Will Dunham/Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court, shown June 1, 2024, in Washington, begins its new term this month with high-profile cases about transgender rights and “ghost guns.”

As the U.S. Supreme Court begins a new term, events outside its marble walls could define the next eight months.

The justices are set to grapple with cases involving transgender rights, “ghost guns,” and fallout from the court’s decisions last term significantly weakening the regulatory power of federal agencies.

But with a presidential election in November – and lower courts deliberating over federal prosecutions against one of the candidates, former President Donald Trump – the most divisive and high-stakes questions may only reveal themselves as the term unfolds.

The Supreme Court now leans the most conservative it’s been in almost a century, and it would be surprising if the court doesn’t continue to deliver policy wins for Republicans, legal experts say. Whether the court will deliver electoral wins for the GOP is another question.

“Cases will absolutely be brought,” says Amy Steigerwalt, a political scientist at Georgia State University, of the November election. “The court turned back those arguments the last time but left open some possibility that they might want to reconsider them in the future.”

Will the justices need to weigh in on the 2024 election?

Some 2024 election issues have already reached the high court. In August the justices allowed Arizona to partially enforce a proof-of-citizenship voter registration law. Two weeks ago they declined to let Green Party candidate Jill Stein appear on the Nevada presidential ballot, and a week ago they refused Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s request that he be added to the New York ballot.

Other litigation is ongoing around the country. And with polls forecasting a tight race between Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, it’s possible that the courts could play a pivotal role in the presidential election.

One possible scenario, experts say, involves a high court decision two years ago. In that ruling, the justices held that federal courts could review state supreme court election-law rulings if they exceed “the bounds of ordinary judicial review.” The justices could choose to review, for example, a lawsuit in swing-state North Carolina alleging that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens are on the state’s voter rolls.

Another scenario involves the Electoral Count Reform Act. Passed in response to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, the bipartisan law updated rules for how election results are certified. Experts say that some of its provisions – including a requirement that states submit their electors by a certain date, or a mechanism for members of Congress to object to a presidential candidate on constitutional grounds – could lead to legal action.

What is easier to predict is that, should Mr. Trump lose the election, the criminal prosecutions against him will return to the Supreme Court.

In July, the court ruled that former presidents are entitled to broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. A federal judge is determining how that decision will affect the case against Mr. Trump for allegedly attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Whatever happens, if Mr. Trump loses in November the case will be appealed back to the justices.

In another criminal prosecution of Mr. Trump, a federal judge in Florida dismissed the case outright, ruling that the special prosecutor bringing the case was unlawfully appointed. The Supreme Court may review that decision, but an appeal is currently before a federal appeals court.

“An inflection point” for transgender rights in the U.S.

As for cases already on the court’s docket, the most high-profile involves a challenge to a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for transgender children.

The case, United States v. Skrmetti, asks whether the Tennessee law violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

Jonathan Mattise/AP/File

Protesters rally at the State Capitol in Nashville, Tennessee, to oppose a series of bills that target the LGBTQ+ community, Feb. 14, 2023. This Supreme Court term is expected to be a pivotal one for transgender rights.

Transgender rights are a new area for the courts, and in this term, starting with Skrmetti, the justices will begin deciding the extent to which statutory and constitutional protections extend to transgender Americans.

“This is an inflection point” for transgender rights in the U.S., said Chase Strangio, co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ Rights project, which is representing plaintiff teenagers and their parents in the case.

“Is this going to be a [case] that sets off years of government-legitimized discrimination against LGBTQ people?” he added, during a briefing on the court’s new term. “Or is this going to [affirm] that LGBTQ people are protected under the Constitution and civil rights law?”

Twenty-six states have passed laws banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors in recent years, and at least four states have also sought to restrict access to transition care for adults. Beyond health care, lower courts are also considering whether a law prohibiting sex discrimination at federally funded schools also bars discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

Courts may also be asked to decide if states can prevent residents from changing their sex on state-issued documents, as Texas did with driver’s licenses this summer.

The questions in Skrmetti “may be distinct,” said Mr. Strangio. “But these [cases] are all going to have an impact on each other.”

Ghost guns, but not the Second Amendment, up next week

On Oct. 8, the court will hear oral argument in another high-profile case concerning government regulation of “ghost guns,” firearms that can be bought online and assembled from kits.

