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Defense lawyers in the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump say they want to put someone on the stand whose testimony could back up their assertion that Terrence Bradley, a witness in their effort to disqualify the prosecutors running the case, gave misleading testimony.

The new information comes from Cindi Lee Yeager, a deputy district attorney in neighboring Cobb County, Ga., whom the defense lawyers said they spoke to on Friday about conversations she has had with Mr. Bradley.

At issue is a key matter in the disqualification effort: the timing of the romantic relationship that developed between Fani T. Willis, who as the Fulton County district attorney is leading the prosecution of Mr. Trump, and Nathan Wade, the Atlanta-area lawyer she hired to manage the case.

Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade have said that a romance developed between them after she hired him in November 2021. But the defense lawyers have tried to prove the romantic relationship started earlier.

If they are correct that Ms. Willis hired a boyfriend for a lucrative, high-profile job, it might bolster their argument that she engaged in “self-dealing” when she took a number of vacations with Mr. Wade, and thus created a conflict of interest that should result in her removal from the case.

Defense lawyers thought that Mr. Bradley, a former law partner of Mr. Wade who also served for a time as Mr. Wade’s divorce lawyer, might offer some clarity as to when the romance began. But that did not happen. In a text exchange in January, he told one of the defense lawyers in the case that he “absolutely” thought the romance began before Ms. Willis hired Mr. Wade.

But when called to the stand last week, Mr. Bradley said that he had been “speculating.”

In a filing on Monday, lawyers for David J. Shafer, a co-defendant in the case, said that they had spoken to Ms. Yeager, who said that Mr. Bradley had told her the prosecutors’ relationship began before Mr. Wade went to work for Ms. Willis.

The filing stated that according to Ms. Yeager, Mr. Bradley told her that “Mr. Wade had definitively begun a romantic relationship with Ms. Willis during the time that Ms. Willis was running for district attorney in 2019 through 2020.”

According to the filing, Ms. Yeager said she also overheard Ms. Willis call Mr. Bradley last September, prompted by a news article that mentioned how much her office was paying Mr. Wade and his law partners. (Mr. Bradley’s work for the office was not related to the Trump case.)

“They are coming after us,” Ms. Willis told Mr. Bradley during the call, according to the account offered by Ms. Yeager that is described in the defense filing. “You don’t need to talk to them about anything about us.”

The context of Ms. Willis’ alleged call to Mr. Bradley is not clear; In any case, it would have taken place before the disqualification effort began in January and before it was known that Mr. Bradley would be subpoenaed to testify.

On the stand last month, Mr. Bradley testified that he “did not personally know” Ms. Willis. “My interaction with Ms. Willis was never where I would pick up the phone and talk to her,” he said.

Also unclear is what impact, if any, Ms. Yeager’s statement could have on a judge’s decision whether to disqualify the prosecutors. The judge, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, has already wrapped up testimony on the disqualification question; on Friday, he said he would rule on the matter within two weeks.

In their filing on Monday, Mr. Shafer’s lawyers asked the judge to allow them to put Ms. Yeager on the stand “in the event that the court reopens the hearing to receive additional evidence.” They noted that Mr. Trump and Ms. Willis’s office have also asked the judge to allow for additional testimony.

At a hearing on Friday, Judge McAfee heard final legal arguments from both sides but said that he could hold another hearing if evidence emerged to require it.

A lawyer for Mr. Bradley did not return calls seeking comment. Ms. Yeager, who has run for local office previously as a Republican — but says she currently considers herself a Democrat — declined to comment on the filing on Monday. A spokesman for the district attorney’s office did not comment on Monday, but Ms. Willis and her office have described the disqualification effort as legally baseless and an effort to generate salacious headlines.

If successful, the effort to remove Ms. Willis would throw the criminal case against Mr. Trump into turmoil, forcing a state agency to find another prosecutor to take it on. A new prosecutor could move to keep, modify or drop the case against Mr. Trump, who was indicted in August with 18 allies on charges of conspiring to overturn the former president’s 2020 election loss in Georgia.

Since then, four defendants have pleaded guilty.

