One September Saturday, Judge Wendell Griffen swaps his robes and courtroom for a crisp suit and a stage at a conference about mass incarceration. He’s the penultimate speaker, and he’s about to talk about the death penalty.

“But first a disclaimer,” he says, and brings up a slide. The crowd, full of like-minded activists, laughs.

“No opinion, statement, or conclusion in this presentation,” the slide reads, “represents the position of the Arkansas judiciary or any other person serving in the judiciary – whether in Arkansas or elsewhere.”

Judge Griffen, who serves in Arkansas’ 6th Judicial District, doesn’t occupy the most glamorous or powerful position in the US judiciary. Still, his decision to join an anti-death penalty rally last year understandably raised eyebrows, not least at the state supreme court, which permanently banned him from hearing death penalty cases last year.

But Griffen points out that judges have free speech rights too – and in an ongoing lawsuit, he claims the state supreme court has violated them.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Wendell Griffen, a judge to the Arkansas Sixth Circuit for Pulaski County, gives a disclaimer before his presentation at a conference with decARcerate, a grassroots organization working against mass incarceration, on Sept. 15, 2018 in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Griffen is an outlier, to be sure. Few judges are willing to air their views publicly on divisive social and political issues. And, observers say, the vast majority of cases decided by judges – including Griffen, and even the United States Supreme Court – do not involve divisive issues. But “the law is not set in stone as people think it is,” says Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “Judges are human beings, and I think judges know the law needs changes and it’s part of their role to make those changes.”

This reality also means that judging comes with the trappings of politics. While much of the job is simply applying laws to settle disputes, it on occasion involves discretionary power that can affect policy. Where judges are supposed to differ from politicians is in exercising their political power in a nonpartisan manner, not letting ideology influence their decisions.

The federal judiciary has become more partisan, however, including at the Supreme Court, which opened its new term Monday. There, the most divisive cases often see Republican- and Democratic-appointed justices voting in blocs. President Trump has said that reshaping the federal judiciary may be “the most important thing we do.”

Mr. Trump’s nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the high court has exposed this partisanship like never before, many experts say. In emotional and fiery testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, Judge Kavanaugh described the sexual assault allegations, which he denies, as “ a calculated and orchestrated political hit” fueled by anger against Trump’s election victory and “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.”

His testimony “sounded like something we’ve never heard before” in a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, says Professor Levenson.

“He can be angry, he can be frustrated, he can say, ‘This is too political a process,’ but he sounded more like a political candidate than a judicial nominee,” she adds. “We’ve all known [confirmations] are a political process, but the fact that he felt free to inject so many partisan references into his remarks I think says that this process has changed.”

Speaking at the Texas Tribune Festival the day after the hearing, conservative commentator Bill Kristol said the institution of the court “is damaged in a way that it really hasn’t been” before.

“We’ve had people who’ve been quietly partisan, people who’ve gone over the edge a couple of times in expressing their views. We’ve never quite had this,” he added. “The courts are pretty [respected], that’s what polls show and that’s what I personally feel. I do worry therefore about jamming through Kavanaugh on a purely partisan vote. I think there will be some damage done.”

In short, judicial behavior and decisionmaking are now under intense scrutiny. The tension between applying the law and deciding when to change it has become especially acute. For the general public it raises questions: How partisan has the judiciary become? And how do judges separate their personal views from their decisions in cases? For legal scholars it raises concerns.

“First we had this idea put forward by politicians that good judges mechanically apply the Constitution and there’s no judicial discretion,” says Kermit Roosevelt, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “Now the public is going to think all the judges are political, and neither of those is healthy.”

'Law is a value construct'

There are important nuances to consider here. Federal judges have become more partisan, in part because they are all confirmed through the highly polarized US Senate confirmation process and because they hear more contentious cases, experts say.

“At the federal level the president, through his advisers, is able to try to fine-tune the ideological balance that they want,” says Bill Raftery, a senior analyst at the National Center for State Courts.

“Over decades the system that’s in place at the federal level has been moving in one direction,” he adds, “and that appears to be a direction that’s much more partisan and much more combative over judicial appointments.”

State court judges like Griffen, who can reach the bench in dozens of different ways and generally hear more routine cases, are largely immune to this trend.

But all judges are subject to similar ethical obligations, and Griffen has been testing his ethical limits.

“There are some people who choose to believe that judges do not have values other than the values we pronounce or declare in our rulings, or that the values we have should somehow remain secret, unknown,” he says. “I’ve never bought into that.”

