Law Commons^™

Terrorism And The Law: Cases And Materials, Gregory E. Maggs

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Terrorism and the Law: Cases and Materials (2d ed. 2010) is a textbook written by Professor Gregory E. Maggs (of the George Washington University Law School) and published by West (ISBN-13: 9780314908582).

The textbook considers legal aspects of a broad range of methods that governments have for fighting terrorism, including criminal penalties, economic sanctions, immigration restrictions, military force, and civil liability. It addresses not just the steps taken in reaction to the 9/11 attacks, but also many other counterterrorism measures by the United States and other nations in recent years. To offer a global and comparative perspective, the materials include …

Terrorism And The Law: Cases And Materials, Gregory E. Maggs

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Terrorism and the Law: Cases and Materials (2d ed. 2010) is a textbook written by Professor Gregory E. Maggs (of the George Washington University Law School) and published by West (ISBN-13: 9780314908582).

The textbook considers legal aspects of a broad range of methods that governments have for fighting terrorism, including criminal penalties, economic sanctions, immigration restrictions, military force, and civil liability. It addresses not just the steps taken in reaction to the 9/11 attacks, but also many other counterterrorism measures by the United States and other nations in recent years. To offer a global and comparative perspective, the materials include …

The International Legality Of U.S. Military Cross-Border Operations From Afghanistan Into Pakistan, Sean D. Murphy

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

To date, U.S. cross-border operations from Afghanistan into Pakistan have taken three forms: the use of Predator drones to target Al Qaeda fighters (although such drones may be launched solely from within Pakistan); the "hot pursuit" of militants who engaged in raids from Pakistan against U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, as well as the Afghan government; and the deployment of special operations forces into Pakistan as a means of striking at Al Qaeda. These types of cross-border operations clearly implicate the jus ad bellum, in that they entail one state projecting highly coercive military force into another state. Arguably …

Responses To The Ten Questions [On National Security Posed By The Journal Of National Security Forum Board Of Editors], Gregory E. Maggs

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In 2009, the Journal of the National Security Forum Board of Editors posed ten questions on national security to a group of national-security law experts. Contributors were free to answer as many of the ten questions as they wished. All responses were published in a special issue of the William Mitchell Law Review. I answered the following three questions: 3. What are the lessons from detaining non-U.S. citizens, labeled enemy combatants, at Gitmo? 4. What is left for the Supreme Court to decide after the Boumediene decision? 10. What is the most important issue for American national security?

The SSRN …

Hate Crimes And The War On Terror, Cynthia Lee

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This chapter, which will be part of a 5 volume treatise entitled, Hate Crimes: Perspectives and Approaches (Barbara Perry ed. forthcoming 2009), situates the private acts of hate violence committed against Arab-Americans, Muslim-Americans, Sikh-Americans, and South Asian-Americans in the aftermath of 9/11 into the broader context of the war on terror. In Part I, after providing some general background information on hate crimes, I discuss some of the hate crimes committed in the aftermath of 9/11. In Part II, I examine two common stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims which likely contributed to the post 9/11 backlash against Arabs and Muslims …

Assessing The Legality Of Counterterrorism Measures Without Characterizing Them As Law Enforcement Or Military Action, Gregory E. Maggs

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In this article, I develop three theses. First, I claim that disagreements about the legality of counterterrorism measures commonly stem from disagreements about whether to characterize the measures as law enforcement efforts or as military actions. Observers who see the measures as methods of controlling crime assess their lawfulness differently from those who see them as a form of warfare against terrorists because criminal law enforcement rules differ substantially from the laws of war. With many specific examples, I show that disputes about legality based on disagreements over characterization have arisen in at least eight different subject areas, ranging from …

The Second National Risk And Culture Study: Making Sense Of - And Making Progress In - The American Culture War Of Fact, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Paul Slovic, John Gastil, Geoffrey L. Cohen

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Cultural Cognition refers to the disposition to conform one's beliefs about societal risks to one's preferences for how society should be organized. Based on surveys and experiments involving some 5,000 Americans, the Second National Risk and Culture Study presents empirical evidence of the effect of this dynamic in generating conflict about global warming, school shootings, domestic terrorism, nanotechnology, and the mandatory vaccination of school-age girls against HPV, among other issues. The Study also presents evidence of risk-communication strategies that counteract cultural cognition. Because nuclear power affirms rather than threatens the identity of persons who hold individualist values, for example, proposing …

