,” and statutory tort, and (18) worker compensation and tort alternatives. Any teacher who would like to have copies of draft materials for these chapters in the spring is welcome to contact me.

Tortz is inspired by the teachings of Professor Marshall Shapo, a mentor to whom I am deeply indebted. Marshall passed away in November 2023.

My thanks to Professor Christopher Robinette, Southwestern Law School, who kindly noted the publication of Tortz volume 2 on TortsProf Blog even before I got to it here.

Plaintiff drops privacy suit that stretched to claim against UMass Medical in nationwide data breach

UMass Chan Medical School
Mass. Office of Travel & Tourism via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0

Until six days ago, the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School was defending a privacy suit over a data breach, though the plaintiff liability theories looked thin.

There doesn't seem to be any dispute over the fact of the data breach. UMass Chan was just one of hundreds of organizations nationwide implicated in a breach affecting tens of millions. According to electronic security firm Emsisoft (which has a commercial interest in higher numbers), the breach affected more than 2,700 organizations and the data of more than 94 millions persons (last updated Jan. 18, 2024).

The vulnerability for all of these organizations was a file transfer platform called MOVEit, a product of publicly traded, Burlington, Mass.-based Progress Software Corp. UMass Chan used MOVEit to transfer personal information to other state agencies and programs. Hackers obtained and published the data of more than 134,000 persons, including recipients of state supplemental income and elder services.

According to state officials, WBUR reported, the "exposed data varies by person, but in each case includes the person's name and at least one other piece of information like date of birth, mailing address, protected health information like diagnosis and treatment details, Social Security number, and financial account information." The commonwealth notified affected persons and offered free credit monitoring and identity theft protection.

The complaint filed in federal court in September 2023 sought class action certification. The named plaintiff blamed UMass Chan for weak security and delayed notification resulting in a fraudulent attempt to use her debit card. Wednesday last week, the plaintiff voluntarily dismissed without prejudice, meaning the case might not yet be over.

The articulated causes of action, though, were a stretch. That's not to say that the putative plaintiffs suffered no injury. The problem rather is that the law in most states, including Massachusetts, and at the federal level still fails to define data privacy wrongs in a manner on par with the law of Europe and most of the rest of the world.

There was no statutory cause of action in the UMass Chan complaint. The diversity complaint alleged counts of negligence, breach of contract, and unjust enrichment.

Negligence has not been a productive vein for privacy plaintiffs, who lack the usually prerequisite physical injury. Massachusetts cracks open the door more than most other states to negligence actions based on lesser injury claims, such as emotional distress or economic loss. But it's not a wide opening.

Privacy actions in state law meanwhile are problematic because American common law has not yet well established the nature of the plaintiff's loss according to conventional understandings of injury. Indeed, federal courts disagree over when a statutory state privacy action supplies the "injury-in-fact" standing required by the federal Constitution. 

The named plaintiff in the UMass Chan case hastened to emphasize her contractual relationship with UMass Chan as a service provider, in an effort to anchor the negligence claim within a strong relationship of duty to get through the Massachusetts doorway. She described the identity risk of the debit-card incident to establish economic loss at least.

It's not clear that the pleading could have pushed over the hurdles to negligence recovery. I have advocated for the evolution of common law tort to close the gap in recognition of privacy violations in U.S. law, similarly to how UK courts developed the "misuse of private information" tort in common law to complement transposition of EU data protection. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court could do that; certification would be required here in a federal case. But the trend in American data privacy law rather has been for the courts to wait on legislators to move the ball forward.

The other liability theories were a stretch, too. In contract, the plaintiff alleged herself a third-party beneficiary of data sharing agreements between UMass Chan and its state partners. Third parties can claim rights in a contract, but the proof is stringent. Contract law also raises a damages problem. The plaintiff here was not seeking specific performance, and it's not clear that any recovery in contract law would exceed the remediation the commonwealth already offered.