It’s the day after the mass incarceration conference, and Griffen is sitting in his office at the New Millennium Church in the gray slacks and a yellow and brown dashiki he wore while delivering his sermon that morning. Perhaps unsurprising for a preacher, he speaks comfortably, eloquently, and at length about why he’s “never bought into that.”

He speaks about Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark US Supreme Court decision declaring segregation unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. Not because the church is four miles from Little Rock Central High School, the scene of forced desegregation four years after Brown that led to the high court reaffirming its ruling, but because it exemplifies his view that “law is a value construct.”

“The text of the 14th Amendment [when Brown was decided] was the same language as in 1868 when it was ratified by Congress,” he says. “What changed was the notion of what the people who understand what that law means thought is right, and I think that’s healthy.”

“It’s important for we judges at every stage to hold that tension inside us and wrestle with it,” he adds. “I think it’s very dangerous for us to pretend the tension doesn’t exist.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

Judge Wendell Griffen hugs motivational speaker Ruby Welch at a conference with decARcerate, a grassroots organization working against mass incarceration, on Sept. 15, 2018 in Little Rock, Ark.

Civil rights era and the rise of partisanship

It took four years for the Brown ruling to take effect in Little Rock. In rural Delight, Ark., where Griffen grew up, it took another six. Watching future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and other black lawyers fight for and win civil rights in the courtroom, he says, inspired him to go to law school.

It was around the civil rights era when the federal judiciary started to become more partisan. And it has largely stayed that way ever since, according to research by Robert Carp, a political scientist at the University of Houston who has been studying the voting behavior of federal district judges for about 50 years.

The American judiciary is designed to be the least powerful but also the least accountable of the three branches of government. Federal judges have lifetime appointments, while state judges have longer terms than most other office-holders and no term limits. For this reason, public confidence in the judiciary’s fairness is critical to its strength, observers point out. Partisanship is a direct threat to that confidence.

From 1934 to 1966, Dr.Carp has found there was very little difference between how judges appointed by Republican presidents and judges appointed by Democratic presidents ruled. But starting in 1967, Democratic judges were “consistently more liberal than their Republican counterparts.”

Up to that point, the ideology of individual judges simply hadn’t mattered that much to presidents, he says. Lyndon Johnson, however, was aggressive in appointing liberal judges who would strengthen his push to broaden civil rights. He was followed by Richard Nixon, who campaigned in 1968 on the Supreme Court being too liberal and then confirmed more ideologically conservative judges.

For probably 90 percent of the cases federal district judges hear, “it doesn’t make any difference whether the judge is Republican or Democrat,” Carp says.

But it’s in that small number of cases – typically ones that raise ambiguous or unprecedented questions – where the particular views and ideologies of a judge do come into play. Those cases can affect large numbers of people, particularly as you climb the hierarchy of the federal judiciary to the Supreme Court, and have the biggest implications for public confidence in the courts.

“It’s not always malicious.… [Judges] have to do the best they can with an [ambiguous] situation,” says Carp. “If it were that obvious you could just have a computer do it, but there’s a human factor in it.”

“If it weren’t common knowledge what difference it makes based on what their values are there wouldn’t have been all this chaos over the Kavanaugh hearings,” he adds.

The Supreme Court seems to receive more media coverage and public attention than every other US court combined. While that is justified to a degree – its decisions apply nationwide, and it is the only court with the power to overturn precedents – federal courts of appeal have much more power than many people realize. And it is at this level that Trump could have the most influence.

Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

People wait in line to attend the opening day of the new term of the United States Supreme Court in Washington on Oct. 1.

The Supreme Court takes fewer than 100 cases a year, so the 13 federal appeals courts often have the final word on interpreting federal law. Trump has appointed 26 judges to these courts so far, a record pace, with many of them given the seal of approval by the conservative Federalist Society. Since most of those appointments have replaced other Republican-appointed judges, Trump’s ideological imprint on the appeals courts has been limited so far. But there is evidence that appeals courts have become more partisan in recent years, and that Trump’s nominees will continue, if not deepen, this trend.

In 2007, Judge Carolyn King – who at that point had served for 28 years on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, including a seven-year term as chief judge – gave a speech in which she described the rise of “clique voting” in appeals courts, voting “with or at the direction of other like-minded judges simply because they share common ideological objectives.”

Hearing upwards of 450 cases a year, she said, it would be rare for more than one judge in a three-judge panel (which is how appeals courts hear most cases) to have a deep knowledge of the record and the law in any one case.

Thus “a judge who has been selected primarily for his perceived predisposition to decide cases in accordance with a particular political ideology may be consciously or subconsciously influenced to decide cases in accordance with that ideology,” she added, “rather than … an impartial and open-minded assessment of what the law actually is.”

