William Safire bought me lunch once.
There. That's a William Safire leed. Has nothing to do with what I'm really going to write about, but it situates me as being a Player. 'Course, when Safire has the personal item it's a signal he's going to be nice to the guy (it's almost always a guy) who was nice to him.
The Washington Post tells the official inside story of how Dean bagged the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) endorsements.
Gephardt's reaction: AFSCME “turned over the country to the Republicans for four more years.” But by the time you finish the story, you think Gephardt's wrong.
The Miami Herald | 11/11/2003 | State's sex predator law goes too far, some argue
The issue is the so-called Jimmy Ryce Act, §§ 394.910-394.931, Fla. Stat.
The statute provides for indefinite confinement of sexual offenders who are currently incarcerated, to continue until they are pronounced ‘cured’ which in the very large majority of cases so far means ‘never’. The statute doesn’t actually say that they must be incarcerated for the sex crime — and the plaintiff in this case committed a rape 20 years ago, was released in 1991, but has been re-arrested since for various crimes of violence.
The Florida Supreme Court has said the Ryce Act is basically constitutional but it has yet to rule on whether the statute can be applied to inmates who committed a sexual offense in the past, but are currently incarcerated for a non-sexual offense.
DRAFT International Law Exam Write-a-Question ground rules
1. Your task is to write a question that could form part of the final exam in International Law.
2. Participation in this question-writing program is not optional. The quality of your participation will be factored into your class participation grade.
3. Questions should be no shorter than two sentences and no longer than one page, single-spaced, with ordinary type face and margins. They can be theoretical questions, hypothetical questions, purely legal/interpretive questions, or any other standard law school exam question.
4. In addition, you should append an outline of your suggested answer. In so doing you should note whether you think there is only one possible answer, or whether there are multiple possible (or arguable) answers. You should also note the most relevant cases, treaties, or other readings, i.e. those that one would ordinarily expect a student to discuss/cite in her/his answer.
5. Generally speaking, I tend to prefer questions for which more than one answer is plausible but this is not a requirement.
6. Questions are due by Tuesday Nov. 25, which is our last regularly scheduled class. E-mail submissions to [email] are preferred, but paper turned in in class is acceptable. I will acknowledge receipt of emails, and you should resubmit anything that isn't acknowledged within 24 hours.
7. I will read all the question and separate them into two groups: those that I think couldn't be on the exam, and those that (perhaps with light editing) could be part of the exam (the “possible pile”).
8. If there are two or fewer questions in the “possible pile”, I will so inform the class. I may or may not use one of the questions on the exam.
9. If there are three or more questions in the “possible pile”, I will publish them on the class web page by Dec. 1. At least one of these questions, and possibly more, will appear on the exam, either as an optional or required question.
Wow. A day I'm so buy I can't post, and traffic goes through the roof suddenly bringing me to over 10,000 unique visitors in less than two months! (The 'unique visitor' is counted on a daily basis, so anyone who visited fifteen times over seven days would be counted seven times.) I moved well over a gigabyte of data in the last 30 days, and that's with few graphics. Good thing my hosting contract allows me about ten times what I used.
Supreme Court Takes First Case on Guantánamo Detainees. The Supreme Court granted cert in and consolidated two cases relating to the Guantánamo detainees. Both raise purely jurisdictional issues.
In one case, Rasul v. Bush (No. 03-334) three detainees' parents sought writs of habeas corpus. Here's the cert petition.
In the other case, Al Odah v. United States (No. 03-343) (cert petition), relatives of twelve detainees sought to challenge the legality of the detention under the Alien Tort Statute, 28 USC § 1350, the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), and the 5th Amendment. They sought a declaration that the detention is arbitrary and capricious, and that the detainees should have an opportunity to speak to a lawyer.
The D.C. Circuit ruled in both cases at once, holding that “the courts are not open” to the detainees, 321 F.3d 1134, because Guantánamo is outside the sovereignty of the United States, and our courts thus lack jurisdiction to hear their claims. The court opinion, authored by Judge Randolph, comes with an interesting concurrence by … Judge Randolph, in which he really goes to town, not only rejecting the dominant reading of the Alien Tort Statute and offering one that effectively neuters it, but also finding that the APA provides no relief for the plaintiffs.
While I disagree vehemently with the view that there is no federal habeas jurisdiction, nor jurisdiction via the Alien Tort Act, I think at first glance that I do agree with Judge Randolph about the APA claims. The APA explicitly does not apply to the military.
The path of least resistance for the Supreme Court is to do what the lower courts did and follow Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763 . I explained in an earlier post how Application of Yamashita provides an alternate approach under which the courts would have jurisdiction to hear this claim.
Let's hope that the Supreme Court has the courage to step up to the plate on this one.
If it doesn't, it becomes our collective moral obligation to demand that Congress extend its undoubted power to extend the jurisdiction of the federal courts to Guantánamo. Not that I'll hold my breath, you understand.
Jotwell Blenderlaw