But while it involves guns, the Garland v. VanDerStok case doesn’t concern the Second Amendment. Instead, the case could have broader implications for the regulatory power of federal agencies – a power that the Supreme Court has curtailed in recent years.

Carolyn Kaster/AP/File

A 9 mm pistol build kit with a commercial slide and barrel and a polymer frame is displayed April 11, 2022, when President Joe Biden announced a rule barring the sale of “ghost guns.” The Supreme Court will hear a case this term about whether the federal government has the power to issue such a ban.

In June, in Loper Bright v. Raimondo, the court overturned a 1984 precedent requiring federal courts to defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. Within three months, Loper Bright had been cited by parties or judges in 110 cases. Courts are now reevaluating federal regulations in areas ranging from overtime pay to airline fees to abortion access, ProPublica reported.

“A lot of the activity is happening at the lower court level, and it may take another term or two to have some of the open questions resolved,” says Cary Coglianese, a regulatory law expert at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

There are other significant cases the justices could hear this term. In particular, two petitions filed to the court are seeking to expand the president’s power to remove the heads of major federal regulators.

In 2020, the justices made it easier for a president to remove the single director of an executive agency. They could now choose to decide if it should be easier for a president to remove the top officials at agencies headed by multiple directors, like the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Reserve.

If the justices do take up those petitions, “It could well amount to one of the biggest administrative law cases of the last century,” says Professor Coglianese. That is not least because of how the Supreme Court has expanded presidential power in the past year.

If presidents “have more power because of the immunity decision, and then they have more power because they can remove officials at will,” he adds, “we’re going to have a government that has a greater degree of concentration of authority in the presidency.”

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/File

U.S. special counsel Jack Smith makes a statement to reporters after a grand jury returned an indictment of former President Donald Trump regarding efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat, at Mr. Smith's offices in Washington Aug. 1, 2023.

With just a month until Election Day, an unsealed filing in the Jan. 6 case against former President Donald Trump has presented new details about his efforts to overturn the 2020 vote – and has drawn Republican accusations of election interference.

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in July that a number of the charges in the case may be subject to presidential immunity, special counsel Jack Smith recast his approach in a 165-page brief.

The filing, which was unsealed at his request Wednesday by federal Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, laid out new details supporting the charges against Mr. Trump and argued that he carried out offenses as a candidate, without any immunity related to his official capacity as president.

The case is still far from going to trial, if it goes to trial at all, but Mr. Smith’s efforts to keep the proceedings moving along are raising questions.

What new evidence does this brief provide?

The main storyline of Mr. Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol remains the same. Prosecutors allege that he fraudulently claimed the election had been stolen, and continued to make those claims even as top aides repeatedly informed him that they were unfounded.

At a rally on Jan. 6, they say, Mr. Trump deliberately riled up his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol while Congress was tallying the Electoral College votes, in a last-ditch effort to cling to power.

Mr. Trump says he was not looking to overthrow the election but to investigate contested claims in a highly unusual election year, during which many states rapidly scaled up the use of mail-in voting amid the pandemic. In more than 60 cases after the election, judges ruled against the president. And his attorney general said there was no evidence of significant fraud that would have affected the outcome. For his part, Mr. Trump contends that the legal cases against him have been politically motivated.

Among the new details in the brief:

• A few days before the 2020 election, a Trump adviser told supporters that although the president had been informed that an election night lead could slip away once all the mail-in votes were counted, Mr. Trump still planned to claim he had won. “He’s going to declare victory. That doesn’t mean he’s the winner; he’s just going to say he’s the winner,” the adviser said, according to the filing.
• Even as the Trump campaign was publicly making unverified claims of ineligible votes, privately it was a different story. For example, while an individual who has been identified by The New York Times as now-disbarred Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was telling the Georgia state legislature that 10,000 “dead voters” had cast ballots, another official – which the Times named as White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows – was texting with another Trump lawyer confirming that that number “was false and the actual number was around 12.” The names are redacted in the filing.
• After the election, as Mr. Trump was engaged in a legal battle to challenge the results, a White House staffer traveling with the president overheard him tell family members, “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”
• On Jan. 6, Vice President Mike Pence – who had refused to bend to pressure from President Trump to contest the Electoral College results, saying it was unconstitutional – was presiding over a Senate debate about the Arizona results when rioters broke into the Capitol. His security detail whisked him into hiding. When an aide told Mr. Trump that his vice president was in peril, he responded, “So what?”