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that states may not bar former President Donald J. Trump from running for another term, rejecting a challenge from Colorado to his eligibility that threatened to upend the presidential race by taking him off ballots around the nation.

Though the justices provided different reasons, the decision’s bottom line was unanimous. All the opinions focused on legal issues, and none took a position on whether Mr. Trump had engaged in insurrection, as Colorado courts had found.

All the justices agreed that individual states may not bar candidates for the presidency under a constitutional provision, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, that prohibits insurrectionists from holding office. Four justices would have left it at that, with the court’s three liberal members expressing dismay at what they said was the stunning sweep of the majority’s approach.

But the five-justice majority, in an unsigned opinion answering questions not directly before the court, ruled that Congress must act to give Section 3 force.

“The Constitution makes Congress, rather than the states, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates,” the majority wrote, adding that detailed federal legislation was required to determine who was disqualified under the provision.

The decision was produced on a rushed schedule, landing the day before the Super Tuesday primaries in Colorado and around the nation. In a series of unusual moves, the court did not announce that it would issue an opinion until Sunday and did not take the bench to do so on Monday, instead simply posting the decision on its website.

The decision was the court’s most important ruling concerning a presidential election since George W. Bush prevailed in Bush v. Gore in 2000.

In an interview on a conservative radio program, Mr. Trump said he was pleased by the outcome. “I was very honored by a nine-to-nothing vote,” he said. “And this is for future presidents; this is not for me.”

The court’s three liberal members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — expressed frustration at what they said was the majority’s needless overreach in a joint concurring opinion. They said the majority opinion was meant to insulate the court and Mr. Trump “from future controversy.”

An earlier version of the decision suggested that the gap between the majority and the three liberal justices had once been even wider. As noted by Mark Joseph Stern, a legal affairs reporter with Slate, a forensic examination of the decision posted on the court’s website appeared to show that what eventually became the joint concurring opinion was once a partial dissent attributed to “Sotomayor, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part.”

The final product was thus the apparent result of a compromise in which all nine justices could say they were united on a narrow bottom line. Still, the scope of the majority opinion was the subject of harsh criticism from the liberal justices.

“The court today needed to resolve only a single question: whether an individual state may keep a presidential candidate found to have engaged in insurrection off its ballot,” they wrote. “The majority resolves much more than the case before us.

“Although federal enforcement of Section 3 is in no way at issue,” the opinion said, “the majority announces novel rules for how that enforcement must operate. It reaches out to decide Section 3 questions not before us, and to foreclose future efforts to disqualify a presidential candidate under that provision. In a sensitive case crying out for judicial restraint, it abandons that course.”

The first line of the concurrence appeared to be intended to needle Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who was probably a principal author of the unsigned majority opinion. Quoting a line from the chief justice’s concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 decision eliminating the constitutional right to abortion, the three liberals wrote: “If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.”

They added that the majority had decided “novel constitutional questions to insulate this court and petitioner” — Mr. Trump — “from future controversy.”

“In doing so,” the three justices wrote, “the majority shuts the door on other potential means of federal enforcement.”

They gave some examples of ways in which the majority opinion undermined the force of Section 3. For instance, they wrote, the majority “forecloses judicial enforcement of that provision, such as might occur when a party is prosecuted by an insurrectionist and raises a defense on that score.” In requiring tailored legislation from Congress, the three justices wrote, the majority seemed to be “ruling out enforcement under general federal statutes requiring the government to comply with the law.”

In all, the three justices added, “the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in a brief concurring opinion, agreed that the majority had gone too far, saying that it should not have addressed “the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced.”

But she urged the public to focus on what was common ground among the justices.

“This is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency,” she wrote. “The court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the court should turn the national temperature down, not up.

“For present purposes,” Justice Barrett wrote, “our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.”

There was, indeed, something approaching consensus on both the scope of state power and the undesirability of a patchwork of differing approaches.

“States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office,” the majority wrote. “But states have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the presidency.”

The alternative, the majority said, was chaos.

