There is an Atlantic Monthly crew doing some good blogging out of this week's Aspen Ideas Festival. The most interesting entry so far reports on a session (with University of Chicago lawprof Dennis Hutchinson) on how Harry Blackmun was influenced by Aspen seminars; one can imagine similar history thirty years from now looking at how international conference travel figured...
I was glad to see that Stuart Levey, the subject of a nicely-written profile in today's Washington Post, is running the financial side of anti-terrorism efforts out of the Treasury Department. He's as described: smart, reasonable, modest, and effective. It's too bad that there aren't more like him, or that those who are like him haven't lasted long...
As is true every July 4th, many of this holiday weekend’s papers contained stories celebrating naturalization ceremonies. (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services conducts 150 public naturalization ceremonies this week, in which almost 20,000 naturalization applicants are sworn in as citizens.) These stories – examples of which can be found here, here, here, and here – usually toe...
Okay, maybe not that new, and maybe not exactly what you had in mind for the beach. But in case you missed it when it was published (I had), there’s a promising-looking law review that’s recently come on stream, the Journal of International Law and International Relations, out of the University of Toronto. Full-text pdf of the first...
Along with Julian, I’m coming around to the position that this is a very big deal, and that it’s likely to have important consequences, short and long-term. But those consequences won’t necessarily happen as a matter of course. The Administration will resist, and in some contexts it may be able to do so successfully. 1) I see now how...
A couple of quick thoughts on Hamdan, which is obviously an important decision (although perhaps not quite as important as on first glance). 1) Over at Scotusblog Marty Lederman asserts that the Court’s finding on common article 3 spills over to dispatch with interrogation practices in other detainee contexts. That may be true at some level, but on my read...
A small sidebar to Saturday's presidential elections in Mexico: it will be the first in which Mexican citizens residing abroad will be able to cast ballots by mail from their place of external residence. But it's a much less significant story than had been anticipated. Of the estimated 3-5 million Mexicans eligible, only a small number bothered to register...
Thanks to Julian for the welcome. Glad to be on board for a mid-summer visit. Jane Mayer has yet another piece of informative reporting in this week’s New Yorker, this one profiling David Addington and his role in the Administration’s expansive post-9/11 conceptions of executive power. (The piece itself isn’t on-line, but you’ll find a Q&A with Mayer about...
