Cornell ACS

Welcome new Cornell American Constitution Society members

2005-09-10T17:31:00.000-04:00

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...

2005-02-21T19:19:00.000-05:00

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?

2004-12-26T01:52:00.000-05:00

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

2004-12-16T13:49:00.000-05:00

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

2004-11-22T01:38:00.000-05:00

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

2004-11-10T20:53:00.000-05:00

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

2004-11-10T20:48:00.000-05:00

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

2004-09-23T19:57:00.000-04:00

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.

ballot wars in battle ground states?

2004-09-21T23:14:00.000-04:00

Looks like the Democrats might be trying to avoid a November squeeze from Nader. See
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-campaign-nader-arkansas.html and
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nader.html for the details. Maybe this year, the motto for all the political parties should be "It's the election procedures, stupid!"

--Matt Conroy

American overseas? Voting obstacles arise.

2004-09-21T21:59:00.000-04:00

The Defense Department operates a website for the Federal Voting Assistance Program, designed to help American civilians and servicemen and -women overseas cast absentee ballots. Now the International Herald Tribune is reporting that the Pentagon has begun blocking access to the site through a range of internet service providers in at least 25 countries - including Yahoo Broadband in Japan, Wanadoo in France, BT Yahoo Broadband in Britain and Telefónica in Spain. The ostensible reason: to prevent hackers from accessing the site. Hackers using other ISP's can of course still reach the site--it's really just a problem for Americans using those ISP's who want to vote.

More info here.

"The danger to political dissent..."

2004-08-30T22:27:00.000-04:00

1) ACLU in suit against Justice Department involving the Patriot Act.
2) ACLU files brief with Supreme Court.
3) Justice Department redacts portions of the brief on national security grounds.
4) It is revealed that the Justice Department redacted the following quote, which comes from a 1972 Supreme Court opinion:

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

Link

via Boingboing

Related posts:
DOJ: "Lawbooks don't belong in libraries"

Welcome 1L's!

2004-08-20T18:17:00.000-04:00

Cornell ACS is an organization dedicated to transforming the discussion about what the law is and what it should be.

You may find that the things you're talking about in class are not the things you thought you'd be talking about in law school. Maybe you want to talk about justice, human rights, or equality. Come here and post your comments. Or if you have a thought that others really ought to see, email us at cornellacs@yahoo.com, and we'll put what you have to say on the blog front page. Or, if you become involved in ACS activities, you can become a regular contributor.

Related posts:
General Info

Blakely

2004-08-04T00:25:00.000-04:00

So the Circuits don't know what to do with Blakely, and they've been issuing all kinds of crazy decisions. The Second took the rare step of asking the SCOTUS to fix the mess they'd made right away. The SCOTUS didn't take them up on the (somewhat impertinent) invitation, but will hear U.S. v. Booker and U.S. v. Fanfan (from other Circuits) on the first day of the term in October.

The Blakely blog is reliably on top of Blakely-related developments.

Related posts:
SCOTUS Roundup

Going up the river

2004-08-04T00:05:00.000-04:00

Someone over at the NLG tipped us to this page with all kinds of information about legal issues if you're planning to be / protest in NYC during the Republican National Convention.

I guess by the time of the convention, they'll have posted a phone number you can scrawl on your arm so you can use your one phone call to get a pro bono lawyer. Sounds pretty sensible to me.

451 degrees

2004-08-03T23:32:00.000-04:00

So the Justice Department has just backed away from their request that the Government Printing Office Superintendent of Documents instruct depository libraries to destroy their copies of five books: Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedure; Select Criminal Forfeiture Forms; Select Federal Asset Forfeiture Statutes; Asset forfeiture and money laundering resource directory; and Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (CAFRA). The reason for the initial request was apparently that the DOJ did not feel they were "appropriate for external use."

Not to be too alarmist, but: it is deeply troubling when the government starts deciding it doesn't want you to know (1) what the laws are, and (2) how they're enforced. I know the title of this post is from Bradbury, but even more I'm reminded of another mid-century dystopian vision, in which hiding the rules of the farm from public view allowed Napoleon to append the fateful words, "but some animals are more equal than others."

Link

via BoingBoing

The AG

2004-07-03T17:25:00.000-04:00

The NY Times's Paul Krugman on John Ashcroft: "Worst Attorney General ever!"

(via Jerry Lawson)

SCOTUS in review pt. I

2004-07-03T16:00:00.000-04:00

Most of the attention this Supreme Court term has been focused on the Padilla, Hamdi, and Al Odah cases(and rightly so, I think). But there've been a number of other notable decisions.

Perhaps the biggest sleeper was Blakely. The Court ruled that (practically) any factor which could result in a longer sentence must be proven to a jury, rather than being left for a judge to find whether the factor is present. Although the case was specifically about a Washington state sentencing law, it's widely expected to result in the same requirement about Federal sentencing rules. The NY Times quotes Justice O'Connor as saying in dissent that the "vast majority" of federal criminal cases may be affected. Going forward, it is likely not only to produce a lot of appeals (and some public outcry regarding same: one judge just reduced the sentence of a tobacco farmer who shut down downtown Washington DC by claiming to have bombs on his tractor), but also to change dramatically the way criminal trials and plea bargains are conducted.

I'll discuss more decisions later. I'm particularly interested in Hiibel (upholding a NV law that you have to give your name to a police officer who asks), Ashcroft v. ACLU (suggesting the Child Online Protection Act's criminal penalties for websites that make sexually explicit material available to minors don't pass Constitutional muster), and Newdow (in which the Court shamefully, IMHO, punted on the inclusion of "one Nation under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, ruling that Mr. Newdow didn't have standing to sue).

Also worth discussing is the 1st Circuit case, US v. Councilman (finding that email is not "in transit" when it's on your email provider's servers, and thus not afforded the strong protections of the wiretap laws).

General Information:

2004-06-19T13:19:00.000-04:00

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 they 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.

Welcome aboard!

2004-03-02T22:22:00.000-05:00

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