From February 14, 2023: Last month's brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police has once again sparked a national conversation about the causes of and remedies for persistent police misconduct and abuse. To explore this issue, Jack Goldsmith sat down with Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at UCLA School of Law, who is the author of a new book called, “Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable.” The book argues that police abuse is a result of pervasive pathologies in the legal system that shield from accountability not just police officers, but also their supervisors and the local governments for which they work.

Joanna and Jack discussed the many accountability gaps in the legal regime governing police abuse. Like her book, they focused on problems of achieving justice through the civil rights system, problems that include the high bars to finding a lawyer and to convincing a judge to hear the case, Fourth Amendment doctrine, qualified immunity, and the challenges of municipal liability. They also discussed the best path to reform and the prospects of reform.

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In this Scaling Laws Academy "class," Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare, speaks with Eugene Volokh, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and long-time professor of law at UCLA, on libel in the AI context. The two dive into Volokh's paper, “Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output.”

• Extra credit for those who give it a full read and explore some of the "homework" below:
• “Beyond Section 230: Principles for AI Governance,” 138 Harv. L. Rev. 1657 (2025)
• “When Artificial Agents Lie, Defame, and Defraud, Who Is to Blame?,” Stanford HAI (2021)

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Since Jan. 20, 84% of U.S. Agency for International Development grants and contracts have been terminated and 93% of agency staff have been fired. On July 1, the State Department absorbed the remaining staff and grants. On Lawfare Daily, Lawfare Associate Editor for Communications Anna Hickey spoke to New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof about the global impact of the Trump administration's dismantling of the USAID and foreign assistance cuts. They discussed what Kristof saw in his reporting trips to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, and South Sudan, and how the cuts to foreign assistance put U.S. national security at risk.

Please note that this episode contains content that some people may find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised.

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