“An evolving electoral map could dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties and states across the country, in different ways and at different times,” they wrote. “The disruption would be all the more acute — and could nullify the votes of millions and change the election result — if Section 3 enforcement were attempted after the nation has voted. Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos — arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the inauguration.”

The case arose from a challenge brought by six Colorado voters who sought to disqualify Mr. Trump from the ballot for the state’s Republican primary based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The provision was adopted after the Civil War to forbid those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

A Colorado trial judge ruled that Mr. Trump had engaged in insurrection but accepted his argument that Section 3 did not apply to the president or to the office of the presidency.

The Colorado Supreme Court affirmed the first part of the ruling — that Mr. Trump had engaged in an insurrection. Among his efforts, as detailed in the courts’ opinions: setting out to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election; trying to alter vote counts; encouraging bogus slates of competing electors; pressuring the vice president to violate the Constitution; and calling for his supporters to march on the Capitol.

But the Colorado Supreme Court’s majority reversed the part of the trial judge’s decision that said Section 3 did not apply to the president or the presidency.

Mr. Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, setting out more than half a dozen arguments about why the state court had gone astray and saying his removal would override the will of the voters.

His primary argument in the U.S. Supreme Court was that the president was not one of the officials covered by Section 3, which does not mention that office by name. That argument did not attract votes on Monday.

The case, Trump v. Anderson, No. 23-719, is not the only one concerning Mr. Trump on the Supreme Court’s docket. The justices said last week that they would decide whether he was immune from prosecution for his role in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, delaying trial proceedings in his criminal case as they consider the matter. And the justices already agreed to decide on the scope of a central charge in the federal election-interference case against Mr. Trump, with a ruling by June.

Michael Gold contributed reporting from New York.

Four former Twitter executives sued Elon Musk on Monday, accusing the billionaire of withholding severance payments worth $128 million after he fired them from the company during his 2022 takeover.

When Mr. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, he fired Parag Agrawal, its chief executive; Ned Segal, its chief financial officer; Vijaya Gadde, its head of legal and policy; and Sean Edgett, its general counsel. Mr. Musk later renamed the company X.

The executives had clauses in their contracts stipulating that they could receive severance if Twitter was no longer a public company — so when Mr. Musk took the company private in October 2022, they were entitled to the payments, the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims. The severance included one year’s salary plus unvested stock awards.

Mr. Agrawal’s annual salary was $1 million, and he was awarded $12.5 million in stock that was scheduled to vest incrementally, according to his offer letter for the role. In the event of an involuntary termination, Mr. Agrawal was entitled to a so-called golden parachute payment of $60 million, according to a Twitter securities filing. Under those same circumstances, Mr. Segal would receive $46 million and Ms. Gadde $21 million, according to the filing.

At the time of the takeover, Mr. Musk said that he could fire the executives “for cause” to avoid paying them severance. Mr. Musk told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he would deny the executives’ severance payments, saving himself about $200 million. He told Mr. Isaacson he would “hunt” the executives “till the day they die.”

Lawyers for the executives wrote in court documents: “This is the Musk playbook: to keep the money he owes other people, and force them to sue him. Even in defeat, Musk can impose delay, hassle and expense on others less able to afford it.”

The executives previously sued Mr. Musk for legal fees they incurred while responding to investigations into the company. In October, a Delaware judge ordered Mr. Musk to pay them $1.1 million to cover those expenses.

A representative for X declined to comment. A lawyer for Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of posting secret intelligence reports online agreed to plead guilty on Monday in exchange for a sentence of up to about 16 years in prison and a pledge to comprehensively brief officials on what he leaked.

The airman, Jack Teixeira, withdrew his not-guilty plea during an appearance in Boston federal court and pleaded guilty to six counts of “willful retention and transmission of national defense information” under the Espionage Act, according to court documents.

The judge in the case, Indira Talwani, scheduled a hearing in September to determine whether she would sign off on the deal, which includes a sentencing range of 11 to over 16 years. It would be unusual for a judge to make major alterations to a deal that required approval from top American intelligence and law enforcement officials.

As part of the agreement, the Justice Department agreed not to charge Airman Teixeira, 22, with any additional violations of the Espionage Act, which, when combined with the other charges, could have resulted in a sentence of up to 60 years in prison had he been convicted.