“After three decades of judicial appointments based on partisan ideology, it should come as no surprise that clique voting happens, albeit infrequently, in more than one (but, I think, not many)” federal appeals courts, she continued.

While most experts think it is still too early in their tenures to know just what effect Trump’s appointments will have on partisanship in the judiciary, anecdotal evidence shows they have strong conservative views on several contentious social and political issues.

• Last year Judge Amul Thapar, appointed to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, joined a 9-to-6 decision upholding the practice of a Michigan county board to open meetings with a prayer and ask audience members to “assume a reverent position.” (The Fourth Circuit had ruled the other way in a similar case last year.)

• Judge Amy Coney Barrett, appointed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, voted to deny the full court rehearing a panel decision dismissing a lawsuit against an auto-parts store over allegedly segregating its workforce.

• And Judge James Ho, appointed to the Fifth Circuit, described abortion in one opinion as “a moral tragedy.”

Ed Reinke/AP/FILE

Judge Amul Thapar, shown in Lexington, Ky., in 2006, was appointed to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals by President Trump. Last year, he ruled that a Michigan county could continue to open government meetings with Christian prayer.

Like any judge, the vast majority of cases heard by appeals court judges are nonpartisan and straightforward and don’t involve contentious social and political issues. Even the Supreme Court, which hears only the tough cases lower courts can’t resolve, rules unanimously far more than many realize – in 36 percent of its cases since 2000, more than any other result.

But split decisions – particularly when they split 5-to-4 along partisan lines, as several high-profile decisions from public union fees to Trump’s travel ban did last term – are what capture public attention.

“Judges differ in terms of what their ideological perspectives are. That’s true at the federal level and it’s true at the state court level,” says Mr. Raftery. “The vast majority of those have no great social or political implications.”

“The vast majority of cases filed in the United States are [also] filed in state courts,” not federal courts, he adds, “and the vast majority of those have no great social or political implications.”

The case of a father, son, and a backhoe

At one bench trial Griffen heard in September, social and political implications would have been impossible to find even with an electron microscope.

Two years ago, Bobby Wade Jr. sued his son, Scotty, after he refused to follow an eviction order. Scotty had breached his rental agreement by not properly maintaining the property, his father claimed. Scotty filed a countersuit alleging not only that it was his father who had breached the agreement, but also that his father promised him the property and that he was the rightful owner of a backhoe.

After hearing testimony from four members of the Wade family, another of Bobby’s tenants and two of Scotty’s friends, Griffen ruled in favor of Bobby on every claim.

“I don’t have the ability to make anyone feel good about my decision,” he said. “One-hundred percent of the time someone walks out of my court upset, but everyone is entitled to their day in court, and I hope you felt you got that today.”

A death penalty case it was not. But those cases rarely came to Griffen – until last year at least.

The state of Arkansas had not executed anyone between 2005 and April 2017 when, with a key lethal injection drug expiring at the end of that month, it scheduled seven executions over 10 days. On Good Friday, after a complaint from the distributor, Griffen issued an order temporarily blocking the state from using one of its lethal injection drugs. A few hours later he attended an anti-death penalty rally outside the governor’s mansion, tied with rope to a cot “in solidarity with Jesus.”

KTHV/TEGNA/AP

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen protests executions on April 17, 2018, outside the Arkansas governor's mansion in Little Rock. He has been barred from hearing death penalty cases because of his activism. A Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission panel filed charges against six Arkansas Supreme Court justices over their handling of the case. A complaint against a seventh justice is still pending.

Three days later the Arkansas Supreme Court banned him from presiding over future death penalty cases, or cases concerning the state’s method of execution. State lawmakers called for him to be impeached.

Griffen did not only protest against the death penalty. A few days earlier he wrote in a blog post that the premeditated killing of defenseless persons, even those convicted of murder, “is not morally justifiable.” He points out, however, that three weeks before his protest he dismissed a petition from death row inmates appealing their method of execution because an earlier state supreme court ruling compelled him to. (He did also call the higher court’s ruling “plain and troubling.”)

“I think it’s a disqualifier ... to act like your thoughts are somehow irrelevant to how you rule,” he says. “What you have to decide is how you are going to shepherd your thoughts so that your personal views are not the controlling factors on the outcome of a case.”

This philosophy reaches to the highest levels of the US judiciary. The late Justice Antonin Scalia regularly defended his vote upholding the right of protesters to burn the American flag even though he disagreed with it. “If it were up to me, I would put in jail every sandal-wearing, scruffy-bearded weirdo who burns the American flag,” he said in 2015. “But I am not a king.”