The equitable claim of unjust enrichment theorized essentially that UMass Chan benefited financially by cheaping out on security. That's creative, but a plaintiff in equity usually wants back something she lost to the defendant. A differential in the cost of contract services is speculative, and it's an attenuated causal chain to allege detriment to UMass Chan clients.

Privacy plaintiffs in the United States have seen some success using laws that predate contemporary data breach. But those theories won't work here. Massachusetts once had a leading data regulatory system for its requirements of secure data management. But the law is now well worn and has not kept up with other states, California being the model. Critically, the Massachusetts regs don't provide for private enforcement.

Some plaintiffs have found success with the dated (1986) Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But a federal CFAA claim would be leveled properly against the hacker. The alleged culpability of UMass Chan is more accident than abuse.

American privacy plaintiffs flailing to state wrongs in litigation unfortunately is common and will continue as long as the United States lacks a comprehensive approach to data protection. I wrote 10 years ago already that American expectations in data privacy had outpaced legal entitlements.

The pivotal factor in whether MOVEit breach victims find any relief is likely to be the state where they and their defendants are located. Perhaps the case will push commonwealth legislators at last to act on a bill such as the proposed Massachusetts Information Privacy and Security Act (see, e.g., Mass. Tech. Leadership Council).

The case is Suarez v. The University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School (D. Mass. filed Sept. 18, 2023).

Recklessness claim in fatal Ford rollover accident allows plaintiff to push past Ga. statute of repose

"Crash Overview Diagram" by defense expert Donald F. Tandy, Jr.
(no. 103 filed Mar. 15, 2022) in Cosper v. Ford Motor Co.
(N.D. Ga. filed Oct. 11, 2018).

The Georgia Supreme Court defined "recklessness" in an erudite November opinion that allowed a plaintiff to surmount the statute of repose with a product liability claim.

In federal court in Georgia, the underlying case involves a fatal Ford Explorer rollover accident on Christmas Day in 2015. The plaintiff sued Ford Motor Co. in product liability over the integrity of the vehicle roof. Arising more than 10 years after the vehicle's manufacture, the claim seems to run afoul of the Georgia statute of repose.

But the statute of repose has an exception for "conduct which manifests a willful, reckless, or wanton disregard for life or property." The plaintiff aimed to surmount the statute of repose by accusing Ford of recklessness. The federal court certified the case to the Georgia Supreme Court to explain what recklessness means in the statute.

Recklessness is a useful but sometimes elusive concept in tort law. Insofar as culpability can be described on a spectrum running from intentional tort to negligence to no fault, recklessness is usually located at the midway point between intent, a subjective state of mind, and negligence, an objectively tested condition. One formulation of recklessness employs the canny "reason to know" analysis, which mixes subjective and objective testing of a defendant's state of mind by allowing reasonable inference (objective) from actually known facts (subjective).

But recklessness is a quirky creature of perspective. Recklessness looks different if you approach the concept from its intent side, when it describes a state of mind short of but indicative of pure subjective intent, or from its negligence side, when recklessness describes a kind of highly exaggerated carelessness.

This Janus-faced character causes recklessness to manifest in different legal tests amid different fact patterns. At a more theoretical level, the dichotomy reveals a deeper truth about culpability, which is that the useful metaphor of a spectrum disguises arguably qualitative differences between intentional wrongs and accidents.

The upshot is that recklessness can mean many things to many people. And the fact that the Georgia Supreme Court had never defined the term in the statute of repose was problematic for the federal court in the Ford Motor Co. case.

The Georgia statute pairs recklessness with the famous doublet, "willful" and "wanton." These terms are even more problematic. While they are well known to historical common law, they have not been uniformly incorporated into modern conceptions of culpability. Their ambiguity thus has been an occasional source of controversy in modern times, for example, in international disagreement over construction of the Warsaw Convention that governed air carrier liability in the 20th century.

The plaintiff in Ford Motor Co. did not allege "willful" misconduct, which smacks of intent and feels incompatible with a product liability claim. That's OK, the Georgia Supreme Court decided, because the disjunctive ("or") in the statute should be taken at face value. So recklessness can suffice by itself.