Airman Teixeira, looking a bit younger than his age but stouter than in previous appearances, was led into a packed courtroom in an orange jumpsuit.

In the audience was Airman Teixeira’s mother, father and stepfather, members of the news media and a throng of curious court workers who filed in and out as the hourlong hearing wore on.

Prosecutors began by ticking off a list of Airman Teixeira’s reported misdeeds: how he made sure no one was around when printed out classified documents and posted them to the social media platform Discord; how he mistakenly believed he could maintain anonymity and “plausible deniability” online; how he deleted chats, killed a Discord channel and chucked his smashed iPad into a dumpster as police closed in.

When Judge Talwani asked if Airman Teixeira disagreed with any of the facts as stated, he responded simply, “No, your honor.”

At the end of the hearing, Judge Talwani asked the pivotal question. “Are you, in fact, guilty of the counts charged?”

“Yes, your honor,” he responded.

As he was handcuffed, Airman Teixeira turned and gave a tight, tense smile to his family before being led back into federal confinement.

Airman Teixeira has been in custody since being arrested at his mother’s house in North Dighton, Mass., last spring. He was responsible for one of the most far-reaching leaks of sensitive information in years — a huge embarrassment that revealed how even a low-level service member could retrieve and disclose defense secrets for months without being stopped.

Prosecutors said they found no evidence of espionage, and concluded that Airman Teixeira had posted secrets to a chat group on the social media platform Discord to impress people he met online with insider information, particularly details of the war in Ukraine.

“I’m not going to speculate on exactly what was his motivation,” said Joshua S. Levy, the acting U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, speaking after the hearing. “I think that’s something only he truly knows. We followed the leads where they went.”

A senior federal law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation publicly, said that the government would not have approved a reduced sentence if it had discovered Airman Teixeira had more nefarious motives.

Michael K. Bachrach, Airman Teixeira’s lawyer, said he would push hard for a sentence at the lower end of the range and cited his client’s youth and immaturity as an explanation for his reckless behavior.

“He is very much a kid,” Mr. Bachrach told reporters outside the courthouse. “We will be able to establish why his youth played a substantial role.”

Airman Teixeira feels remorse, he added.

His family blamed the Air Force for creating an environment that allowed him to retrieve and post secrets, which they called “a lackadaisical work atmosphere” with a “lack of adequate training and oversight,” in a statement.

Airman Teixeira, who worked at an intelligence unit at an air base on Cape Cod, took the material off computers after conducting unauthorized searches of databases, even after a superior warned him to stop, according to the original indictment.

Among the secrets disclosed was information on the provision and delivery of military equipment to Ukraine and a highly sensitive report on Russian and Ukrainian troop movements. Officials said the revelations about the troop movements might have compromised how American intelligence gathered the information and from whom.

He also shared a report on the hacking of an unnamed American company’s accounts by “a foreign adversary” and details of an unspecified foreign plot to target U.S. troops abroad that described “where and how” an assault might take place, the indictment said.

A New York Times investigation of more than 9,500 of his messages painted a portrait of a young man who was fixated on weapons, mass shootings and shadowy conspiracy theories.

In the middle of struggling through the opening monologue of the Golden Globes in January, the comic Jo Koy did something unusual, if not unprecedented, for the host of a major awards show: He blamed the writers.

“I wrote some of these — and they’re the ones you’re laughing at,” he said of his jokes, prompting writers across the country to grind their teeth.

Koy, who later apologized, endured some light mockery a week after the show, when his ex-girlfriend Chelsea Handler followed up a successful joke in her monologue at the Critics Choice Awards by saying, “Thank you for laughing at that. My writers wrote it.”

If something positive came from this episode, it’s that a spotlight was put on a corner of the showbiz work force that tends to remain in the shadows: the joke writers for awards shows like the Oscars on Sunday.

“It’s a small fraternity, and they always remained anonymous,” said Bruce Vilanch, the best known of this breed, who said his acclaim for the job, which included starring in the 1999 documentary “Get Bruce!,” had spurred resentment among his predecessors. “They were not personalities in their own way. They never talked about this stuff. I think there was almost a code.”

