Allies Bridging The Valley Of Death: How NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator For The North Atlantic Will Help Maintain NATO’s Technological Edge

Around the world, governments hope to leverage procurement for innovation—and then to carry that innovation into sustained production, across the “valley of death” where many innovative technologies fail in development. To access technologies emerging across the Alliance for the common defense, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has launched the Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA). DIANA nurtures dual use (military and commercial) technologies across the NATO Alliance, and offers important strategies—including funding, accelerator programming, connections with end users and commercial expertise, testing and demonstration opportunities, private investment, and rapid adoption—for technological innovation in public procurement. This article demonstrates DIANA’s potential to complement existing procurement systems and efficiently provide for the adoption of new, commercial technologies by defense and security end users within the NATO Alliance. While presenting the operational model of DIANA, special attention will be given to the “Rapid Adoption Service”—DIANA’s constituent element intended to support agile and rapid development and adoption of innovative solutions by Allies and NATO. DIANA will operationalize the Rapid Adoption Service through a single set of rules supporting contracting vehicles that can be utilized by multilateral, multinational, and bilateral consortia to continue development and eventually procurement of innovative solutions, directly, through national procurement structures, or through partner NATO elements such as the NATO Support and Procurement Agency or the NATO Communications and Information Agency

Agency Delay and the Courts

Administrative delay plagues the modern regulatory state, yet scholars and courts lack a coherent framework for analyzing when delay becomes unlawful and how to remedy it. This Article provides the first comprehensive examination of judicial oversight of agency delay, tracing the evolution from common law mandamus through the delay provisions of the Administrative Procedure Act. It reveals critical distinctions between these mechanisms that courts have increasingly elided, leading to doctrinal confusion and ineffective remedies. On account of the second Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency initiatives, this topic takes on unprecedented urgency because administration policies to reduce workforce and restructure the executive branch agencies will rapidly lead to a dramatic increase in delays across the administrative state. This Article makes three contributions. First, it illuminates the forgotten role of mandamus as a check on bureaucratic delay by excavating its development from prerogative writ to modern remedy. Second, it demonstrates how courts have improperly conflated mandamus with APA delay claims, obscuring important differences in their scope, standards, and available relief. Finally, it proposes a new framework for evaluating agency delay that better serves congressional intent while respecting executive branch resource constraints. This framework would replace the malleable and increasingly ineffective factors in the prevailing judicial review standard for agency delay with more structured analysis of agency operations, congressional deadlines, and regulated party impacts. The Article’s insights are intended to help the Judiciary more effectively police the boundary between permissible administrative discretion and unlawful foot-dragging—a critical task as political forces threaten to increase delays across the regulatory state as a consequence of shrinking government

The Ten Commandments in Louisiana Public Schools: A Study in the Survival of Establishment Clause Norms

In June 2024, Louisiana enacted legislation requiring the prominent posting of the Ten Commandments on the wall of every public-school classroom. In Roake v. Brumley, a federal district court decided that the requirement violated the Establishment Clause. Judge DeGravelles’s lengthy opinion followed the Supreme Court’s 1980 decision in Stone v. Graham, which invalidated a highly similar Kentucky law. In late June 2025, in an opinion by Judge Ramirez, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the district court in every significant respect. Texas recently enacted similar legislation, now under the cloud of Roake v. Brumley. In this paper, we defend the result in Roake, with some proposed modifications. Central to our argument is demonstration of the continuing vitality of the Establishment Clause principles on which Stone rests. We explain that recent decisions, especially Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, have repudiated the “no endorsement” test, a widely disparaged extension of Establishment Clause concerns. But neither Kennedy nor any other decision has abandoned longstanding constitutional norms that require government actions to have a predominant secular purpose; not have the primary effect of advancing religion; and avoid excessive entanglement with religion. Lemon v. Kurtzman will no longer be shorthand for these norms, but they endure on the authority of the School Prayer Cases (among others). Along the way, we explain the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission; clarify the limited role of “historical practices and understandings” in the application of Establishment Clause norms; and map the place of coercion in cases about school-sponsored religion

Standing

Chapter 4 explores the intricacies of the legal principle of standing, its role in climate litigation, and how it impacts the ability of parties to bring climate change-related lawsuits to trial. The author discusses interpretations of standing across different jurisdictions, such as the United States, New Zealand, and countries in Europe, and explains how these interpretations can either impede or facilitate climate litigation. He distils emerging best practice from this analysis, providing an insightful guide for future climate lawsuits. The author then identifies emerging best practice in interpreting standing rules in a flexible manner, thus allowing a broader range of actors to bring climate-related lawsuits and enhancing access to justice