In a review worth reading for legal linguaphiles, to define recklessness, the court reviewed a range of precedents and sources, including the Restatement of Torts. (The court cited the "Restatement (First) of Torts § 500"; section 500 appears in the Second Restatement.) In the end, the court settled on a definition that hewed to the Restatement:

[when] the actor intentionally does an act or fails to do an act which it is his duty to the other to do, knowing or having reason to know of facts which would lead a reasonable person to realize that the actor's conduct not only creates an unreasonable risk of harm to another's life or property but also involves a high degree of probability that substantial harm will result to the other's life or property.

The approach comprises definitional components that are common in recklessness formulations, even if the words and particulars sometimes vary: volitional action (not necessarily intent as to result), knowledge of predicate facts (from which one might deduce risk), unreasonable risk (not necessarily unreasonable conduct), elevated probability of harm, and elevated magnitude of harm. (Cf. my YouTube Study of Intent (2017).)

Significantly, this approach to recklessness is free of moral appraisal. Thus, modern recklessness often is synonymized with "actual malice" and distinguished from "common law malice." The older latter imports the notion of "evil," or at least "hatred." My torts textbook examines this distinction when it is salient in punitive damages, for which some states employ one standard, some employ the other, and some employ them both in the alternative.

In the Georgia case, if recklessness can be proved, the plaintiff will be able to work around the statute of repose. The proof won't come easily. But usually it is easier for a plaintiff to show that a corporate defendant was reckless than to show that it acted "willfully" or "evilly," descriptors more often associated with persons.

Justice Verda M. Colvin

The case is Ford Motor Co. v. Cosper (Ga. Sept. 19, 2023). Justice Verda M. Colvin wrote the opinion of the court.

In 2021, Justice Colvin became the first African-American woman appointed to Georgia's high court by a Republican governor. An Atlanta native, she studied government and religion at Sweet Briar College, graduating in 1987 (just a couple of years before I arrived at my alma mater in nearby Lexington, Va.), and law at the University of Georgia, graduating in 1990. In May 2023, Justice Colvin gave the commencement address at Sweet Briar. 

Justice Colvin told New Town Macon that "Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King Jr. inspired her since she was a child through their devotion to service." In 2016, Judge Colvin spoke to youth in the "Consider Consequences" program of the Bibb County, Ga., Sheriff's Office; a recording (below) of the powerful allocution went viral.

It's education and healthcare, stupid

CC0 Pixabay via picryl

Experts are puzzled over American discontent while economic indicators ride high. Yet they consistently fail to recognize what seems to me an obvious factor: the exorbitant cost of education and healthcare.

My feeds have been awash in stories and analyses of the disconnect between economic indicators of a prosperous America and people's simultaneous sourness on their economic prospects. The Atlantic tackles the problem perennially (e.g., Apr. 2022, Oct. 2023, Nov. 2023, Dec. 2023, Jan. 2024). Yesterday I caught up on my podcast backlog with Paddy Hirsch and Darian Woods enumerating five explanations for The Indicator earlier this month.

To be fair, the explanations are multiple, complicated, and interrelated. Almost every writer fairly points to inflation as a capstone problem. As Hirsch put it, Americans care less about mathematical formulae than about strain on the wallet at the gas pump and the grocery checkout. 

Moreover, The Indicator helpfully told me, data show that even if wages are keeping up with inflation on average across the economy, that's not the experience of many, if not most, Americans. Wages in volatile markets, especially for young people who have the economic flexibility to change jobs more readily, are outpacing inflation times over. But wages in career tracks, for middle-aged and older Americans tied to mortgages and other responsibilities, are failing to keep pace with inflation. So yes, we're rightly frustrated when a smiling employer gleefully announces a wage hike, yet we somehow have less money in our pockets at month's end.

At the same time, I have been frustrated repeatedly by writers' and analysts' failure to recognize an elephant in the room: the exorbitant cost of education and healthcare in America. The problem is amplified by inflation, but it's not a byproduct of inflation, and it won't be remedied by any number of interest-rate hikes.