Dana Verkouteren/AP

An artist sketch shows Michael Dreeben, counselor to special counsel Jack Smith, arguing before the Supreme Court about whether former President Donald Trump is immune from prosecution in a case charging him with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, April 25, 2024.

Why did this come out now?

Mr. Smith’s prosecution of Mr. Trump is still far from reaching a trial date – if it reaches one at all. As in the other criminal cases against him, the former president’s lawyers have sought to slow proceedings as much as possible. Mr. Smith has been arguing to move more quickly.

The most substantial delay in the case involved Mr. Trump’s appeal to the Supreme Court that the case should be dismissed due to presidential immunity. The court ruled in July that former presidents are entitled to immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, instructing Judge Chutkan to determine how that affects Mr. Smith’s case.

In early September Judge Chutkan outlined a schedule for the parties to file briefs on the immunity question and other issues over the coming months.

The 165-page brief unsealed on Wednesday represents Mr. Smith’s response to that question. His arguments are sweeping.

“Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” he wrote in the brief. “None of the defendant’s charged conduct is immunized.”

Mr. Smith asked for special permission to (1) file the first brief on the immunity issue; (2) file an “oversized” brief on the issue; and (3) release a partially redacted copy of the brief to the public. Judge Chutkan granted all three requests, even though she acknowledged it would be “irregular” to allow the government to brief first. While Mr. Trump has two weeks to file his reply brief, Mr. Smith will be able to file a response, giving him the final word.

While this represents an acceleration in proceedings, Judge Chutkan noted that there have already been substantial delays in the case. And while the U.S. Constitution guarantees due process rights for criminal defendants, including the right to a vigorous and thorough defense, courts have also held that there is a public interest – particularly for federal prosecutions funded by taxpayers – in not letting criminal cases drag on.

A 1972 Supreme Court ruling held that “There is a societal interest in providing a speedy trial.” In a 1979 case, the court wrote that the public “has a definite and concrete interest in seeing that justice is swiftly and fairly administered.”

But Mr. Smith’s actions also appear to go against what is known as the Justice Department’s “60-day rule” – an informal policy that department officials should avoid taking any actions within 60 days of an election that could influence how people vote.

Timing has formed the basis for criticisms of this week’s legal events. Trump ally Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, a conservative legal advocacy group, criticized Judge Chutkan in a statement for “unnecessarily and shamefully releasing a one-sided political story ... during the height of 2024 presidential election season.”

Julio Cortez/AP/File

Supporters of then-President Donald Trump try to break through a police barrier Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol in Washington.

Is this election interference?

Mr. Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, Wednesday night to decry Mr. Smith’s unsealed brief as “ELECTION INTERFERENCE,” and accuse Democrats of trying deflect attention from the performance of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz in the debate the night before.

He framed it as the latest in a series of politically motivated investigations and lawsuits meant to undermine his political fortunes.

“THIS ... WILL END JUST LIKE ALL OF THE OTHERS – WITH COMPLETE VICTORY FOR ‘PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP,’” he posted.

The timing elicited comparisons from Republicans to then-FBI Director James Comey’s bombshell in the final days of the 2016 campaign. On Oct. 28, he announced that the agency had found new emails related to its investigation of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server.

As the story consumed the news cycle, Mrs. Clinton’s lead in the polls fell from 5.9 to 2.9 percentage points, with an even narrower lead in key swing states. Though Mr. Comey said two days before the election that the emails did not turn up any new evidence, she ended up losing Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by less than 1 percentage point – tipping the election to Mr. Trump. Democrats and some analysts – including statistician Nate Silver – argued that Mr. Comey likely cost her the election.

Trump lawyer John Lauro, who is representing him in the case brought by Mr. Smith, said he “may be the Jim Comey of 2024.” In an interview with Fox News, he alleged that there was a “coordinated” effort to target the GOP nominee with multiple lawsuits in the middle of a campaign.

