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Series

Georgetown University Law Center

Constitutional Law

2004

Terrorism

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

The Priority Of Morality: The Emergency Constitution's Blind Spot, David Cole Jan 2004

The Priority Of Morality: The Emergency Constitution's Blind Spot, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Three aspects of Bruce Ackerman’s thesis, which is a proposal to legitimate the practice of suspicionless preventive detention during emergencies, are discussed in this essay—its premises, its efficacy, and its morality. Part I critiques three of Ackerman’s premises—his underestimation of courts and overestimation of legislatures as guardians of liberty, his misguided belief that the supermajoritarian escalator provides a one-size-fits-all solution to the conundrum of emergency powers, and his contention that the short-lived character of emergencies makes it sensible to cede to a minority of our popular representatives control over critically important and largely unpredictable decisions concerning the appropriate duration of …


War Everywhere: Rights, National Security Law, And The Law Of Armed Conflict In The Age Of Terror, Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks Jan 2004

War Everywhere: Rights, National Security Law, And The Law Of Armed Conflict In The Age Of Terror, