Law
Torture and the Law
Bush told ABC news he knew administration officials met to discuss the use of torture against detainees. Could a prosecutor charge him with a crime?
Using Law to Justify Torture
The Bush White House might be on shaky ground in relying on memos written by administration lawyers to justify "enhanced interrogation" policies.
Are Contractors Above the Law?
Contractors operating abroad claim they are immune from lawsuits because they work for the U.S. military.
Mukasey Won't Enforce the Law -- Again
Once again, Attorney General Michael Mukasey has announced that he will not be enforcing the law. Taking another “let-bygones-be-bygones” approach, he told the American Bar Association yesterday that he's not going to bother prosecuting anyone in the Justice Dept. for illegally hiring career government lawyers based on political considerations rather than merit.
Judicial Partisanship Awards
Is it true that liberal justices are more partisan than conservatives ?
Experts Predict Slew of Torture Suits
Last week the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decided to take a second look at the case of a Canadian citizen interrogated by the U.S. in Syria.
Torture and the Presidential race
While more and more evidence comes out that Bush administration officials illegally authorized torture of suspected terrorists, in violation not only of international law but of established U.S. law as well, both leading presidential candidates have, for the most part, remained silent on whether they support further investigation and prosecution, if the evidence warrants it.
Still, the statements they’ve made so far about torture, justice and accountability give us a strong idea of where they stand on the question.
At his recent speech in Berlin, Sen. Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee, made a point of asking: “Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law?” Though he didn’t lay out what exactly he would do to enforce the law, his comments elsewhere indicate he’s open to investigating and even prosecuting policy-makers for war crimes if the evidence turns out to support the charges. As he told a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter in April:
Spying Law Challenged
FISA opponents claim the recently updated law is a violation of the Constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The Berkeley Tempest
For one Berkeley professor, a recently released torture memo authored by Yoo raises questions about the meaning of academic freedom.
EFF, ACLU Intervene in Wikileaks Case
Last week a Federal judge in San Francisco "shutdown" the whistleblower site Wikileaks over a private dispute between a Cayman Islands bank and a disgruntled former employee. The former employee posted company documents to Wikileaks, which the bank claims violated a confidentiality agreement and banking laws.
Online rights group, Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU have now intervened in the lawsuit, the bank filed against the site and Dynadot, Wikileaks' domain registrar. EFF and ACLU argue that Judge Jeffrey S. White should not have ordered the closure of the entire site -- an unecessarily far-reaching move.
Boumediene: Victory of Law
The decision also raises questions about the future of the Guantanamo Bay facility's 270 detainees.
The Supreme Court v. Reality: FDA Version
Today the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that you can't sue a manufacturer for a defective medical device if the Food and Drug Administration has already approved the device. Legally, perhaps, the decision has its merits. But practically the decision ignores the myriad scandals surrounding the agency that call its core competency into question.
California's Oily Justices
Former employee Braxton Berkley was one of hundreds to sue Lockheed Martin and other chemical supply companies—some of which are among the world’s largest oil companies—for injuries resulting from exposure to toxic chemicals. Berkley, who says the injuries resulted from his work on military planes, appealed his case to the California Supreme Court. But the case was dismissed.
Why? Four out of seven justices held stock in some of those oil companies, and therefore couldn’t rule on the case.
Apparently, U.S. Contractors in Iraq Are No Longer Above the Law
Daphne Eviatar wrote an excellent piece last week pointing out that private contractors in Iraq are not currently subject to any U.S., Iraqi or international law. More than five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq that finally may be about to change.
Ends & Means in War Crimes Trials
Osama bin Laden's alleged driver, Salim Hamdan, was convicted on five of 10 charges. Meanwhile, a former Serbian leader stands trial in The Hague. Will future generations deem both as just verdicts?
Playing Politics With Immigration Law
The politicization of Justice Dept. hiring is not just an embarrassing Bush administration scandal-- it's affected asylum seekers and immigrants. So says a new report by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse or TRAC. Using Justice Dept. hiring data, TRAC found that the number of immigration judges have slightly decreased while immigration cases have exponentially increased. This is despite Alberto Gonzales vowing in 2006 to hire 40 new immigration judges.
Justice Dept. Auditor Gives Long Version Of Why Monica Goodling Broke Law
Attention summer beach readers: As JJ mentioned in his "State of Play" post, the Justice Dept. inspector general released an eight-chapter, 146-page report today on how the Attorney General's office of Alberto Gonzales illegally played politics with its hiring. We've known for more than a year that Monica Goodling, the former Justice Dept. White House liaison, and Kyle Sampson, chief of staff for Gonzales and Goodling's immediate supervisor, violated federal govt. policy -- and federal law -- by taking into account the political affiliations of candidates for career Dept. positions. Today's report, though, details Goodling's remarkable lack of subtlety in her zeal for a more Republican Justice Dept.
Captain Kangaroo's Wacky Guantanamo War-Crimes Trials
Speaking of kangaroo courts, Josh White had a great piece in the Washington Post yesterday about the military tribunals, known as military commissions, currently underway for the 9/11 conspirators held at Guantanamo. (The Justice Dept. is taking the position that last week's Boumediene ruling doesn't affect the tribunals.) The cases against them are, in many respects, predicated on classified information. A basic feature of any adversarial system of justice -- and particularly, you know, ours -- is that the accused has the right to view the evidence against him or her. Oh well.
Legal Theory Seeks to Curtail Tort Cases
A House committee hopes to prevent the spread of a legal doctrine that shields industry from consumer lawsuits.
Court of the People?
The judiciary deserves a look these days, with the next president expected to replace two or three aging Supreme Court Justices.