“For the first time in our history, a sitting president is using the Department of Justice to go after a political opponent criminally,” said Mr. Lauro.

Legal experts point out that the case had originally been scheduled to go to trial in March, long before the election, but Mr. Smith supported expedited appeals to clarify the immunity issue. Supporters of the Justice Department also say that the 60-day rule may not apply here. The policy is an informal, unwritten one, and legal observers believe it applies only to new law enforcement actions, not to ongoing cases like this one.

What happens next?

Over the next two weeks, Mr. Trump’s lawyers will file their response brief, in which they are expected to argue that many of the activities described by Mr. Smith were in fact official acts and should be subject to presidential immunity. Mr. Smith’s reply brief is due a week before Election Day.

Throughout this month, the parties will also be briefing on other legal issues in the case, including whether Mr. Smith was unlawfully appointed. A federal judge in Florida, who was appointed by President Trump, dismissed another case against the former president on those grounds in July. All told, it’s unlikely that Judge Chutkan will issue a ruling on the immunity issue – or any other legal issue – until after the election.

If Mr. Trump wins the election in November, he will almost certainly instruct the Justice Department to end the case. If Kamala Harris wins, the case will probably go to trial. It’s unclear when exactly that might happen, but as Judge Chutkan acknowledged in September, the verdict will almost certainly be appealed.

Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

Smoke rises over Beirut's southern suburbs after a strike, amid ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Sin El Fil, Lebanon, Oct. 3, 2024.

In Israel Thursday night, in Iran, and in Hezbollah’s bunkered hideaways in Lebanon, rival commanders will be poring over plans that could trigger the worst Middle East conflict in decades.

But if they do pull back from the brink, it will be because they are also reminding themselves of a trio of sobering truths about their battle-scarred region.

Firstly, that in the Mideast, especially along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, small wars have had a nasty habit of becoming far larger ones.

Secondly, starting wars has proved to be a lot easier than ending them.

And thirdly, stability, if not full peace, has almost always been achieved not on the battlefield but through diplomacy.

The question for a nervously watching world, above all for the Biden administration, is whether these lessons will give Israel and its enemies sufficient pause to slow the rapid Mideast escalation of recent days.

Louisa Gouliamaki/Reuters

A displaced man kisses his son at the famous Skybar club in Beirut, which has become a shelter for the displaced who fled hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces.

Above all, the world’s eyes are on the Israelis.

That’s not because they are wholly responsible for the increased tensions. That spiral began a year ago when Iran-backed Hamas fighters poured across Israel’s southern border from Gaza, murdering and abducting more than a thousand men, women, and children.

It’s because of the train of events since then, most recently Israel’s new focus on Iran’s main regional surrogate, Hezbollah. Its forces began firing into northern Israel the day after Hamas’ attack, driving some 65,000 Israelis from their homes.

Over the past two weeks, Israel has set off explosions inside pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah in Lebanon. It has assassinated the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and several top commanders, along with a senior Iranian military figure visiting Beirut.

Then, in the early hours of Tuesday, Israel sent ground forces into Lebanon to attack Hezbollah positions.

And hours later, Iran launched the most powerful missile attack against Israel in its history.

The issue now is what Israel will do next.

Israeli leaders have vowed to respond. How and when they do so will go a long way to determining whether the region’s two main military powers end up in an all-out war.

The Israelis are fully aware of the time-proven pitfalls of waging Mideast wars.

There were signs, at least until Iran’s missile attack, that they were keeping those risks in mind as they planned their latest major push into Lebanon – their fourth since the late 1970s.

Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

Israeli army Capt. Eitan Itzhak Oster, who was killed fighting against Hezbollah in Lebanon, is buried at Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem Oct. 2, 2024.

Only the first one, lasting a week in 1978, came near to achieving its declared aim. Longer, larger invasions in 1982 and 2006 caused huge destruction, and casualties on both sides. They also left behind the incomparably more powerful Hezbollah that Israel is now seeking to defeat.

In announcing the latest incursion, Israel said it would be a “targeted and limited” operation.

Still, unlike the 1978 incursion, whose explicit aims were to deliver a short, sharp response to a terror attack inside Israel and to clear a border strip of rocket-firing positions, there is no indication this time of precisely what Israel wants to achieve, nor of how long it is planning to stay.