The expectation that judges will separate their personal views from their legal rulings is becoming more acute as experts say that the element of surprise – where a judge may rule counter to their individual ideology – is disappearing, at least when it comes to that small minority of cases that deal with divisive issues. That trend crystallized this summer with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, for decades the Supreme Court’s “swing” justice, some experts say. His retirement is “the farewell to even the pretense of dispassionate, nonpartisan jurisprudence” on the high court, Garrett Epps wrote for The Atlantic. Dahlia Lithwick wrote for Slate that his departure is “a bracing reminder that there is no longer [an ideological] center” on the court.

Christina Huynh/AP

After marrying Allan Cox (L.) and Steve Thomas (R.), Judge Wendell Griffen signs their marriage license on May 12, 2014, in Little Rock, Ark.

Ideology may only factor into those rare cases that concern divisive issues, whether they be an abortion case before the Supreme Court or a lethal injection case in an Arkansas circuit court, but it’s those cases on which faith in the judiciary is increasingly staked. In those moments, Griffen believes people need to have faith in the judges who comprise the judiciary.

“One may have a viewpoint about a subject matter controversy without being partial to the litigants in a controversy.... That’s what our system turns on,” he says. “Trust is fundamental, and if we do not trust our processes, if we distrust our processes, we’re not going to trust the people.”

Correction: This story has been updated to correct where Griffen grew up.

R. Norman Matheny/The Christian Science Monitor/File

The Statue of Liberty stands in New York Harbor.

It’s a statement that sounds compelling but which, like much else in recent US politics, has invited dueling critiques from left and right: that America is more than just a country, or a culture. “America is an idea.”

If so, we’ve just seen a dramatic retreat from so-called American exceptionalism: the belief that the idea is special, and that America’s democratic experiment has given it a role to inspire others around the world. The forum was last week’s annual gathering of world leaders for the UN General Assembly. President Trump delivered an address defining the US as a superpower, but a country like any other – each with a “distinct culture, a rich history … and the values that make our homelands like nowhere else on earth.”

While the speech was entirely consistent with his “America First” credo, the wider shift of which it’s a part could have real-world consequences.

In my own 45-year experience as a foreign correspondent, the outside world does see the “idea of America” as exceptional: an amalgam that includes democracy and the rule of law; freedom of worship, expression, and protest; and the promise of opportunity at the core of the old American Dream.

America isn’t universally loved. Its critics point out that the “idea of America” has not always been perfectly honored – whether at home, for African-Americans and other minorities; or abroad, where realpolitik has often meant cozying up to autocrats. But even adversaries have seen America as somehow special. When I first met PLO leader Yasser Arafat, an aide welcomed me with a lecture about “American-Zionist imperialism.” Later, he drew me aside and asked how to get a green card.

Two issues in particular – freedom of expression, and the world’s response to refugees and asylum-seekers – may bear watching. On both, the US has long played a crucial role, not just through policies or actions, but the “soft power” example of the American idea. 

Especially in countries like Syria or the former USSR, or the black townships of state-of-emergency South Africa, I’ve been struck by how dissidents or democracy activists viewed America’s First Amendment freedoms: not merely with admiration or envy, but as a kind of gold standard to which they believed their own governments should ultimately be held to account.

The First Amendment is alive and well in the US. The question for press-freedom advocates overseas is whether Mr. Trump’s refrain of “fake news” and his characterization of critical voices as “enemies of the people” could further embolden regimes like Vladimir Putin’s in Russia or Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s in Turkey, where independent journalists have been silenced, even killed.

America has also played the leading role in helping refugees worldwide: now numbering nearly 70 million, according to the UN, including some 25 million fleeing war or fear of persecution. That, too, has been seen as part of the American idea, embodied in the words of welcome on the Statue of Liberty.

The US remains the largest donor to the UN’s refugee program. Since the 1980 US Refugee Act helped kickstart an international effort to address the problem, around three-quarters of the 4 million people resettled have come to America.

The number admitted fell steeply, however, in the first year of the Trump administration: from nearly 100,000 to 33,000. Next year’s cap has been set at 30,000. The question that has prompted abroad is whether at a time when other countries, especially in Europe, are facing pressure from anti-immigration nationalists, Washington’s example will make the argument for offering refuge doubly difficult.

A wider potential impact was highlighted by Israeli politician Natan Sharansky after the US-North Korea summit. He was imprisoned in the USSR as a human rights activist. When Trump omitted any reference to North Korea’s human rights record, suggesting North Koreans supported Kim Jung-Un’s dictatorship with “great fervor,” Mr. Sharansky wrote about how important US-led criticism of Soviet human rights violations was in keeping his and other dissidents’ hopes alive.

