Jonathan Peters Finally, my parents can be proud of me. No longer do they have to tell their friends that I practice law or teach or write. They can say I’m a lobbyist, all because of Richard Kaplan, the mayor of Lauderhill, Fla. Kaplan said last week that reporters and columnists are lobbyists. Specifically, he refused to speak with a reporter unless she filed for public inspection “whatever is required as a lobbyist.” …
DOJ’s Aulaqi Memo Under Fire
Billy Corriher A law professor recently compared the Department of Justice’s legal memo justifying the Anwar al-Aulaqi killing to the Bush administration’s notorious torture memos. Professor Noah Feldman suggested that the OLC again twisted the law to achieve certain ends. Feldman says that critics of the torture memos believed “there was something wrong with the president acting as judge and jury in the war on terrorism.” The ACLU and others have also argued that the Obama administration’s …
Freedom of Information Act Requests and the War on Terror
Huaou Yan It looks like October will be a bad month for those of us hoping for a little more government transparency in the War on Terror. As Billy Corriher of this blog has already noted, in the context of the secret OLC memo justifying the assassination of Anwar al-Aulaqi, that it would be unfair to criticize the OLC without having actually seen its legal reasoning. However, it is also worth nothing that this month has also seen two important developments in how we might get to (or not get to) …
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Justice Scalia Is Speaking for Just About Everybody on This One
Frank Housh It was a great mistake to put routine drug offenses into the federal courts. United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia testifying before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on October 2, 2011. As I was finishing law school in 1993 and making the job interview rounds, I found myself sitting across from a pleasant but tired and distracted federal judge who was interviewing me for a judicial clerkship. My carefully worded resume sat unmarked in front of him. …
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Unknowable Consequences: Israel’s Prisoner Swap
Catherine Moore Today’s 1:1,027 prisoner swap between Israel and Hamas represents a number of important shifts in the Middle East dialogue. Gilad Shalit was taken prisoner in 2006 after terrorists tunneled from Gaza into Israel to murder two IDF soldiers and take 19 year-old Shalit captive. Although Shalit was literally a few miles from Israel, the IDF was unable to successfully extract him, leading to a five-year campaign of vigilance and solidarity across Israel. While his homecoming will …
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Terrorist Suspect Tried in Civilian Court; Head for the Hills!
Mark Wilson Last week, the “underwear bomber,” also known not nearly so well by the name Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, pleaded guilty to eight charges in a Detroit courtroom. Then, without warning, terrorists burst into the courtroom and blew up the entire building. Congress banded together, speaking in one voice, and passed a bill that required terrorism suspects to be tried in off-shore military tribunals. Okay, so it’s pretty clear by now that I made that story up. Obviously Congress would …
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