Nor has there been any clear signal so far of what kind of response to Iran’s unprecedented missile barrage Israel is contemplating.

Ever since the Hamas attack, the fear in Washington has been that, however aware the rival forces were of the “trio of truths” about Mideast wars, raw emotion might overwhelm reasoned restraint.

So far, that hasn’t happened.

But for many Israelis, a new factor has been gaining traction in the past few days.

Khaled Abdullah/Reuters

Students hold posters of Hassan Nasrallah, the assassinated chief of Lebanon's Hezbollah, during a rally in Sanaa, Yemen, Oct. 2, 2024.

It’s a belief that their stunning recent successes against Hezbollah have given them a unique opportunity to completely remove the threat the group poses and also deal a crushing blow to Iran.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett captured that mood when responding to Iran’s missile attack. He said Israel now had “its greatest opportunity in 50 years to change the face of the Middle East.” He urged the government to target Iran’s nuclear program and its energy infrastructure and to “fatally cripple” the regime.

Whether the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, chooses that path will doubtless become clearer in the next few days.

But the memories of past Lebanon invasions – two in particular – could also weigh on his mind.

The 1978 incursion was not only short and sharp. It had a well-defined diplomatic endgame: the creation, negotiated with Lebanese government support, of a United Nations buffer force in southern Lebanon.

The 1982 war was nearer in conception to the kind of counterstrike Mr. Bennett is advocating.

Crafted by then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, it was a full-scale invasion in which Israeli forces ended up besieging, bombarding, and entering the capital, Beirut.

It, too, aimed to “change the face of the Middle East,” by expelling Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization and installing a Lebanese Christian ally, Bashir Gemayel, as president.

It ended with Mr. Gemayel’s assassination, his supporters’ rampage against defenseless Palestinians in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and a 20-year Israeli occupation of a “security zone” in southern Lebanon.

And it had another, unanticipated after-effect: the emergence of an unprecedentedly powerful Lebanese Shiite militia, backed by Iran, inside Lebanon.

Hezbollah.

From the outside, the job as president of an Ivy League university might not seem so desirable right now. Prestigious? Sure. Lucrative? Certainly. But during the past year, some leaders have had tenures that lasted less time than it takes to make the dean’s list.

Claudine Gay, the first Black woman president at Harvard University, lasted just six months. Minouche Shafik at Columbia University and Liz Magill at the University of Pennsylvania fared slightly better at 13 and 17 months, respectively. But in the end, they all left unceremoniously – along with presidents from other prominent schools – in the wake of mass campus protests against the war in Gaza. So far, none of the universities have named permanent replacements.

That raises the question: Who would want to be a college president right now?

“It’s making the job of a president a really shaky job to take on,” says former college administrator Joe Sallustio, who hosts the “EdUp Experience” podcast.

Dr. Sallustio says that he has spoken to administrators who acknowledge they are wary.

“The pipeline of people that are willing to do that job – I see from those that I talk to – is not drying up, but it is not as juicy of a job as it used to be, because [presidents] are going to have all eyes on [them],” Dr. Sallustio says.

Schools like Columbia faced intense scrutiny after mass protests and encampments turned violent and scores of students were arrested. At the University of Southern California, the spring commencement ceremony was canceled due to arrests and protests on campus. Both former university Presidents Gay and Magill gave what many saw as troublesome testimony in front of Congress last December about their response to antisemitism on campus. At Cornell University, Martha Pollack retired after donors called for her ouster. Dr. Shafik resigned her post at Columbia before this school year started.

Yuki Iwamura/AP

Pro-Palestinian supporters protest the war in Gaza outside Columbia University, Sept. 3, 2024, in New York.

Because of the fallout from the protests, colleges have revamped student codes of conduct and increased security measures on campus. And universities are rethinking taking formal stances on divisive topics, something that had become common surrounding issues like climate change and the murder of George Floyd.

Recently, Penn became the second Ivy League school to end sociopolitical statements. Its new policy is that the school will not release statements in response to world or local events that don’t have “significant bearing on university functions.” Harvard announced a similar plan in May. Other schools adopting institutional neutrality are Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Stanford University, and the University of Southern California, as well as the University of Texas system.