Indeed, two of the three veterans who wrote jokes for the Golden Globes monologue declined to comment for this article, and a third didn’t respond to a request. While the hosts get all the attention, the writers do work that is less understood and equally tricky, requiring skill, self-awareness and even diplomacy.

Not only do writers not get much credit if things go well, they also don’t always get to attend. Megan Amram wrote for the disastrous host pair James Franco and Anne Hathaway at the 2011 Oscars and didn’t get a ticket to the ceremony. “James and Anne didn’t have the same, let’s say, creative taste,” she told me, using the kind of careful language you hear from this class of writers to describe the challenges they face. Those include the balancing act of finding jokes that will kill both in the room and on television, for audiences of vastly diverse demographics.

Amram, who later wrote for the host Jimmy Kimmel at the 2018 Academy Awards, likens writing jokes for the Oscars to giving a best man’s speech at the world’s biggest wedding. “You want it to be a little bit edgy, but not so much that it turns off the grandparents.”

Inside the ceremonies, the audiences are tough: self-conscious, nervous and, as the night unfolds and more of them lose, in a souring mood. Robert Wuhl, a comic and actor who wrote for Billy Crystal when he hosted the Oscars, thinks that there shouldn’t even be comedy bits after the monologue. “It stops the show cold,” he said. “It’s not our show. Do the first eight to 10 minutes and get out of the way. It’s already too long.”

Kimmel, who is back as host of the Oscars on Sunday, benefits from bringing his late-night staff, which knows his voice. There are generally two sets of awards show writers: those who work for the host and those who write for the presenters and others on the show, and the two teams rarely intermingle. Compared with the Globes, which used three writers for the host and five overall, there is a small army for the Academy Awards on Sunday — about two dozen.

One of them, the comic Jesse Joyce, said he once wrote an entire Tonys monologue for Kevin Spacey by himself despite never seeing a single show on Broadway that year. He said awards show bits demand a more formal style. In late night or standup, he explained, you gum up the language to make it seem conversational. “There’s a polish to award show jokes,” he added. “I think it’s a better showcase for sharp, precise jokes, so I kind of admire it on a clinical skill level.”

If writing for hosts can feel like an abstract exercise in joke construction, working for presenters is all about navigating real-world chaos.

Dave Boone, who has won three Emmys and has worked on 120 shows since 1998, spoke nostalgically of the days when the producer Buz Kohan, maybe the most storied figure among these writers, would call Gregory Peck or Sophia Loren and knock out a few amusing lines.

Now nearly every joke goes through a battalion of publicists, managers, even spouses. Some stars ask for bits but then never do them. Others agree but get cold feet at the last moment. Then there are the ones who insist on ad-libbing — and blame the writers on air when their jokes don’t land.

“What’s sometimes frustrating is when you get a note from a talent manager who says, ‘We don’t want to mention the superhero movie, and he doesn’t want to be funny,’” Boone said. “And then the talent shows up on the day and says, ‘You know, this is kind of dry. Wouldn’t it be funnier if I came out in a superhero outfit?’”

Boone said the job there is to bite your tongue. But this is what leads to stilted banter. “Unfortunately, there have been so many awkward moments that have been water-cooler conversation that award shows can get a bad rap.”

Boone’s favorite show is the Tony Awards, for which he has been the head writer for the last 18 years. It’s not because the participants understand performing live (though they do), but because theater people respect the word of the playwright. He fondly recalled the time James Earl Jones contacted him to ask about adding a comma to make a line read better.

Renee Gauthier, who was one of two people writing material for presenters at the Globes, said the only person who didn’t have any notes was Oprah Winfrey. When Koy criticized his writers, Gauthier, who had also submitted monologue jokes, told me her phone blew up with texts from outraged comics. “I didn’t think it was cool for that to be said about writers,” she said. “But as a comedian I understand. He kind of freaked out and got in his head.” She added: “I forgive him.”