Evolving Geneva Convention Paradigms In The 'War On Terrorism': Applying The Core Rules To The Release Of Persons Deemed 'Unprivileged Combatants', Sean D. Murphy

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The purpose of this essay, written in late 2006, is to take stock of the current application of the Geneva Conventions in the global "war on terrorism," including interpretations recently taken by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Hamdan case. The Geneva Conventions and the laws of war more generally comprise a sophisticated regulatory regime whose rules can and should be closely analyzed by lawyers. Yet, like all law, the inevitable imprecision in the rules presents opportunities for governments to exploit gray areas so as to augment governmental authority, and to avoid sensible interpretations that will protect individuals from overreaching …

The Campaign To Restrict The Right To Respond To Terrorist Attacks In Self-Defense Under Article 51 Of The U.N. Charter And What The United States Can Do About It, Gregory E. Maggs

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Article 51 of the United Nations Charter preserves the right of nations to use military force in self-defense. This broad language would appear to allow nations to use military force in self-defense in response to "armed attacks" by terrorists. But a significant problem has developed over the past twenty years. In a series of resolutions and judicial decisions, organs of the United Nations have attempted to read into Article 51 four very significant and dangerous limitations on the use of military force in self-defense. These limitations find no support in the language of Article 51, they do not accord with …

The Rehnquist Court's Noninterference With The Guardians Of National Security, Gregory E. Maggs

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Based on an examination of the Rehnquist Court's national security cases decided between 1986 and 2005, this essay makes three claims. The first claim is that the Rehnquist Court generally did not interfere with the governmental units that serve as the guardians of national security. The Rehnquist Court almost always rejected challenges to governmental actions when the official responsible justified the actions based on the need to protect the United States from external threats. The second claim is that the Rehnquist Court's hands-off approach generally had favorable consequences. It promoted national security by leaving the subject to the governmental units …

The Doctrine Of Preemptive Self-Defense, Sean D. Murphy

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

To the extent that the intervention in Iraq in 2003 is regarded as an act of preemptive self-defense, the aftermath of that intervention may presage an era where states resist resorting to large-scale preemptive self-defense. The intervention in Iraq highlighted considerable policy difficulties with the resort to preemptive self-defense: an inability to attract allies; the dangers of faulty intelligence regarding a foreign state's weapons programs and relations with terrorist groups; the political, economic and human costs in pursuing wars of choice; and the resistance of a local populace or radicalized factions to what is viewed as an unwarranted foreign invasion …

The Appeal And Limits Of Internal Controls To Fight Fraud, Terrorism, Other Ills, Lawrence A. Cunningham

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Congress responded in similar ways to 2001's major national crises: bolstering internal controls in corporate America under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in response to Enron's debacle and imposing internal controls on its financial services industry under the USA PATRIOT Act in response to 9/11's terrorism. These reflexive legislative responses to national crisis fit a pattern of proliferating controls as a first-order policy option dating to the mid-1970s. Documenting this proliferation and untangling the definition of internal controls, this Article attributes the appeal of internal controls as a policy option to systemic forces including the movements for deregulation and cooperative compliance, resistance …

Transitional Justice In Afghanistan: The Promise Of Mixed Tribunals, Laura T. Dickinson

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In the wake of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, how to apprehend, question, and punish the perpetrators remains a difficult question to answer. Moreover, the question of where, and how, to try suspects raises a series of deeper questions about the role of criminal accountability in times of conflict and war.

Scholars in the emerging field of transitional justice do not focus on the question of terrorism specifically, however, they study the ways in which societies that are attempting to confront past and lingering mass atrocities do so through a variety of means: …

Using Legal Process To Fight Terrorism: Detentions, Military Commissions, International Tribunals, And The Rule Of Law, Laura T. Dickinson

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, those arguing that international law cannot serve as an effective tool in the fight against terrorism have grown. The ranks of international relations realists, who view international law primarily as a cover for strategic interests and thereby as lacking any independent bite, has swelled. In November 2001, President Bush issued an executive order asserting the authority to use military commissions to try individual terrorism suspects captured by the United States. Such commissions would be conducted unilaterally and would not be required to include procedural safeguards to protect the rights of the accused. This crisis has …