Why some people no longer want that promotion

It has not been lost on those in academia that many of the presidents losing their jobs have been women and people of color. Stephanie Shonekan is someone who ordinarily might be eyeing a top spot. Two years ago, she was named dean of the University of Maryland’s College of Arts and Humanities. She’s an ethnomusicologist and educator who, as part of her scholarship, has published both a book and research in her field.

“I’m not a president and I don’t plan on being a president,” Dr. Shonekan said at a conference at Penn recently.

“I’ve kind of sat on the sidelines watching what has happened to many women of color the last couple of years,” she said, “and the scrutiny that they got was much more than their peers who are not Black and who are not women. So that gave me pause.”

Dr. Shonekan says she was turned off by how Harvard treated Dr. Gay. Her scholarship was called into question, and Harvard alumnus and billionaire Bill Ackman accused the professor of being merely a “DEI hire.”

Francis Chung/POLITICO/AP

Then-Columbia University President Minouche Shafik prepares to testify on Capitol Hill during a hearing on the university’s response to antisemitism, April 17, 2024. Dr. Shafik resigned in August.

“It’s like being the mayor of a small town”

“The best analogy for the college presidency is that it’s like being the mayor of a small town,” says Marjorie Hass, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, an association of 700 independent colleges and universities that supports leadership at those institutions.

Dr. Hass says that Ivy League colleges with ample resources are not a good example of what’s happening in the broader realm of academia, which is facing challenges like declining enrollment and even school closures. Many presidents find themselves in situations without large endowments, or with problems that can’t be solved by wealthy donors.

“You’re constantly in a situation where you can’t solve problems with money; you have to solve them with creativity, with vision, with real leadership skills. You’re moving an institution in a direction, inspiring people to act on behalf of a vision that you have worked with the community to develop,” she adds.

Dr. Hass was president at two schools: Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, and Austin College in Sherman, Texas. She says that people who take on presidencies have to go into them with a firm set of values – and be willing to walk away from the positions if those are threatened. In Texas, she was ready to resign if the state went through with a policy forcing the school to turn over the names of students without legal documentation.

“I had a very come-to-Moses conversation with my board leaders that that was not something that I could personally do,” she remembers. “If that became a legal requirement, either the board would stand by me as I civilly disobeyed the law or I would leave quietly, in a way that didn’t disrupt the institution.”

Texas never made that move mandatory, so she stayed. Dr. Hass concedes that for people of color and women, the additional pressures of being a pioneer are real. For university boards, she urges them to wake up to the fact that colleges are becoming more diverse.

“When boards hire pioneers, they need to be courageous,” Dr. Hass says. “They need to understand that there will be resistance.”

For her part, Dr. Hass says that she has not seen research that would indicate waning interest in the position of president. The job is tough, but fulfilling if you feel called to do the work, she says. Also, people aren’t going to feel sorry for people making the high salaries that presidents can command.

“I felt very badly for her”

Jared Mitovich, a senior, is editor of the daily newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania. He covered the protests on campus last spring. He followed Dr. Magill on Instagram and liked how she would post pictures of her dog and her daily activities. He hopes the next president will be “normal.”

Ken Cedeno/Reuters/File

Then-University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill testifies before a House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Dec. 5, 2023. Dr. Magill resigned in the wake of her testimony regarding antisemitism on campus.

“We heard from one of our board of trustee members who resigned, saying, ‘This presidential search that you’re embarking on is going to be a lot different and might be more challenging because it’s a unique time to be a college president,’” Mr. Mitovich says.

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of the history of education at Penn. He describes Dr. Magill as normal and relatable.

“I felt very badly for her,” says Dr. Zimmerman, who says he wasn’t friends with Dr. Magill but had met her a few times. “I do think she could have avoided the land mine.”

Dr. Zimmerman says that during her testimony she could have leaned on the fact that the university had not been consistent with its respect for free speech norms. He also challenges the university moving forward to create environments that are friendlier to free and open expression.

He thinks it is interesting that the four Ivy League schools replaced their presidents with interim leaders from the medical sciences and medical schools. He hypothesizes that this may be in part because they are used to overseeing large budgets and perhaps are less political.