Ironically, part of the problem may have been a failure to listen to writers. Gauthier said they suggested Koy begin with a self-deprecating joke drawing attention to his status as a relative unknown next to Meryl Streep, Martin Scorsese and other major Hollywood figures in the room. Gauthier’s version was something like: “I know you don’t know who I am, but I know exactly who you are.” Echoing many of the writers I talked to, she said he would have been helped by poking fun at himself. “Jo Koy is known, but this is an A-list party. They aren’t all your peers.”

Then again, writers tend to understand their place in the pecking order better than star hosts. Koy might have been unknown to some in the audience, but as a stand-up, he regularly packs arenas. He opened by saying how thrilled he was to be there, then added that it’s “a dream come true not just for me but everybody in here.”

Vilanch, asked what he would have done, said, “The whole monologue would have been: Who am I and why am I here?”

He also expressed sympathy for Koy, pointing to the shots of stars not laughing. “Did he really need the reaction of Taylor Swift to swiftly bring condemnation upon his soul?” he said.

French legislators on Monday voted to explicitly enshrine access to abortion in the Constitution, making their country the first in the world to do so.

Acutely aware that they were breaking historical ground from the grand assembly room inside Versailles Palace, the politicians delivered impassioned speeches about women’s rights around the world, paid homage to the courageous Frenchwomen who had fought for abortion rights when it was illegal and leaped up to offer standing ovations.

“We are sending the message to all women: Your body belongs to you and no one has the right to control it in your stead,” Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said before the gathered lawmakers voted 780-72 for the amendment.

The amendment declares abortion to be a “guaranteed freedom,” overseen by Parliament’s laws. That means future governments will not be able to “drastically modify” the current laws funding abortion for women who seek it, up to 14 weeks into their pregnancies, according to the French justice minister, Éric Dupond-Moretti.

Amending the Constitution is not unprecedented in France; the current Constitution has been modified over 20 times since it was adopted in 1958. But it is rare. Lawmakers last amended the Constitution in 2008.

The impulse for the latest change was the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, an issue raised repeatedly by legislators. But the move also reflects the widespread support for abortion in France, and a successful campaign by a coalition of feminist activists and lawmakers from multiple parties.

“France is showing the right to abortion is no longer an option, it’s a condition of our democracy,” said Mélanie Vogel, a Green Party senator who has been a major force behind the bill. “The French Republic will no longer remain democratic without the right to abortion.”

Ms. Vogel said in an interview, “I want to send a message to feminists outside of France. Everyone told me a year ago it was impossible.” She added: “Nothing is impossible when you mobilize society.”

The Conference of Bishops, representing the Catholic Church in France, opposed the amendment. But in France, a country where calls to protest regularly bring hundreds of thousands to the streets, the opposition was notably scarce.

With the vote, France became the first country in the world to explicitly write access to abortion into its Constitution, according to five constitutional experts.

“It’s not stating reproductive choices or the right to have children; it’s a very different language when you say access to abortion,” said Anna Sledzinska-Simon, a professor of comparative constitutions and human rights law at the University of Wroclaw in Poland. “The French are calling it by its name — that’s crucial.” She added: “The whole world is watching.”

Constitutional experts say the amendment broadens the mold of France’s fundamental text, written by men for men while ignoring their dependence on women.

“It’s a big milestone, because it goes to the very foundation of this idea that constitutions were about men’s autonomy,” said Ruth Rubio-Marín, author of a book on gender and constitutions. “Women’s role as citizens was essentialized and defined as being breeders and caretakers,” she said. “That was left out. It was just simply assumed as part of this modern society that was being built.”

Other constitutions, particularly those of younger democracies such as Ecuador, have been broadened to include things like support for caregiving and the equal division of domestic work. But they often remain more aspirational than actionable, said Ms. Rubio-Marín, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Seville in Spain.

“That this is happening in the old world, in an established democracy where the constitution is taken seriously — in that way, it’s historic,” she said.

The fight for legal abortion in France burst into public view in 1971, when 343 French women signed a manifesto written by the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir declaring that they had undertaken clandestine, illegal abortions and demanding that the law change.