FEATURE COMMENT: Don’t Let Post-Employment Conflicts Derail Your Contract Award

Often referred to as “revolving door” restrictions, the U.S. Government has devised numerous laws, policies and procedures designed to combat unethical or anti-competitive conduct that may stem from a Government employee’s decision to leave federal service. The laws range from ethics restrictions designed to minimize the appearance of impropriety while a federal employee endeavors to leave the Government, to criminal laws, which seek to punish conflicts of interest and improper conduct that may occur after Government service concludes. In addition to the ethical and criminal considerations that must be taken into account when navigating the Government’s myriad post-Government employment restrictions, in recent years, contractors have faced another growing area of risk: protests. In numerous recent bid protests, protestors have alleged “unfair competitive advantages” stemming from Government contractors’ hiring of former Government employees— these include several high-profile examples in which the protests were sustained. Given the increasing prominence of these protests, we surveyed GAO and U.S. Court of Federal Claims protest decisions to identify when those fora have found post-employment unfair competitive advantages and when they have not. We summarized our assessment in a convenient chart that practitioners may use in evaluating potential conflicts. By being vigilant about these concerns and addressing them proactively, contractors may reduce their risk of being the subject of a protest

Feature Comment: Ethics, Compliance, And The Dispiriting Saga Of Craig Whitlock’s Fat Leonard

This essay discusses the forthcoming book, Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy (480 pp, Simon & Schuster, 2024), authored by Washington Post investigative reporter, Craig Whitlock. The book chronicles the extraordinary \u27\u27Fat Leonard saga (or scandal), involving Glenn Marine, an Asia-based ship husbanding contractor, and its business with the U.S. Navy. The animating character, not surprisingly, is Leonard Francis, and the book spans his career and demise, which eventually prompted investigations (of hundreds of Naval servicemembers, including 90 admirals), multiple criminal plea bargains, and a staggering number of military administrative actions. On the one hand, Francis is the stuff of legend, originally known to many due to his pretrial escape and the ensuing global manhunt. But, for most readers, what’s so remarkable about the book is the breadth and diversity of the government contracts, government ethics, and compliance issues the case study implicates and the book recounts. Alas, as a cautionary tale (or training tool), one of the book’s pervasive themes is that, when it came to modelling behavior, senior Navy leaders routinely behaved like pigs at the trough rather than cautious and deliberate role models for ethical behavior. Pedagogically and professionally, I hope the book is widely read in (Navy and, more broadly) military circles. Also, my sense is that compliance officials (and professionals in the anticorruption space) will find it informative and worthwhile reading. As an aside, it\u27s a hugely entertaining tale, well told

Protecting the U.S. National Security State from a Rogue President

The presidency of Donald Trump revealed weaknesses in the U.S. constitutional structure and its legal rules, weaknesses that had been covered over for most of our history because presidents of all political parties voluntarily obeyed norms of behavior that kept the presidency within the bounds of constitutional democratic governance. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that such norms have been permanently restored. Thus, scholars, policymakers, and judges must consider now how to protect the rule of law from a rogue president, rather than waiting for the next crisis to occur. This Article provides a comprehensive set of achievable reforms targeted specifically at the dangers of a rogue president in the national security arena. Because national security tends to implicate the president’s commander-in-chief power, it has historically been an area where presidential power is thought to be at its zenith. As a result, Congress’ power is thought to be circumscribed, and courts tend to be deferential. This historical deference makes the dangers of a rogue president even more acute with regard to national security-related powers than in other areas. Nevertheless, the president’s power over national security matters is not unlimited. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court made clear in its landmark decision in Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer that presidential power domestically, even in times of military conflict abroad, remains subject to important constitutional constraints. And Justice Jackson’s influential concurrence in that case invoked the specter of an authoritarian president as a principal reason for insisting on those constraints. Thus, we need to embrace a Youngstown-inspired approach to presidential power in the national security arena, and there are steps that could be taken by all three branches of government that would help instill these values and embed rule-of-law norms to at least make it more difficult for a rogue president to tear them down. This Article focuses on five such steps: (1) limit the president’s power to use the military domestically under the Insurrection Act ; (2) better define and limit the president’s emergency powers; (3) set outer bounds to the pardon power with regard to war crimes; (4) empower inspectors general throughout government (and particularly in the national security agencies) and better protect those inspectors general from politically-motivated firing by a rogue president; and (5) encourage courts to take a more skeptical approach to evaluating executive branch invocation of the so-called state secrets doctrine to protect governmental actions from disclosure and scrutiny. For each step, I set forth tangible actions that could be taken by various branches of government, describe some of the existing legal rules that must be overcome in order to implement those reforms, and outline potential constitutional arguments that might arise. Of course, a rogue president with authoritarian impulses could lay waste to any and all guardrails that are created. Nonetheless, the more constraints that are erected, the more difficult the task of authoritarian overreach becomes, and the more likely that actors within the government will be empowered to resist. Therefore, although the multiple reforms described in this Article are certainly not a panacea, they are important and achievable steps that will at least help to preserve rule-of-law values in the national security domain

