Lexical Compendium

From Wikipedia:

The Leahy Laws or Leahy amendments are U.S. human rights laws that ostensibly prohibit the U.S. Department of State and Department of Defense from providing military assistance to foreign security force units that violate human rights with impunity.

In 2024, as the Israel–Hamas war wages on, the Leahy Law has been in the news a lot.

I won't abrogate my duties as a journalist...

I heard the above while listening to the news and had to look up the word abrogate. By context clues, it's obvious that one meaning of this word is to abandon one's responsibilities.

The more common use is in a legal context and here it means to abolish a law.

And there's also a medical use, where it is used in the context of suppressing an immune response (...strategies to abrogate antibody production...).

Habeas corpus is a Latin phrase meaning "you shall have the body."

It is a legal principle that safeguards individual freedom by protecting against unlawful or indefinite imprisonment and it has its origins many hundreds of years ago in England. The Magna Carta in 1215 established that no one -- not even the king -- is above the law. In the 13th century and for the next few hundred years, common law court practices involved issuing writs to check unlawful imprisonment. These started with Habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, meaning you have the body to submit [before the court]. Over time, this evolved into a powerful legal tool, eventually codified in the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679.

In the U.S., the right to habeas corpus is enshrined in the Constitution (Article I, Section 9), which states that it may only be suspended "when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." As it was centuries ago, it remains a key check on arbitrary power by government leaders. . I’ll be honest -- if you’d asked me to define habeas corpus or explain the Magna Carta, I probably would’ve stumbled through it. I knew the term appeared in the Constitution, but I couldn’t have told you exactly what it meant.

Then came the news cycle in late May 2025.

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, bungled answers on Tuesday about habeas corpus, incorrectly asserting that the legal right of people to challenge their detention by the government was actually the president’s “constitutional right” to deport people.

-- Gold, Michael. "Noem Incorrectly Defines Habeas Corpus as the President’s Right to Deport People" The New York Times, 20 May 2025

Heather Cox Richardson also covered this in the 20 May 2025 Letters From an American.

I'm guessing I wasn’t the only one suddenly revisiting high school civics after that performance.