Trump should “understand how demoralizing it is for dissidents … to commend the supposed love affair between Kim and his people,” he said. “Such statements undermine America’s moral standing and dampen North Korean dissent, the most powerful unconventional weapon in the fight against dictatorship.”

Jose Luis Magana/AP

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein leaves his home on Sept. 27, 2018, in Bethesda, Md.

This week Rod Rosenstein may finally face the grim prospect of a face-to-face meeting with President Trump to explain something many Trump supporters consider wholly inexplicable.

According to a recent New York Times report, in May of 2017, Mr. Rosenstein, the newly installed deputy attorney general, allegedly suggested to senior FBI and Justice Department officials that he might wear a concealed recording device to gather evidence against the president. He also reportedly raised the idea of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office.

Rosenstein has said the New York Times report was inaccurate, and his defenders said his comments about wearing a wire were made in jest. But to critics, the report seemed to verify a central thesis of many Republicans – including conservative members of Congress – of a “deep state” conspiracy to undermine the Trump presidency.

Washington has been abuzz with anticipation that Rosenstein might resign or be fired. For now, it appears more likely that he will remain in his job – at least until after November’s midterm elections. 

But analysts are watching closely to see what happens next. Any move by the White House to oust the deputy attorney general could dramatically undercut the Trump-Russia investigation.

“If Rosenstein is no longer in that job, whoever comes in to serve as the acting attorney general over the Russia investigation could slowly strangle that investigation and could constrain its resources,” says Sarah Turberville, director of the Constitution Project at the Washington-based Project on Government Oversight.

“The [Rosenstein replacement] could decide there won’t be any new approvals of new surveillance or warrants,” she added.  

Rosenstein is expected to participate this week in a closed-door session with members of Congress, who also want to closely question him about his May 2017 comments.

Many are furious at what they see as Rosenstein’s stonewalling of longstanding congressional requests for Justice Department and FBI documents dealing with the early stages of the Trump-Russia investigation. Among the documents Congress has been seeking: memos written by then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who is currently under investigation for allegedly misleading Justice Department officials investigating an unauthorized leak to the news media, and who was fired last March. The Times report was based on leaked content from the McCabe memos. 

On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee took the unusual step of issuing a subpoena for the McCabe memos.

South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy (R), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was asked on Sunday what he hoped to learn from a meeting with Rosenstein this week. “I need to see the memos,” he said in an interview on Fox News. “I need to ask Rod what he said, and then we’ll get to what he meant. Those may or may not be the same thing.”

An independent operator 

Rosenstein has occupied a somewhat unique role in the Trump administration.

He has spent his entire career at the Justice Department, including serving twelve years as the top federal prosecutor in Maryland under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. He was confirmed as deputy attorney general in the Trump administration by a Senate vote of 94 to 6.

He has cultivated an image as an independent operator, a kind of nonpartisan fair broker. But his role at the center of the Trump-Russia investigation has made him into something of a hero on the left and a lightening rod on the right.  

After Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself, it was Rosenstein who decided to appoint Robert Mueller to investigate suspected collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians who meddled in the 2016 election.

And it was Rosenstein who approved an expansive scope for Mr. Mueller’s investigation, making it broad enough to include allegations of obstruction of justice against Trump himself.

Since his confirmation, Rosenstein has personally supervised every aspect of the investigation, including signing a controversial secret application under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to authorize spying on a former advisor to the Trump campaign.

(No charges have been filed against the target of that year-long surveillance. There is no indication whether the surveillance yielded intelligence about members of the Trump campaign, the Trump administration, or the president.) 

Rosenstein also approved the FBI’s controversial raid on the home, office, and hotel room of Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Mr. Cohen has since pleaded guilty to tax evasion, bank fraud, and campaign finance charges, and has reportedly agreed to cooperate with prosecutors against Trump.

During this same time, Rosenstein has steadfastly refused to turn over documents requested by Trump supporters in Congress who are investigating what they see as a conspiracy among certain officials at the Justice Department, FBI, and the broader intelligence community to undermine the Trump campaign and, later, the Trump presidency. 

In an effort to circumvent Rosenstein, members of Congress went directly to the president. Last month they convinced Trump to order the immediate public release, without redaction, of a range of documents related to the Trump-Russia investigation.  

Justice Department officials pushed back, warning that release of the documents could have a “perceived negative impact” on the special counsel’s Trump-Russia investigation. A few days later, Trump reversed his directive, and instead asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to review the documents and release them on an expedited basis. No specific timetable was imposed.

