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Military, War, and Peace

Selected Works

Constitutional Law

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Law and Politics

Targeted Killing: A Legal And Political History, Markus Gunneflo Dec 2015

Targeted Killing: A Legal And Political History, Markus Gunneflo

Markus Gunneflo

Looking beyond the current debate’s preoccupation with the situations of insecurity of the second intifada and 9/11, this book reveals how targeted killing is intimately embedded in both Israeli and US statecraft and in the problematic relation of sovereign authority and lawful violence underpinning the modern state system. The book details the legal and political issues raised in targeted killing as it has emerged in practice including questions of domestic constitutional authority, the norms on the use of force in international law, the law of targeting and human rights. The distinctiveness of Israeli and US targeted killing is accounted for …

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Unchecked Political Question Doctrine: Judicial Ethics At The Dawn Of A Second Nuclear Arms Race, Daniel T. Rust Mar 2015

Unchecked Political Question Doctrine: Judicial Ethics At The Dawn Of A Second Nuclear Arms Race, Daniel T. Rust

Daniel T Rust

This paper examines The Republic of the Marshall Islands v. The United States of America et al., the grounds for its dismissal, and recommendations for how it should be appealed and ultimately judged. The Marshall Islands sued alleging noncompliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), seeking declaratory and injunctive relief. At issue are concepts of legality and ethics behind the “Political Question Doctrine” defense that the United States provides, in addition to whether or not the Marshall Islands has standing. When noncompliance with a valid, legal treaty causes real harm, Political Question Doctrine should not be allowed to the …

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The Road Most Travel: Is The Executive’S Growing Preeminence Making America More Like The Authoritarian Regimes It Fights So Hard Against?, Ryan T. Williams Aug 2014

The Road Most Travel: Is The Executive’S Growing Preeminence Making America More Like The Authoritarian Regimes It Fights So Hard Against?, Ryan T. Williams

Ryan T. Williams

Since September 11, 2001, the Executive branch of the Unites States government continues to accumulate power beyond which is granted to it under the U.S. Constitution. This Article examines how the Executive wields this additional power through a secret surveillance program, the indefinite detention of terror suspects, and the implementation of a kill list, where Americans and non-Americans alike are targeted and killed without any judicial determination of guilt or innocence. Moreover, Congress and the Judiciary have condoned the Executive’s unconstitutional power accumulation by not only remaining idle and refusing to challenge this taking, but by preventing other American citizens …

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Disclosure's Effects: Wikileaks And Transparency, Mark Fenster Feb 2012

Disclosure's Effects: Wikileaks And Transparency, Mark Fenster

Mark Fenster

Constitutional, criminal, and administrative laws regulating government transparency, and the theories that support them, rest on the assumption that the disclosure of information has transformative effects: disclosure can inform, enlighten, and energize the public, or it can create great harm or stymie government operations. To resolve disputes over difficult cases, transparency laws and theories typically balance disclosure’s beneficial effects against its harmful ones. WikiLeaks and its vigilante approach to massive document leaks challenge the underlying assumption about disclosure’s effects in two ways. First, WikiLeaks’s ability to receive and distribute leaked information cheaply, quickly, and seemingly unstoppably enables it to bypass …

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Collective Choice, Justin Schwartz Jan 2011

Collective Choice, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

This short nontechnical article reviews the Arrow Impossibility Theorem and its implications for rational democratic decisionmaking. In the 1950s, economist Kenneth J. Arrow proved that no method for producing a unique social choice involving at least three choices and three actors could satisfy four seemingly obvious constraints that are practically constitutive of democratic decisionmaking. Any such method must violate such a constraint and risks leading to disturbingly irrational results such and Condorcet cycling. I explain the theorem in plain, nonmathematical language, and discuss the history, range, and prospects of avoiding what seems like a fundamental theoretical challenge to the possibility …

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