The Supreme Court today issued its decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and ruled that the military commissions were invalid. The decision is available here. Justice Stevens wrote the 5-3 opinion and was joined by Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, and in part Justice Kennedy. Justices Kennedy and Breyer wrote separate opinions. Justices Alito, Thomas, and Scalia dissented...
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...
We have invited Professor Carlos Vázquez at Georgetown Law Center to summarize his initial impressions of today's decision in Sanchez-Llamas and Bustillo. Here is his summary: In these two cases, state prisoners relied on the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations in challenging their criminal convictions. State courts in numerous cases had denied relief on the ground that the treaty, although self-executing,...
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...
OK, maybe that is overstating the majority opinion's holding today, in Sanchez-Llamas/Bustillo, but not by much. In an opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court rejected attempts by alien criminal defendants to invoke the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR) to either suppress evidence against them during a trial, or to challenge their conviction in post-trial hearings. ...
Opinio Juris is thrilled to welcome Professor Peter Spiro as a guest-blogger here for the next two weeks. Peter holds the newly established Charles R. Weiner Professor of International Law at Temple University School of Law in Philadelphia. Prior to joining Temple, Peter held the Dean and Virginia Rusk Chair in International Law at the University of Georgia...
This article from the Independent strongly suggests that the detainees who committed suicide did not do so as an act of desperation or depression. It also illuminates details on the suicides and how the detainees used benefits they were accorded at the request of the Red Cross against the United States. "Every time we give them something to...
The Supreme Court just renderened its decision in the companion cases of Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon and Bustillo v. Johnson. The decision can be accessed here. The decision was 6-3 with Chief Justice Roberts writing the opinion and Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito joining. Justice Ginsburg filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. Justice Breyer wrote...
Hannah Buxbaum has just posted on SSRN an interesting article on "Transnational Regulatory Litigation." You can download the document here. In particular she includes an illuminating section on global class actions. Here is the abstract: Recent years have seen much debate about the role of national courts in addressing global harms. That debate has focused on the application...
There was an interesting little sidebar comment from Justice Scalia in yesterday's death penalty decision in Kansas v. Marsh. Scalia said that: There exists in some parts of the world sanctimonious criticism of America's death penalty, as somehow unworthy of a civilized society. (I say sanctimonious, because most of the countries to which these finger-waggers belong had the death penalty...
I would not normally post about something as vapid as celebrity interviews on CNN, but I happened to watch the encore presentation of Anderson Cooper's interview with Angelina Jolie over the weekend. (Transcript available here). What was a pleasant surprise for me was that Jolie came across as believable and quite sincere about her work with the United Nations. You...
For those of you who missed it, U. Chicago law professor Eric Posner had a very sensible op-ed in the NYT yesterday defending the detention of suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. Here's a brief excerpt, but the whole essay is worth reading: The detention of enemy aliens, especially enemy soldiers, during wartime is a long-established practice. Enemy aliens and soldiers...