Mixed response to allegations

Trump supporters have been divided over how the president should respond to the recent revelations about Rosenstein. Fox News host Sean Hannity has been a loud and frequent critic of both Rosenstein and Mueller. But he suggested the leak to the New York Times was a trap designed to infuriate Trump and trigger the firing of Rosenstein in advance of November’s midterm elections. Mr. Hannity advised Trump not to fire the deputy attorney general. 

“It is all a set-up,” Hannity warned on his program.

In contrast, Laura Ingraham, whose Fox News program follows Hannity’s on the network’s evening lineup, advocated for the immediate firing of Rosenstein.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) says the president just needs to have a candid conversation with the deputy attorney general. “I wouldn’t fire Rosenstein unless there is some real credible evidence, other than [from] McCabe, that he did something improper,” he said on Fox News.

But Democrats warned that Trump could use the controversy over Rosenstein’s alleged comments as an excuse to replace the deputy attorney general with a loyalist – who might then fire Mueller or quietly restrict the scope of the investigation in ways the public would not see.

“The president has the right to remove anybody who serves at the pleasure of the president, but a right is different than the responsible or the reasonable thing to do,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D) of New York said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“Rosenstein must stay there to defend the integrity of the [Trump-Russia] investigation until it is finished,” he said. “That is very important for the integrity of American democracy.” 

Inside her downtown studio, Iranian artist Rene Saheb is surrounded by the tools of her craft: a multicolored riot of art supplies, and a number of large, unfinished canvases upon which she explores her psyche – and the state of Iran’s.

The paintings often intricately explore modern interpretations of ancient Persian fables, on themes ranging from telling lies and thievery to flattery and the human spirit. One painting, still unfinished after years of work, reflects how the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s continues to affect everyday lives of Iranians, from the ubiquitous presence of “martyrs” to daily vocabulary.

Iran’s legions of creative artists have served as a window into the state of the country’s deeply simmering cultural scene since long before the 1979 Islamic revolution. They often labored in the dark those first two decades, in low-profile places with tiny audiences of friends, until a renaissance with the 1997 election of reformist President Mohammad Khatami.

The genie was out of the bottle, and despite new restrictions imposed during the 8-year tenure of archconservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the number of art galleries flourished, along with the global profile of Iran sculptors, painters, and filmmakers.

Wearing denim overalls and a flowery headscarf, Ms. Saheb, who at 31 has been a professional artist for a decade and is a member of Iran’s Institute for Promotion of Contemporary Visual Art, speaks passionately about her art.

Ironically, her on-going exploration of the Islamic Republic’s most revered narratives – the “sacred defense” war against Iraq, and the depth of Shiite belief for many Iranians – was triggered in 2012 by depression after her US visa application was rejected, despite being accepted at a prestigious New York art school.

“I have to continue living in my country and discover who I really am,” Saheb recalls thinking. She began noticing posters of Iran's martyrs, felt for the hundreds of thousands who died, and saw how black flags were flown during the Shiite mourning month of Muharram.

Artistic solutions

Like many of their fellow citizens, Iran’s artists are grappling with renewed US sanctions, facing shortages of art supplies, cash, and hope. In response Saheb has chosen a purist path.

“I don’t care about sanctions because under these pressures, people will find a different way,” says Saheb, who muses about, for example, using papier-mâché instead of bronze in sculptures.

“A real artist can find an artistic way,” she says.

Iran is brimming with art. Murals decorate the sides of buildings with vast images from modernist works to, of course, martyrs. Parks and intersections are laden with sculptures, many funded by municipalities.

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art still has a large pre-revolution collection of Western works, from Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock to Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. It is a legacy that exemplifies how art has always stirred this nation, despite its tumultuous politics.

“We are masters of survival,” says Nazila Noebashari, owner of Aaran Art Gallery in Tehran, who knows hundreds of Iranian artists. When President Trump first announced the United States would withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal and reimpose sanctions, she was inundated with unhappy, anxious calls.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Nazila Noebashari, owner of the Aaran Gallery, stands in the gallery space hung with a photographic exhibition in Tehran, Sept. 16, 2018. Ms. Noebashari says she knows hundreds of Iranian artists, and says, 'We are masters of survival.'

But as weeks went by, the tone became defiant.

“Artists kept coming and said, ‘You know what? This is nothing new. We are here. We are artists. We have no other option but to work,” says Ms. Noebashari.

There will be changes, she says. Long gone are the days of the Iran-Iraq War, when no Iranian galleries were open, and artists had to quietly show their work in their garages or teach inside their houses.