Let me interject that there is an overarching problem as well that analysts often fail to recognize, which is simply that economic indicators are not interchangeable with human happiness. American culture habituates us to equate, mistakenly, economic prosperity with personal joy. Yet ample social science data gathered around the world show that wealth, whether societal or personal, does not necessarily correlate with happiness; much less is it causal. And see Matthew 6:19-24. A productive society by economic measures is not necessarily a society that produces art, that affords opportunity for recreation and leisure, or that values freedom for individual and interpersonal fulfillment.

Even by economic measures, though, healthcare and education are anomalous sectors. As a matter of morality, healthcare cannot be left to the free market—and I say this as an economic conservative—because the essentiality of healthcare for survival makes any bargain inherently unfair, any playing field invariably unlevel.

Similarly, education, at least in part, also must operate extrinsically to the free market for goods and services. Education does not guarantee upward economic mobility. But upward economic mobility is profoundly unlikely without education. And a market has no incentives to provide educational opportunity as long as labor is abundant.

Consider: A society based on slave labor might look marvelous by economic measures: full "employment," efficient resource distribution, pyramid-building productive capacity. Yet there is zero potential for laborers' upward social or economic mobility. In America, we purport to abhor servitude and to prize socioeconomic potential as "the American dream."

Both healthcare and education are therefore imperative in our society; their absence, or unattainability, is hard felt. But the free market will provide neither in adequate supply. Healthcare will be unattainable for those unable to pay the going price. Education is a byproduct of a healthy economy only insofar as it is necessary to ongoing productivity. The economy won't provide for retraining as long as labor is abundant, and upward mobility is not even on the board.

This isn't an abstract problem. This is what Americans feel on the ground.

I went to the ER in the fall.  I was in the hospital for maybe seven hours, out-patient.  I am lucky to have insurance that covered most of the roughly $15,000 cost.  I am blessed with employment that allows me to cover without much strain the roughly 10% of the cost allotted to me. 

But for many Americans, in many instances, medical treatment is unaffordable or entails bankrupting medical debt. People choose to live with pain—not economic pain, but real pain, sometimes a toothache, sometimes terminal illness—because they can't afford healthcare. 

Why would we expect that people suffering with pain and ailments, unable to see doctors, would ever report feeling good about the economy?

My wife and I make decent money (for now). By some measures, our U.S. household ranks as high as the 93rd percentile by income. By tightening our belts for a few years, we mostly managed to put our one child, after public K12, through a bachelor's program. Still, she had to borrow about $50,000, much of it at 6.5%, to close the gap for four-year university. And we co-signed on those loans even while we were still, in our 40s, paying off our own higher-education debt. Neither our education debt nor the mortgage on our modest home discounted our income on the FAFSA that blithely informed us of our ample capacity to pay for college. And again, we're lucky and blessed. We could make it work.

For too many Americans, the cost of higher education is crippling or prohibitive. To my point, the economy doesn't care about education other than an efficient means to an end. The only relevant question is whether the hamster wheel is still turning. There's no need for people to better themselves, their lot. 

Why would we expect that people without hope for a better life for themselves or their children would ever report feeling good about the economy?

Education costs and debts work an enormous strain, financially and emotionally, on Americans. Healthcare costs, sometimes risks, sometimes debts, work an enormous strain, financially, emotionally, and physically, wearing us down, day after day.

And here's what really gets my goat: Things don't have to be this way. My cousins in Canada and Europe don't suffer under these strains. They have affordable healthcare and education. They are free to move about their lives.

My cousins pay more in overall tax burden—but not much more, and maybe less if I factor in my lifetime healthcare and education costs, as well as property taxes. And don't get into it with me over quality. As to education, I teach in Europe, and my students there are, to be frank and on average, better equipped as liberal arts undergrads than my American 1Ls, not for lack of work ethic. As to healthcare, I haven't met my primary care doctor since three primary care doctors ago. The reason I went in the fall to the ER, where I waited for five hours to be seen, was that neither my primary care network nor any area urgent care had a single opening. My "best healthcare plan anywhere in the world" must have been mislaid with my jetpack.

