Amnesty International is considering taking on abortion rights as part of its portfolio. A good summary and critique of the development can be found in this article in the center-right Spectator. The prospect is causing chagrin among conservatives and Catholic members of Amnesty. (The organization was founded by an English Catholic lawyer in 1961.) The controversy shows how...
Given that Walter Dellinger has described Hamdan v. Rumsfeld as the "the most important decision on presidential power ever" I guess it would come as little surprise that I would vote for Hamdan as the most important case for the month of June. Although I seriously doubt Dellinger's conclusion is correct, I do predict that the decision will have...
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...
Two weeks ago, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, briefed the Security Council on the results of his investigation into the situation in Darfur. Not suprisingly, he found the widespread commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity: The Office has so far documented (from public and non-public sources) thousands of alleged direct killings of...
Imagine a man who professes over and over his unending love for a woman but who knows nothing of where she was born or who her parents were or where she went to school or what her life had been until he came along--and furthermore, doesn't care to learn. What would you think of such a person? Yet we appear...
A few months ago, I noted the repeated failure of Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, the special prosecutor investigating past government abuses in Mexico, to indict former president Luis Echeverria on genocide charges. Carrillo has finally succeeded: a Mexican court of appeals held on Friday that it had sufficient evidence to charge Echeverria with genocide in connection with the "Tlatelolco massacre,"...
One small sidenote about Hamdan that struck me this morning: the superiority of the blogosphere over the mainsteam media to address breaking news such as Supreme Court decisions. Were any of you just dying to know what Adam Liptak or Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times thought about Hamdan? I had very little interest in their take...
Georgetown's new faculty blog has some great stuff on Hamdan, including summaries of a recent panel about Hamdan that included Neal Katyal (lead counsel for Hamdan), David Luban, Mark Tushnet, and Carlos Vázquez. (There also is an audio of the panel available here and a C-Span video available here). ...
Excellent news out of Manila: last week the Philippines became the 125th country to ban the use of capital punishment for all crimes, a move that commutes the death sentences of nearly 1,200 prisoners to life imprisonment. This is the second time that the Philippines has abolished capital punishment; although the country's constitution eliminated the death penalty in 1987,...
For the Hamdan-weary among you — and my thanks to Peter, Roger, Julian and the others who have saved me from having to read the opinion myself — there's a fascinating article in today's Daily Mail (UK) discussing the British government's belief in 1961 that the only way to defend Hong Kong against an attack by the Chinese would have...