Four years later, a female minister, Simone Veil, successfully pushed through a temporary law decriminalizing abortions and offering limited access to health services to terminate pregnancies.

Throughout the special legislative session on Monday, lawmakers paid tribute to Ms. Veil, a Holocaust survivor and human rights champion, as well as Gisèle Halimi, the former lawyer whose defense of a 16-year-old student who had had an illegal abortion after having been raped led to her acquittal in 1972. The case was a turning point on the road to the legalization of abortion.”

“We have followed in your footsteps and like you, we succeeded,” said Senator Laurence Rossignol, a former women’s rights minister. She added that French feminists would continue to fight internationally against “those who resist,” citing politicians including Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“Liberty, equality, fraternity,” she said, citing the French national motto. “And, if I could add, sorority.”

Over the past five decades, the law assuring abortion rights has continually been expanded, to the point that it is now considered among the most liberal in Europe. It includes the right to fully funded abortions for women and minors up to the 14th week of pregnancy upon request, with no waiting period or required counseling sessions.

Later abortions are permitted if the pregnancy is deemed a risk to the woman’s physical or psychological health or if the fetus presents certain anomalies.

After the Covid pandemic hit, France quickly ensured that women seeking abortions could receive medical consultations virtually, said Laura Rahm, a researcher at Central European University, in Vienna, who examined access to abortion in France for a five-year European study.

“A system always shines or cracks when it’s put under pressure,” she said. The French system had clearly shone, she said.

Still, studies show that 17 percent of women travel outside their home regions — called departments in France — for abortion services, sometimes because of a growing shortage of medical facilities locally.

And though the law states that women should have a choice of medical or surgical abortions, in practice that’s often not the case, said Sarah Durocher, national co-president of Le Planning Familial, a French equivalent of Planned Parenthood.

Putting the “guaranteed freedom” to have an abortion in the Constitution means that will have to change, she said.

“This will give birth to other things,” said Ms. Durocher, noting that 130 centers offering abortion had closed in France over the past decade. “For example, real policies so there is effective access to abortion.”

Despite the new amendment, French feminists say that France remains a male-dominated society where sexism persists. Settling into her perch overseeing the session as the president of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet pointed out that she was the first woman in French history to preside over such a gathering.

But unlike in the United States, the issue of abortion in France is not politically charged and highly divisive. Instead, most French people believe abortion is a basic public health service and a woman’s right. A recent 29-country survey showed France having the second-highest support for legalized abortion in the world, after Sweden.

However, attempts to introduce abortion into the Constitution had failed before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. The decision motivated French lawmakers to safeguard the practice, presenting multiple bills within months. Last year, the French government introduced its own bill seeking to enshrine it in the Constitution.

Just last week, members of a coalition of lawmakers and feminist organizations feared that the Senate, dominated by conservatives, might derail the amendment, but it passed.

“We managed to create this environment, where if you voted against this change, it meant you wanted to maintain the right as a legislator to potentially prohibit abortion in the future,” said Ms. Vogel. “So if you are not against abortion, you had no reason not to vote in favor of it.”

She added, “That narrative penetrated society.”

Ségolène Le Stradic and Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.

Allen H. Weisselberg, a longtime lieutenant to former President Donald J. Trump, pleaded guilty to felony perjury charges in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday, the latest twist in his tortured legal odyssey.

Mr. Weisselberg, who for years has remained steadfastly loyal to Mr. Trump in the face of intense prosecutorial pressure, is not expected to implicate his former boss. That unbroken streak of loyalty has frustrated prosecutors and already once cost him his freedom.

Mr. Weisselberg, who was led into the courtroom in handcuffs wearing a blue surgical mask and a dark suit, conceded that in recent years he had lied under oath to the New York attorney general’s office when it was investigating Mr. Trump for fraud. The attorney general, Letitia James, sued Mr. Trump in 2022, accusing him of wildly inflating his net worth to obtain favorable loans and other benefits.

That civil case recently ended with a judge imposing a huge financial penalty on the former president — more than $450 million with interest. Mr. Weisselberg, who was also a defendant, was penalized $1 million plus interest and permanently banned from serving in a financial position at any New York company.

