Sustaining the Rule of Law

Jeannine DeLombard
English
UC Santa Barbara

Kathleen Moore
Religious Studies
UC Santa Barbara

2026, the semiquincentennial of the U.S., also marks a decade of increasingly explicit threats to the rule of law. The year opened with the unauthorized capture of a foreign leader, which the U.S. president justified by proclaiming that his “own morality” trumped international law. This disregard for congressional war powers was immediately followed by the administration’s refusal to investigate an ICE agent’s killing of an unarmed Minneapolis protester, Renée Good. These events demonstrate with tragic clarity how threats to the rule of law can endanger individual, communal, and national well-being. This crisis of governance is exacerbated by a systematic campaign against civil society. The capacity for informed critical analysis has been severely compromised by federal efforts to constrain universities, law firms, and news outlets. As we reach the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, this institutional suppression challenges good-faith efforts to assess the American experiment—its history, its present, and above all, its future. Our working group seizes this historic moment to demonstrate that preservation of the rule of law is not the exclusive province of legal professionals, but a profoundly humanistic undertaking.