When a dog seriously injures someone, the conventional wisdom has always been to have it put down. No matter the circumstances, a potentially vicious dog presents its owners with enormous liability. Should the dog attack again, what could possibly be said in its defense? This is precisely the conventional wisdom that is being challenged in Princeton, NJ this year with the trial and appeals of Congo the German shepherd. His case has the potential not only to set a new precedent in New Jersey dog law, but also to usher in a new era in animal rights.

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New Jersey dog owners and immigrant baiters breathed a sigh of relief last week as Congo the German shepherd dodged death. Less than 24 hours before his appeal was scheduled to be heard before Superior Court Judge Mitchel Ostrer, the pooch’s lawyer, Robert E. Lytle, cut a deal with prosecutor Doris Galuchie. As it turns out, the deal was quite a good one for Congo’s owners Guy and Elizabeth James--if by good, one means getting to keep with minimal penalties a violent dog one cannot control.

During a slow weekend this past July in St. Petersburg, Russia, Rob Madole, Tim Nunan, and John Nelson started scheming, started to talk of raising hell.

The Democratic Party has promised the electorate change, but is not always clear about what this will mean in practice. There is Obama change with its emphasis on bipartisanship, and there is Big Momma change with its emphasis on taking back the country for liberals. The first kind is an easier case to make to the American people, but it is the second kind that might actually make life better for them.

It is hard to believe, but the eight years are almost over. For ninety-some months, Vladimir Putin has led his country though gruesome displays of terrorism, border crises, a dysfunctional pension system, and a generally decaying infrastructure. He has done it all despite a hailstorm of international criticism from both those who oppose his blunt foreign policy and those who question his exercise of enormous executive authority. And on Sunday, Russian voters will go to the polls to confirm his chosen heir to the throne, Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev.

If I had five kopecks for every time an American friend has asked me about Russia’s take on Obama and the election, I’d have a hell of a lot of kopecks (but I’d still be poor – thanks, world economy!).

“A lot of sawdust written on this subject—a lot of sawdust. Don’t read any of it.”

—Isaiah Berlin, on ‘natural law’

In the Fall of 1930, Soviet architect Andrei Konstantinovich Burov was part of a team assembled by Moscow to visit Detroit’s state-of-the-art factories and to establish links with America’s leading industrialists. What follows are excerpts from his letters to his wife Irina, in which he describes his American ...

After completing his A.B. at Princeton in 1970, Michael Barry came back to campus in 2004 to serve as lecturer in the Near Eastern Studies Department. His signature course, NES 307: Afghanistan and the Great Powers 1747-2001, explores social and political dynamics within the country as well as...

In the Fall of 1930, Soviet architect Andrei Konstantinovich Burov was part of a team assembled by Moscow to visit Detroit’s state-of-the-art factories and to establish links with America’s leading industrialists...

The day after President Nixon’s announcement of an imminent US invasion of Cambodia, a group of Kent State University history graduate students—calling themselves World Historians Opposed to Racism and Exploitation (WHORE)—convened an anti-war rally on the Commons...