Although Mr. Weisselberg has committed no violent offense, prosecutors argue that perjury undermines the broader ends of justice and cannot be ignored. They sought a 5-month sentence for him.

“The harm caused by the crime of perjury tears at the very fabric of our justice system,” Gary Fishman, one of the prosecutors on the case, said at the plea hearing.

Mr. Weisselberg’s agreement with the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, comes weeks before the former president will stand trial on unrelated criminal charges. That case, also brought by Mr. Bragg, stems from a hush-money payment, made on Mr. Trump’s behalf, to a porn star during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Throughout Mr. Trump’s legal travails, Mr. Weisselberg has often been caught in the middle, squaring off against several law enforcement agencies in both civil and criminal trials. As the long-serving chief financial officer for the Trump family business — the former president’s trusted moneyman — Mr. Weisselberg was considered a linchpin in efforts to implicate Mr. Trump.

Mr. Weisselberg has been rewarded for his loyalty to the family he served for nearly a half century: When he left Mr. Trump’s company last year, he was awarded a $2 million severance package that required him not to cooperate with any law enforcement investigation unless legally required.

He also paid a price. In 2022, he pleaded guilty in a tax fraud case. Although he did not implicate Mr. Trump, he agreed to testify against the former president’s company, the Trump Organization, at its trial on the same charges.

In that case, the company was convicted, and Mr. Weisselberg received a five-month sentence. With good behavior, he served nearly 100 days behind bars at the notorious Rikers Island jail complex.

With this latest plea, Mr. Weisselberg now faces another five-month stint at Rikers.

Mr. Weisselberg’s plea agreement comes at an inopportune time for the former president, just weeks before he is expected to go to trial on a raft of felony charges accusing him of falsifying business records related to the hush-money deal with the porn star, Stormy Daniels. The trial, the first criminal prosecution of a former president, is scheduled to begin with jury selection on March 25.

Mr. Bragg has accused Mr. Trump of orchestrating a cover-up of a potential sex scandal involving Ms. Daniels that could have influenced the outcome of the 2016 election.

The guilty plea on Monday could strengthen Mr. Bragg’s hand heading into the trial, deterring other witnesses in Mr. Trump’s circle from lying on the stand. The perjury charges could also discredit Mr. Weisselberg, who has disputed details of the prosecution’s evidence in the case involving the 2016 election.

For his part, Mr. Trump has lashed out at Mr. Bragg, a Democrat, accusing him of persecuting Mr. Weisselberg. And Mr. Trump’s allies have lamented that Mr. Weisselberg will have to again serve time behind bars well into his 70s, and have disputed that he lied in the civil fraud case brought by Ms. James, another Democrat.

Ms. James filed her lawsuit in 2022, and it led to a trial late last year. In February, the judge presiding over the nonjury case sided with the attorney general, concluding that Mr. Trump had manipulated the value of his properties. The judge, Arthur F. Engoron, imposed a sweeping array of punishments, including the more than $450 million judgment.

A focus of the case — and Mr. Weisselberg’s testimony — was Mr. Trump’s triplex apartment in Trump Tower, which is 10,996 square feet, but had been listed for years on his annual financial statements as measuring 30,000 square feet.

Before the trial, in a deposition under oath, Mr. Weisselberg played down his involvement in valuing the triplex.

And on the witness stand at the trial, Mr. Weisselberg claimed that he “never focused” on the unit.

Yet soon after, Forbes magazine, which compiles a list of America’s richest people, published an article citing emails and notes showing that Mr. Weisselberg “played a key role in trying to convince Forbes over the course of several years” of the apartment’s value.

Justice Engoron concluded that Mr. Weisselberg was not a credible witness, in part because of his severance agreement, which is paid in installments over time, as if to keep Mr. Weisselberg in thrall to the Trump family.

“His testimony in this trial was intentionally evasive, with large gaps of ‘I don’t remember,’” the judge wrote in his decision last month, adding that the severance agreement “renders his testimony highly unreliable.”

“The Trump Organization keeps Weisselberg on a short leash,” the justice wrote. “And it shows.”