For the past two decades, Iranian artists have instead enjoyed good raw materials, from canvas to paints to bronze, and a surge of spaces that number 50 active galleries in Tehran alone.

Intersection of art with politics

Iran’s artists have done relatively well since the election of centrist President Hassan Rouhani in 2013. The spread of gentrification, cafes, and even newly established theater houses in central Tehran has “accelerated” under Mr. Rouhani, whose officials have been “much gentler toward arts and culture,” Noebashari says.

“We say there are always wonderful currents running in the depths in Iran, and whenever we get the chance – whenever there is security and safety – then we flourish, and this is what we have been doing for many, many centuries,” she says.

Still, Iran’s art scene is never far from politics. And as Rouhani has not been able to fulfill promises of economic prosperity and greater social freedoms, he has been targeted by artists, too.

Actor and film director Reza Tavakkoli, for example, said last year that during Rouhani’s first term “no attention was paid to culture, art, and artists,” and their living conditions, especially in cinema, “only got worse day by day” and were sometimes akin to “absolute poverty.”

This spring, months after protests rocked Iran, several artists declined Rouhani’s offer to attend a fast-breaking iftar dinner during the holy month of Ramadan, to protest the stark conditions for common Iranians.

“At a time when most of our people live in hardship and their food tables are empty, I cannot swallow this Iftari [dinner],” the actress Parastou Golestani wrote on her Instagram account.

But despite the uncertain politics and specter of sanctions – or perhaps because of them – art is advancing in Iran.

Images from an unremembered war

Saheb continues to probe the layered meaning of Persian proverbs, using hens, foxes, and even sheep to show the truth of human frailty, as well as goodness. And though she doesn’t remember the war, her mother was pregnant with her during the last year of fighting, when Iraqi bombs were falling on the capital.

Her unfinished painting shows buildings on fire and martyrs, framed by a cat and a helmet, with layers of other images such as flutes that evoke a line of Iran’s war poetry: “Listen to the flute, it tells the story of separation.”

In one installation, upon a replica anti-tank mine, Saheb attached a metal toy soldier that normally lies on its belly. Upright, it holds its gun above its head, and with knee bent it looks like a ballet dancer.

She turned it into a simple music box to evoke a childhood memory, and gets goosebumps when she watches it. It is called Khorramshahr, or City of Happiness, after an Iranian city where the fighting was so intense it was nicknamed Khuninshahr, or City of Blood.

“He’s not fighting, it’s not war – it’s dancing,” she says.

“All the concepts are the mirror of my mind, and all the things I faced in my life. For me, art is like therapy, scanning all my life and clearing it up, to start anew and find myself.”

Mike Blake/Reuters

A man rides an electric Bird scooter in San Diego. City officials are pushing back against companies that leave electric rental scooters on sidewalks without warning.

Dockless scooters are one of the newest entries in the sharing economy that also includes businesses like Airbnb and Uber. Maybe surprisingly, the devices have also become controversial.

Q: How do they work?

Dockless electric scooters are cousins to the dockless bicycle and work through the same concept. Step 1: Download a dockless scooter app. Bird, Lime, and Spin are three of the largest in the business at the moment. Step 2: Use the in-app GPS tracker to locate a scooter. Step 3: Scan the bar code on the scooter to unlock the wheels. Step 4: Kick off and cruise to your next location.

In most cases, scooter riders must have a driver’s license, and some cities require riders to wear a helmet. It usually costs $1 to unlock a scooter and 15 cents for every minute of riding.

“[The scooters] are so efficient financially. I’m able to barely spend any money,” says Bryan Caicedo, who lives in Baltimore and takes a dockless scooter to work every morning. “I know people I’ve worked with in the past who take Uber on a day-to-day basis, and that costs them anywhere from $10 to $15. Or you can ride a scooter and pay literally a tenth of that.”

Businesses seem to be making a good profit from this model. Bird, for one, is said to be worth about $2 billion. 

Q: So what’s the catch?

The appeal – and potential downfall – of dockless scooters is that riders can leave them just about anywhere. Even with suggestions that a device stay on the sidewalk for the next patron to pick up, the scooters have been stowed in alleys and elevators. In some cases, San Francisco Bay has been a repository.

People who work for the scooter companies pick up the devices, recharge them overnight, and return them to public spaces by morning in easy-to-find clusters. The rechargeable aspect of the scooters is part of their environmental appeal. Their battery range is as much as 30 miles.

Q: Are the problems serious?

Because riders can leave the scooters wherever they want, the devices sometimes block sidewalks, which can pose accessibility issues for those with disabilities.

