Last month the Supreme Court rendered its latest installment on the issue of judicial supervision of national security. Winter v. NRDC has received surprisingly little attention, but it strikes me as an important example of judicial deference to the Executive Branch in military affairs. This language in particular is noteworthy: We “give great deference to the professional judgment of...
Chevron wins a big Alien Tort Statute verdict in a case involving its alleged complicity in killings by Nigerian security forces. This is no doubt an important case (though probably not as important at Andrew McCarthy thinks it is -- see "Sovereignty, Vindicated" over at NRO). On the heels of a lower-profile case last year involving Drummond that...
Peter Raven-Hansen has a review of Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency in the latest American Journal of International Law which includes some thoughts on law professors as top government lawyers. His basic line, with John Yoo as the example: better not to use a perch in the government to validate your academic theories. But in this fact lies a risk for...
An association of 15 human-rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, and the Save Darfur Coalition, released a devastating report today on the Sudanese government's cynical -- and mendacious -- PR campaign to convince the international community that it is committed to bringing peace to Darfur. Here is a snippet of the executive summary: This report focuses on four...
The Institute for War & Peace Reporting has a must-read article today about how ordinary Darfuris view the OTP's decision to seek arrest warrants for the rebel leaders allegedly responsible for killing 12 peacekeepers in 2007. According to the article -- and all the usual caveats about anecdotal evidence apply -- the response is uniformly negative: Yasir, an IDP (internally displaced...
Remarkable story in today's Wall Street Journal, front page, December 1, 2008, about a Latvian economist arrested and held for several days - not finally charged - for expressing pessimistic sentiment about the stability of the Latvian financial system: How to Combat a Banking Crisis: First, Round Up the Pessimists Latvian Agents Detain a Gloomy Economist; 'It Is a Form of Deterrence' I have stuck...
Violence in Kenya following the disputed 2007 elections left more than 1,300 people dead and more than 500,000 internally displaced. Last month, Kenya's Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence released a 527-page report -- the Waki Report -- that concluded much of the violence was planned and organized by members of Kenya's security agencies, business leaders, politicians, and government officials. ...
Going forward I need to remember that if I'm ever looking for a quick topic about which to blog, I just need to take a look at the latest developments from the UK on surveillance. First there was using ubiquitous surveillance to make art. Now there's surveillance imitating art...
