Welcome new Cornell American Constitution Society members

This is the blog curated by members of Cornell Law School's chapter of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.

The goal of the national ACS and of our chapter is to revitalize and transform the legal debate and the national conversation about law. It is our aim to restore the principles of respect for human dignity, protection of individual rights and liberties, genuine equality, and access to justice to the place those principles rightfully hold at the center of American law.

As an organization, the American Constitution Society doesn't lobby, litigate, or take positions on specific issues, cases, legislation, or nominations. As individual ACS members, most of us do take positions on specific issues, cases, legislation, or nominations. We will use this blog to engage in the legal debate and the national conversation about law. If you'd like to post to the blog, let us know and we can add you as a contributor. If you'd like to comment on something somebody else has posted, you're welcome to do that as well.

Welcome aboard!

Your day in court...

The Washington Post today highlights the continuing attempts by the Justice Department to undermine the rule of law:

Attorneys for the Justice Department appeared before a federal judge in Washington this month and asked him to dismiss a lawsuit over the detention of a U.S. citizen, basing their request not merely on secret evidence but also on secret legal arguments. The government contends that the legal theory by which it would defend its behavior should be immune from debate in court.
...

Link

Unilateralism in a unipolar world?

An article in the NY Times about how the US effort to dismantle the Pakistani nuclear proliferation ring runs into problems.

I thought that this article gives a good idea of the difficulty of the present US position in the world. On one hand, some of our most necessary allies (Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia) seem like they're taking us for a ride. On the other, our work with the IEAE is compromised by our unilateralism and its lack of discretion.

One wonders how our national interests diverged from those so many other nations.

Link

Copyright movies

Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has just put up the finalists in their contest to create "short films demonstrating some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film."

NYT: Giving the Law a Religious Perspective

New York Times article focusing on the rise of a handful of religiously oriented law schools--Liberty, Regent, Ave Maria, and University of St. Thomas--as well as the idea of teaching law in a more religiously oriented manner generally. Raises some interesting questions:

• Can something that is "contrary to the law of nature" be law?
  
• Are religious perspectives welcomed at mainstream law schools, generally? Are they welcomed here at Cornell?
  
• Even if they are welcomed, should there be a more affirmative effort to expose law students to "seriously developed contrary points of view that proceed from a strong faith-based perspective"?
  
• Is CivPro mainstay decision Erie best characterised as a ruling that federal courts may not apply general principles in some cases but must follow state laws, and thus a denial of the possibility of "a law that's fixed, that's uniform, that applies to everybody, everyplace, for all time"?
  

• Finally, what do you think of a law school, like Liberty, that is not yet ABA-approved? Should a diploma from such a school preclude a student from standing for the bar?
  

Values Voters

A post-election Zogby poll (with a tiny margin of error of only about 1%) shows that:

42 percent of voters cited the war in Iraq as the "moral issue" that most influenced their choice of candidates
13 percent cited abortion
9 percent cited same-sex marriage.

Asked to name the greatest threat to marriage,

31 percent said "infidelity,"
25 percent cited "rising financial burdens"
22 percent named same-sex marriage.

From Washington Post

Election Protection

On election day, 44 Cornellians headed down to Pittsburgh to help ensure people could vote, in conjunction with the non-partisan Election Protection project. There was a really high turn-out, and people came back with a lot of stories. I personally met several people who were really glad that somebody was working hard to help them vote and make sure their votes counted.

'04 Election Effect on Supreme Court

Hi,

Glad to join the ACS and this blog.

Some leading scholars believe the election won't have much impact on the direction of the Court.
http://www.law.com/jsp/printerfriendly.jsp?c=LawArticle&t=PrinterFriendlyArticle&cid=1095434441602
Liberal Georgetown University Law Center professor Mark Tushnet has even offered the heretical and hotly contested view that the outcome Nov. 2 will be a wash for the Court. "The politics in the Senate make it likely that a newly appointed Democratic Supreme Court justice would look a lot like a newly appointed Republican one," Tushnet wrote in the current issue of Legal Affairs magazine.