As Steve Kaminshine said in his comments at the symposium honoring Charity Scott, I was recruited to come to Georgia State University as a “Law and Bioethics” scholar who had spent more than sixteen years shuttling between an office in a hospital and another in a law school. But when I first visited Georgia State Law, I did not know that more than ten years earlier Charity Scott had spent the better part of an academic year living and breathing clinical ethics at Grady Memorial Hospital.1 Because of her usual habit of immersion in all learning experiences, in that year Charity gained more insight into how hospitals work and how physicians behave when they are knee deep in their professional milieu of life and death decision-making than many full-time bioethics academics do in a career. For the rest of her career Charity kept one foot well planted in the medical context, as an advisor in problems of research ethics, as a teacher in her own medical-legal partnership structured around real-life clinical problems, and as an ethical analyst who could never be accused of mouthing a mantra of phrases, the “vacuous incantation of abstract principles”2 that might pass for bioethics discourse in some circles.

On July 18, 2023, the Appeals Chamber, by a 3–2 majority, rendered its “Judgment on the appeal of the Republic of the Philippines against Pre-Trial Chamber I's ‘Authorisation pursuant to article 18(2) of the Statute to resume the investigation.’” The decision upheld the Pre-Trial Chamber's decision of January 26, 2023, which authorized the Prosecutor to resume investigating crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court allegedly committed on the territory of the Philippines between November 1, 2011 and March 16, 2019, in the context of a government-led “war on drugs” campaign.

In 2006, the University of Maryland Carey School of Law had the privilege of co-hosting the annual Health Law Professors Conference with the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics (ASLME). Coincidentally, as director of the Law & Health Care Program at Maryland, I had the opportunity to announce the winner of the Jay Healey Health Law Teachers’ Award at the conference. The award is given to “professors who have devoted a significant portion of their career to health law teaching and whose selection would honor Jay [Healey’s] legacy through their passion for teaching health law, their mentoring of students and/or other faculty and by their being an inspiration to colleagues and students.”1 Healey, a Professor in the Humanities Department at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, was the youngest recipient of the Society’s Health Law Teachers’ Award, which he received in 1990. He was passionate about teaching and had the idea to devote a session each year at the annual conference to teaching health law. It was always a plenary session at which he challenged us to be better teachers. Jay died in 1993, at the age of 46, not long after the Health Law Teachers conference that year, which he attended and which also happened to be held in Baltimore at the University of Maryland School of Law. Thereafter, the award was given in his name.

Soviet citizens perusing their daily copies of Pravda or Izvestiia on May 23, 1934, would have come across an essay by the famous writer Maksim Gor΄kii with an unusual title: “Proletarskii gumanizm” (Proletarian Humanism). Perhaps intrigued by this funny sounding but clearly important foreign word, inquisitive readers might have turned to the recently published first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (BSE), which provides two entries for humanism: one referring to “a conventional but not sufficiently precise term used to characterize the culture of the Renaissance epoch, or some aspect thereof,” and a second, much shorter entry concerning “a modern movement in the theory of knowledge that arose in the early twentieth century in connection to pragmatism.” Neither entry makes any mention of proletarian, socialist, or Soviet varieties of humanism. Indeed, according to the BSE, Renaissance humanism inevitably “exhausts its progressive possibilities, degenerates, and becomes a conservative and reactionary force,” remaining “alien to the broad masses and even a significant part of the bourgeoisie.”