Can you imagine an America in which a university degree or a hospital admission would not have to be followed by years or decades of monthly payments? in which people could retrain for better jobs without incurring crippling debt? in which people could change jobs without sweating the burden of massive debts or the risk of losing access to life-saving medicine for themselves or their families?

That would be a free market. A level playing field. 

That's not what American corporations want. So that's not what Congress wants.

It's ludicrous (ludacris?) to expect that people—consumers—would radiate joy about a rosy economy as long as they're shackled, compelled to run the hamster wheels of a market that's not really free.

Police reform shines light on disciplinary records

CC0 Pixabay via picryl

A favorable reform to follow the police protest movement of recent years, stemming in particular from the killing of George Floyd, has been transparency around police disciplinary dispositions.

There is room for disagreement over what police reform should look like. I'm of the opinion that it costs society more to have police managing economic and social problems, such as homelessness and mental health, than it would cost to tackle those problems directly with appropriately trained personnel. I wouldn't "defund" police per se, but I would allocate public resources in efficient proportion to the problems they're supposed to remedy. We might not need as much prison infrastructure if we spent smarter on education, job training, and recreation.

Regardless of where one comes down on such questions, there is no down-side to transparency around police discipline. Police unions have cried privacy, a legitimate interest, especially in the early stages of allegation and investigation. But when official disciplinary action results, privacy should yield to accountability. 

Freedom-of-information (FOI) law is well experienced at balancing personnel-record access with personal-privacy exemption. Multistate FOI norms establish the flexible principle that a public official's power and authority presses down on the access side. Because police have state power to deprive persons of liberty and even life, privacy must yield to access more readily than it might for other public employees.

In September 2023, Stateline, citing the National Conference on State Legislatures, reported that "[b]etween May 2020 and April 2023, lawmakers in nearly every state and [D.C.] introduced almost 500 bills addressing police investigations and discipline, including providing access to disciplinary records." Sixty-five enacted bills then included transparency measures in California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York.

The Massachusetts effort has come to fruition in online publication of a remarkable data set. Legislation in 2020 created the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission. On the POST Commission website, one can download a database of 4,570 law enforcement disciplinary dispositions going back 30 years. There is a form to request correction of errors. The database, at the time of this writing last updated December 22, 2023, can be downloaded in a table by officer last name or by law enforcement agency, or in a CSV file of raw data.

The data are compelling. There are plenty of minor matters that can be taken at face value. For example, one Springfield police officer was ordered to "Retraining" for "Improper firearm usage or storage." I don't see that as impugning the officer, rather as an appropriately modest corrective and a positive for Springfield police. Many dispositions similarly suggest a minor matter and proportional response, for example, "Written Warning or Letter of Counseling" for "conduct unbecoming"/"Neglect of Duty."

Then there are serious matters. The data indicate termination of a police officer after multiple incidents in 2021, including "DRINKING ON DUTY, PRESCRIPTION PILL ABUSE, AND MARIJUANA USE," as well as "POSING IN A HITLER SALUTE." Again, it's a credit to the police department involved that the officer is no longer employed there. Imagine if such disciplinary matters were secreted in the interest of personal privacy, and there were not a terminal disposition.

The future of the POST Commission is to be determined. It's being buffeted by forces in both directions. Apropos of my observation above, transparency is not a cure-all and does not remedy the problem of police being charged with responsibility for social issues beyond the purview of criminal justice.

Lisa Thurau of the Cambridge-based Strategies for Youth told GBH in May 2023 that clarity is still needed around the role and authority of police in interacting with students in schools. Correspondingly, she worried whether the POST Commission, whose membership includes a chaplain and a social worker, is adequately funded to fulfill its broad mandate, which includes police training on deescalation.

Pushing the other way, the POST Commission was sued in 2022, GBH reported, by police unions and associations that alleged, ironically, secret rule-making in violation of state open meetings law. Certainly I agree that the commission should model compliance in rule-making. But I suspect that the union strategy is simply obstruction: strain commission resources and impede accountability however possible. Curious that the political left supports both police unions and police protestors.