Assessing Percipient.ai After Loper Bright Enterprises – Potentially a New Trajectory in Government Procurement Law

In early June 2024 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued its decision in Percipient.ai, Inc. v. United States, 104 F.4th 839 (Fed. Cir. 2024). The Percipient decision was noteworthy primarily because it seemed at odds with established precedents regarding standing to bring a bid protest: the case recognized standing in a non-bidder that was not even a potential prime contractor. But a few weeks later the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, No. 22-451, in which the Court departed from a forty-year practice of judicial deference under Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, 467 U. S. 837 (1984). Suddenly the approach taken in Percipient took on a new cast: the Percipient decision, like Loper Bright, emphasized the courts’ primacy in interpreting the law, and so Percipient may turn out to have been one of the first decisions which follows Loper Bright’s trajectory and opens new lines of challenge to agency procurement decisions, grounded in the courts’ prerogative to define what the law is

Value-Centered Lawyering: Reshaping the Law School Curriculum to Promote Well-Being, Quality Client Representation, and a Thriving Legal Field

For three long and harrowing years in law school, students learn to think like lawyers, to put their clients first, to interpret the law as it stands, to deftly advocate for positions they do not believe in, and to strive for successful and prestigious careers. These lessons help them develop analytical and advocacy skills, creativity and perseverance, a strong work ethic, and ambition. But there is a darker side to these learning objectives. What law students often take away from their time in law school is that their own personal beliefs, values, and experiences are irrelevant to the practice of law. They quickly learn that they must serve clients and employers, however personally distasteful or damaging it may be to them. And they begin to measure their worth and success by the yardsticks of prestige and money. Hearing these consistent albeit subliminal messages, law students frequently disassociate from the expectations that their future careers should reflect their inner selves, and they soon find themselves trapped in jobs they consider morally taxing or meaningless. When faced with such recurring conflicts between their work obligations and personal values, or with an overarching feeling of professional meaninglessness, most lawyers experience chronic cognitive dissonance, turn to alcohol or controlled substances for comfort, or develop anxiety, depression, and a host of other emotional, mental, and physical ailments. They lose interest in their work, perform worse, and experience burnout, thus jeopardizing not only their own well-being, but also client outcomes and the stability of the legal field in the long run. Tragically, such scenarios are the norm, not the exception. Something needs to change. This essay explores what and how in three parts. Part I examines the symptoms of an ailing legal profession. Part II traces the root cause of lawyer unhappiness and aimlessness to the law school curriculum and its shortcomings in supporting law students’ and lawyers’ burgeoning professional identities. This section challenges the choice to de-emphasize personal values in the classroom, the unquestioning and unqualified insistence on client- centered lawyering, and the system of external rewards and validation as the predominant law school narratives. Finally, Part III argues that, alongside teaching students to think like lawyers, to serve their clients, and to work hard, we also need to teach them how to fulfill a paramount duty to themselves—to choose careers, job opportunities, and clients aligned with their values and sense of purpose. This section proposes simple modifications to the legal curriculum that would promote frequent value-focused self-reflection and reinforce the perception that lawyers are not merely instruments of client service, but people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and personal values that can and should factor in building their professional identities

A Financial Case for a Medical-Legal Partnership: Reducing Lengths of Stay for Inpatient Care

While Medical-Legal Partnerships (MLPs) have improved the health and well-being of the people they serve, most healthcare institutions will only invest in an MLP if they are convinced that doing so will improve its balance sheet. This article offers a detailed estimation of the cost savings that an MLP targeted toward the most acute legal needs would accrue to an academic medical center (AMC) in North Carolina