Samuel Witten is counsel at the law firm Arnold & Porter LLP. He worked at the State Department for 22 years, including six years as Deputy Legal Adviser (2001-2007) and three years as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration (2007-2010). The world’s attention has been riveted on the potential foreign policy implications of the recent...
Ben describes as "puzzling" my claim that his recent post on WikiLeaks reflects American exceptionalism. I find his puzzlement equally puzzling. Recall the quote on which I focused: This, in turn, leads ineluctibly to Tom’s reciprocity point: If Congress can make such a demand on Assange, the U.S. would be in a bad position to object if the Congress of People’s Deputies...
Steve testified yesterday about WikiLeaks in front of the House Judiciary Committee. Here is a snippet of his testimony, which discussed five major flaws in the Espionage Act: Second, the Espionage Act does not focus solely on the initial party who wrongfully discloses national defense information, but applies, in its terms, to anyone who knowingly disseminates, distributes, or even retains national...
Secretary Clinton yesterday released the much-awaited first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review. It's an important document, and if implemented (a big if, given the shift in Congress and threats to cut State's funding) it would have important consequences on the ground. The central theme of "civilian power" has a nice ring to it in the context of situating diplomacy, a...
Video here. (Downfall producers seem to have unblocked these parodies, which had been taken down some time ago for copyright reasons. Lawprofs might be entertained by this one, clearly composed by someone in our ranks -- the mindset of someone who's taught for a while is perfectly satirized in a way that no outsider could, ever.)...
Having received a number of emails complaining about how I counted the size of various faculties, I have decided to remove both posts. As I made clear in the original post, my count was not designed to be scientific and excluded -- rightly or wrongly -- a number of categories of scholars that some might believe should have been included. ...
I always wish I had more opportunities to blog about international environmental law (IEL), especially in light of recent developments (and thanks to Dan Bodansky for keeping our readers' abreast of all the happenings in Cancun). For those of you who have a similar affinity for IEL, check out the new(ish) blog from the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). It's...
The Ninth Circuit this week ruled that there was no federal policy with respect to the Armenian Genocide, thereby allowing insurance claims brought by Armenian nationals under a California statute to go forward. In Movsesian v. Victoria Versicherung AG, the Ninth Circuit distinguished Garamendi, concluding that there was no federal policy against recognizing the Armenian Genocide. Indeed, "[c]onsidering...
David Glazier is a Professor of Law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. He has written, under the same title as this post, a paper critiquing U.S. military commissions which you can download from SSRN here. As the Senate considers an outright ban on the transfer of detainees from Guantánamo to the United States this week, it seems obvious that...
Courtesy of Ben Wittes at Lawfare, responding to a question about whether he believes that, if America should be permitted to prosecute a non-American like Assange for disclosing American secrets, countries like France, China, or Iran should be able to prosecute Americans for disclosing their secrets (my emphasis): This, in turn, leads ineluctibly to Tom’s reciprocity point: If Congress can make...
Buried in a post from Ben Wittes at Lawfare is a suggestion (in response to HRW's Tom Malinowski) that the Espionage Act shouldn't apply outside US territory to non-citizens: [T]his statute has a nuance that makes one pause before treating it as just another extraterritorial application of American law. That nuance is that the entire moral force of a...
"The majority of the Supreme Court said that although they would not stop publication in advance, the question of whether there could be prosecution afterwards was a completely different thing." --former Attorney General Michael Mukasey on the Pentagon Papers Mukasey is right. It seems that in the attempts to compare this case to the Pentagon Papers, the essential distinction between the...