For Dr. Shonekan to change her mind about pursuing a presidency, it would take a board of trustees that lets presidents have more freedom, as well as less input from donors on who should serve. And she would like a job that respects research.

“I want to create a place, a university where scholars can do incredible work that helps us understand the world,” she said. “All of the politicking is taking away from that.”

On a sunny September morning, Joyce Trindade works her way around the stalls of a secondhand clothing market here, distributing hugs and political pamphlets in equal measure. A candidate in this weekend’s Rio de Janeiro city council elections, she’s in the bustling commercial neighborhood to show that a woman’s place is in politics, she tells the vendors, all of whom are women.

This is the first time that Ms. Trindade, in her late 20s, is running for a seat on Rio’s city council. She’s one of 158,000 female candidates participating in nationwide local elections, and seeking to break into the overwhelmingly male world of electoral politics.

Despite electing a woman president in 2010, Brazil has one of the lowest levels of female political representation in Latin America, ranking almost dead last. Women hold just 17.5% of seats in the lower house of Congress, and are similarly absent from state and municipal bodies, even after more than two decades of legislative and grassroots efforts to increase their presence. As many Latin American countries have reached political parity – a benchmark associated with policies that often better serve women and children – Brazilian political parties have found ways to work around the law, and cultural stereotypes about women are widespread, experts say.

But the sorry numbers don’t tell the whole story: Twenty years after Brazil’s quota law was first passed in 1997, the number of women in the federal lower house doubled. The overall number of women winning office has continued to gradually increase over the past six years, as affirmative action laws are strengthened, voters become more aware of the glaring gender disparities in politics, and more female candidates enter races.

“There is growing awareness among women [that] they can be part of this change,” says Débora Thomé, a political scientist at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas university in São Paulo and author of a new book on female candidates. It’s a slow process, but there are signs that Brazilian society wants this change, she says.

“If you invest in women, you transform society,” says Ms. Trindade, who served as Rio’s youngest secretary for women under Mayor Eduardo Paes. She decided to run for office after realizing “how necessary it is to have more women, especially Black women, on the council” to help shape everyday policies in a field that has historically been hostile to Black Brazilians and women.

Constance Malleret

Luana Mota sympathizes with potential voters in São Gonçalo, a poor city on the outskirts of Rio, who are concerned about child care and public transport. “We women know firsthand what the problems are,” Ms. Mota says on Sept. 20, 2024.

Why politics?

Across the Guanabara Bay in São Gonçalo, a poor city on the outskirts of Rio, Luana Mota is on her third electoral campaign in four years. She arrives late for canvassing on a recent Friday because she was looking after her daughter. “It’s the same old, outdated crowd [in power]; we need renewal,” she tells three potential voters, sympathizing with their concerns about child care and public transport. “We women know firsthand what the problems are,” she says, to a chorus of assent.

Women are dominant in a number of ways in Brazil: They make up 52% of the electorate, serve as primary breadwinners in over half the country’s households (50.9%), and make up 52.2% of the workforce. They have more formal education than men do and increasingly occupy leadership positions in the private sector.

“And yet in this specific space that is electoral politics, we aren’t breaking in,” says Jacqueline Pitanguy, a sociologist and political scientist who fought to get women into the constituent assembly of 1988, responsible for drafting the current Brazilian Constitution. “It’s a discrepancy that’s hard to make sense of.”

Many point to Brazil’s patriarchal society and deeply ingrained sexism. “Gender-based violence starts at birth,” says Thânisia Cruz of #ElasNoPoder, a nongovernmental organization committed to increasing female representation. “Gender-based political violence begins when you tell a girl she isn’t capable of accessing positions of power.”

Brazil has a broad understanding of gender-based political violence that goes beyond physical aggression and includes any action or behavior that might limit women’s political rights. A law making this a crime was passed in 2021, but 58% of the country’s female mayors still suffer from gender-based political violence such as online hate speech, fake news, and verbal aggression, according to Instituto Alziras, another organization working to help women break into public office.

Brazil’s lack of political representation can’t be explained simply by sexism. Countries with similar cultures of machismo, such as Mexico or Bolivia, have achieved gender parity in Congress through laws requiring 50-50 representation on political ballots. Yet in Brazil, a 1997 law requiring a 30% gender quota on party lists for legislative elections at local, state, and national level has largely failed to get more women into office.

