Wednesday, April 02, 2008 - Posts
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John Yoo's controversial legal memorandum on interrogation authority is now being matched by Mrs. Clinton's ethically questionable memoranda advice attempting to distort the Watergate impeachment process -- including denying counsel to the accused. Isn't there some hope for concluding the American political process on the merits, not character failing? Read More...
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Plenty of wags have compared Hillary Clinton to a zombie or the Terminator—she claws her way back to her feet and limps on when any mere mortal would be long dead. But the real reanimated corpse of this election is the contemptible question of whether Read More...
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I've now completed reading the March 14th OLC opinion . As you might expect, there is a great deal within it that warrants very careful attention and analysis. There is nothing like it in our long legal history, as far as I know. After all, how often Read More...
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Kudos to Berkeley 2L Josh Keesan for rising to the challenge of nominating "law poetry" for the National Poetry Month -long Convictions Poetry Slam announced yesterday. Josh's entry fits neatly within Slam example No. 2, "poems about law or about law's Read More...
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OK, true, Orin and Jack , lawyerly can mean trussing up bad and thin arguments with questionable analogies from other cases and a horde of citations. (Though an awful lot of the ones in this Yoo memo are to other OLC memos from the same era — the ones Read More...
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Orin notes that John Yoo's torture memo sounds very lawyerly in its arguments . This observation points to an important fact about legal discourse: Lawyers can make really bad legal arguments that argue for very unjust things in perfectly legal-sounding Read More...
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After reading the March 2003 memo ( NYT and WP ), I feel like the youngest kid at Passover dinner, who by tradition asks the question "How is this night different from all other nights?" Except that in this case, I'm left with the question of "How is Read More...
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David, I suspect you're right that the Supreme Court will eventually take one of these cases and overturn their prior precedent, Watts : I think that's one of the results that the Booker / Blakely revolutionaries hoped to change. What are the odds? I'd Read More...
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My reaction to the Yoo memo is almost the exact opposite of Emily's : I'm struck by how lawyerly it reads. It cites tons of authority, hedges arguments, discusses counterarguments, and generally reads like a careful lawyer's work. In fact, if it were Read More...
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