Also, in some cities riders are getting hurt – or causing crashes with other people – in what seem to be large numbers. In addition, city officials have complained that the scooter companies simply dropped their gear on sidewalks, following a tactic that other sharing-economy businesses have employed: Do now, ask for forgiveness later.

Dennis Herrera, San Francisco’s city attorney, sent cease-and-desist letters to dockless scooter companies after many of the devices turned up on San Francisco’s sidewalks overnight.

“Despite previous warnings, your company LimeBike (‘Lime’) has continued to operate an unpermitted motorized scooter rental program in the City and County of San Francisco ..., creating a public nuisance on the City’s streets and sidewalks and endangering public health and safety,” Mr. Herrera wrote to Lime. “Lime must immediately cease and desist from unlawful conduct....”

San Francisco is among the cities passing regulations to deal with scooter issues.

Q: What else is being done?

Many people who have had negative experiences with dockless scooters say they lack accountability. In the majority of cases, the scooters don’t have license plates to help with identification in the event of an accident.

Some law firms are dedicating resources to addressing the problems associated with dockless scooters. Catherine Lerer, a partner at McGee, Lerer & Associates in California, says her firm receives calls every other day about riders getting injured. She’s taken on a number of cases involving dockless scooter accidents.

Adi Raval, a Lime spokesperson, says the company collaborates with cities to overcome any issues that arise with the scooters. Overall, he says, communities have embraced Lime’s scooters. “We’re seeing scooter ecosystems being formed across this country,” he says.

Q: How can somebody ride a scooter safely?

Ms. Lerer says some of the most common issues she hears about are failed brakes and malfunctioning wheels. So before riders begin their journey, they should make sure the brakes work and the wheels aren’t locked up.

Also, riders should be aware of local regulations. Does a city require scooters to be operated in the street? Are helmets a must?

And when a trip ends, the rider should make sure the scooter is parked in a place where others can find it easily and it isn’t blocking public pathways.

Reuters

A car hauler heading for Detroit, Michigan, drives on the road to Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

A great cloud of uncertainty has been lifted over the massive North American economy.

On Sept. 30, the United States and Canada finally reached a trade agreement that, when joined with a recent US-Mexico pact, will replace the region’s outdated accord from a quarter century ago. The new agreement will do more than simply help the three economies generate more growth (they already trade more than $2 million a minute). It will also allow them to better compete with other global production centers, such as China.

Yet beyond reshaping the region’s contours of competition, the accord should also allow healing to begin from the serious political damage done over the past two years by US insults and criticisms of its two closest economic partners. Positive views of the US in Mexico and Canada have plummeted, jeopardizing relations on a host of security and other noneconomic issues.

Much work still needs to be done to finalize the new agreement, which is called USMCA (think of the song “YMCA”) for each country’s name and which replaces the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The three still need to resolve the US decision to impose “national security” tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada and Mexico, which led those countries to impose retaliatory tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of US farm and manufactured products.

Yet all three can claim wins. Each showed flexibility by dropping or modifying divisive proposals. Now legislators in each country must ascertain what the pacts might actually yield. Stakeholders from the business, farm, labor, and consumer sectors will offer their perspectives. In the US, the International Trade Commission will also provide its assessment.

At first glance, it looks as if the “modernization” aspects of the agreement are as good as or slightly better than what was in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a proposed deal that collapsed after a US withdrawal under President Trump. Many of the changes in USMCA reflect changes in trading and investments since the early 1990s, especially with the rise of internet commerce.

Many parts of the pending treaty deserve careful scrutiny.

For example, unions will be looking at what the government of Mexico has committed to do to improve workers’ rights and how the US can enforce compliance with those commitments. US energy companies and other investors will want to examine how changes will affect their rights in Mexico, where reforms have attracted many billions of dollars in foreign investment. It is also important that the agreement not hinder energy integration across North America, which has brought the continent closer to real energy security than ever in the past 50 years.

From a Mexican perspective, the agreement will allow outgoing President Enrique Peña Nieto to sign the agreement before he leaves office on Dec. 1 and will allow incoming President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to start his six-year term with a fixed framework for economic relations with a northern neighbor that buys 80 percent of its exports. 

For Canada, the agreement similarly provides a stable environment for commerce with the country that buys 75 percent of its exports and hosts massive amounts of Canadian investment. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will have time to build support for the agreement before he faces national elections in 2019. 

After many months of bitter and often unfounded criticisms from the US, the key actors in this accord need to support this attempt to upgrade and broaden trade relations. North America can and should have a bright future built on a foundation of cooperation.