In the last municipal elections, four years ago, nearly a fifth of Brazil’s municipalities failed to elect even one woman to their local council.

Part of the problem lies with the electoral system: Imposing quotas on parties’ electoral lists does not guarantee the same gender division among elected representatives. “Brazil has an open-list system, where people vote for a specific person. ... Quotas work much better in closed-list systems,” says Dr. Thomé.

For years, political parties simply ignored the quota law. That was made harder by a 2009 electoral reform, but it’s still common for parties to circumvent the system by nominating uncompetitive female candidates who have little chance of winning. They’ve also made a practice of giving women fewer resources to run their campaigns.

“It’s a situation in which various women give up,” says Ms. Pitanguy.

Yuri Murakami/Fotoarena/Sipa/AP

São Paulo's mayoral candidate Marina Helena gives an interview after a debate Sept. 19.

“Bring other women with us”

The general election of 2018 was a turning point for Brazilian women, analysts say. That year, the Supreme Court ruled that female candidates must receive at least 30% of TV advertising airtime and, crucially, of the money in a public electoral fund, which the state provides following a ban on corporate donations. The number of women elected jumped more than 50% to reach 290 women at the federal and state levels.

Other key events brought women out onto the street that year and got them talking about their treatment in society in new ways, says Dr. Thomé. Then-far right candidate Jair Bolsonaro’s derogatory attitude towards women triggered concerns for the future of hard-fought rights. And the brazen murder of Marielle Franco, a Black, lesbian city councilwoman and human rights activist in Rio, sparked a movement to carry on her legacy.

This year, a record 34% of registered candidates are women – with over half of them Black like Ms. Trindade and Ms. Mota.

The real challenge is turning more of those candidacies into electoral victories, researchers and candidates say. That won’t happen without parties investing in women’s political careers over the long term.

“We really need to rethink how political parties operate, because basically politics is made of white men who control the whole financial structure,” says Ms. Mota. She wants to see more women in strategic positions, like treasurer or president, within party leadership.

“There’s still a lot to be done,” adds Ms. Trindade, as a nearby car equipped with a sound system blasts out her electoral jingle. “I hope we can pull together to bring other women with us.”

Reuters

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha visit the Memory Wall of Fallen Defenders of Ukraine in Kyiv, Sept. 13.

The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, certainly has plenty on his plate: End Russia’s land grab. Join the European Union. Tour the world for support. Keep the economy and military up and running. And oh, by the way, reconcile with neighboring Poland over historical grievances from more than 80 years ago.

Yes, amid a war for its survival as a nation, Ukraine decided this week to make some amends with Poland. Next year, it will start to locate the bodies of thousands of Polish villagers killed during World War II by Ukrainian nationalists. The issue, among many in a long and complex history between the two peoples, has been exploited in recent years by conservative Polish politicians. What is often known as the Volhynia massacre is also frequently used by Russia to divide Ukraine and Poland.

Ties between the two countries are as close as ever, especially as each seeks to stop Moscow’s penchant for expanding its borders by force. Ukrainian refugees were warmly welcomed by Poles in 2022 after the Russian invasion. Yet Ukraine now sees a need for a reckoning on the truth about past atrocities, as well as full reconciliation with Poland.

“[We] value every life, remember history, and defend freedom together,” President Zelenskyy said during a visit by Polish President Andrzej Duda last year. The two attended a church service in the Ukrainian city of Lutsk to commemorate those who died in the massacre. In a spirit of humility, President Duda said both nations made mistakes “for which we paid the ultimate price.”

In recent months, a new government in Warsaw has suggested that Ukraine move faster on the historical reckoning in order to become a EU member. “We do not want revenge, we do not demand punishment, we just want a dignified burial of our ancestors,” Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Władysław Teofil Bartoszewski told broadcaster Polsat.

After Kyiv’s announcement this week, the Ukrainian foreign minister pointed to shared geopolitical interests. “The past, no matter how complicated, must not jeopardize the modern-day efforts to address common challenges and the future of the Euro-Atlantic family,” said Andrii Sybiha. A clean slate along with a bit of forgiveness between Poland and Ukraine will be one more tool in the war against Russian aggression.