Thursday, December 11, 2025

Today, Eugene Volokh evaluates where in America private employees have legal protections for their political speech. Orin Kerr speaks about how the Fourth Amendment is adapting to meet the challenges of a digital world. And Andrew Roberts cites historical materials that illustrate what really happened when Hermann Göring was tried at Nuremberg, saying a new film about the trials does little to illustrate how his lies caught up with him.

Revitalizing American Institutions

Can Talking Politics Get You Fired?

In the wake of a new round of firings and disciplinary acts taken against people for odious things they said online, Senior Fellow Eugene Volokh explores where protections exist for private employees’ political (and perhaps offensive) speech. He generates a map of where speech protections exist across the United States, pointing out that 20 states have no protections whatsoever for private employees’ speech. He moves on to ask whether state protections of speech are a good idea and how employers should navigate dealing with their employees’ speech, “especially in a time that is widely seen as more politically polarized than before, and a time in which social media has made it easier than ever to call for boycotts triggered by an employee’s unpopular political views.” Read more here.

Digital Crimefighting and Frontiers of the Law

Orin Kerr is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor at Stanford Law School, where he teaches and writes on criminal law and criminal procedure. He helped found the field of computer crime law, which studies how traditional legal doctrines should adapt to digital crime and digital evidence, and is widely considered a leading authority on the Fourth Amendment. For an interview featured in the Center for Revitalizing American Institution’s monthly newsletter, Inside RAI, he spoke with Chris Herhalt about how the Fourth Amendment must adapt to the digital realm. Kerr and Herhalt discuss when law enforcement can access personal digital devices, whether law enforcement can “buy” their way around the Fourth Amendment via data brokers, and how large databases can be lawfully accessed during criminal investigations. Read more here.

Revitalizing History

How Göring almost derailed the Nuremberg Trials

Writing in The Spectator, Distinguished Visiting Fellow Andrew Roberts explores the real story portrayed in the film Nuremberg (released last month) of how Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring nearly outsmarted the American and British prosecutors tasked with making him answer to his vast crimes against humanity. Citing the documents, letters, and other materials found in the Kilmuir Papers at the Churchill Archives at Churchill College, Cambridge, Roberts says the British prosecutor Maxwell Fyfe was the one who saved the Allies from embarrassment after Göring was able to evade and outfox other lawyers during his examination. But Roberts says the best examples of this aren’t in the movie. Read more here. [Subscription required.]

Decoding Espionage: Newly Declassified Documents Reveal the Secret Intelligence War

A new piece in Skeptic explores the book Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Senior Fellow Amy Zegart—specifically how it and other books explain how intelligence and espionage are chronicled by historians. The writer, Michelle Ainsworth, says that Zegart’s book argues that “the explosion in popularity of spy entertainment” in recent years means that there is an overemphasis in modern media and even historical narratives of “humint” or human-sourced intelligence (think agents, double agents, and dead drops) versus “sigint” or signals intelligence, which Zegart argues was more crucial in the development of modern espionage. Read more here.

Reforming K-12 Education

Remembering Rod Paige, a Great American

Rod Paige, who served as America’s first Black secretary of education during the first term of George W. Bush’s presidency, died on Tuesday. He was 92. Senior Fellow Chester E. Finn, Jr. writes that Paige, despite serving as education secretary in the uncertain and hectic environment after the 9/11 attacks, was still able to create and implement the No Child Left Behind Act on schedule. Finn writes that Paige, while earlier serving as superintendent of schools in Houston, introduced charter schools to that system along with “a dozen important reforms for kids within the system.” Read more here.