WNYC has online a superb 50-state survey of police-disciplinary-record access law, classifying the states as "confidential," "limited," or "public." Massachusetts is among 15 states in the "limited" category. My home state of Rhode Island and my bar jurisdictions of Maryland and D.C. are among the 24 jurisdictions in the "confidential" category.

"Sunshine State" Florida is among 12 states in the "public" category. In a lawsuit by the Tallahassee Police Benevolent Association, the Florida Supreme Court ruled unanimously in November 2023 that Marsy's Law, a privacy law enacted to protect crime victims, does not shield the identity of police officers in misconduct matters. (E.g., Tallahassee Democrat.)

Western myopia marginalizes war in Sudan, Ecuador

My prayers, especially over the recent holidays, have admittedly felt cliché, if not comical, being dominated by desire for "world peace."

In case Ricky Gervais is right and prayer works like a democratic election (jk; it doesn't), I've focused on the conflicts of the world that my otherwise-trusted David Muir & co., reporting on Israel and Ukraine, seem quick to forget: Sudan and Ecuador.

I've written previously about Sudan (Apr. 2023, Sept. 2023). The New York Times in December reported a death toll in excess of 10,000 and displaced persons rounding 6 million. My friend from Khartoum remains safe abroad, but it looks increasingly like there will be nothing to come home to. I just read in Christianity Today that hospitals have been targeted and destroyed by the warring generals in the unscrupulous scorched-earth struggle.

I'm the last to rush to judgment with the r-word, but is there another explanation for seeming western indifference to this ongoing tragedy?

And then there's Ecuador, which in recent weeks also has entered a chaotic kind of civil war. It's a country dear to me for personal history there, but also of professional interest for fascinating and groundbreaking developments in constitutional law in recent years.

The Daniel Noboa Administration declared war on organized crime after drug lords were broken out of prison, almost certainly with the help of corrupt insiders. As Noboa cracked down, the country was besieged by retaliatory violence, especially in the Guayaquil Canton.

Efforts to remedy the desperate situation are closely related to the social and economic prosperity Ecuador experienced in recent decades. Ecotourism, again especially in Guayaquil, an access point for the Galápagos, had been an engine of economic and social development, precipitating recognition of rights of indigenous people and of nature with which the nation's courts were experimenting.

When I was last in Guayaquil about a dozen years ago, it was safe enough to walk around, for me, at least, by day. Security and the economy were on the upswing. On January 9, 2024, in contrast, the world was horrified to see armed terrorists, some of them teenagers, holding guns to the heads of journalists in a Guayaquil news station broadcasting live. My friend Ugo Stornaiolo Silva, an Ecuadorean lawyer living and working in Poland, reports that his family in Ecuador is safe, but the hatches are battened down. Domestic travel is out of the question.

Elected only in November 2023, Noboa promised to get a grip on drug trafficking and restore the rule of law. In a sense, then, the present violence is a promising sign of a much needed reckoning. Yet it remains to be seen whether the cause is winnable. Observers predict a bloody road ahead, or maybe worse if Noboa wavers in his resolve.

Ecuador's problem is part of the wider narrative of drug trafficking and human migration through Colombia and Central America, driven by the wealth, demand, and relative opportunities of the United States. America's backyard is declining into a mega-narco-state, while neither of our only choices of political party has demonstrated the will or ability to tackle the problem even in its domestic dimension.

Say what you will about China, the PRC recognizes that stability in its neighborhood is essential to the country's own national security. The means to the ends of course are problematic, exemplified by Nauru's recent change of alignment from Taiwan to China. But that matter again demonstrates the ascendancy of Chinese foreign policy over America's apparent appetite for isolationism.

Pray for world peace, as a spiritual matter. Know that it will only happen with American commitment, as a political matter.

*     *     *

As often happens in the course of the school year, my personal blogging in the fall semester had to yield to professional workload. I have been logging matters I'm eager to share and will endeavor to catch up in the coming months.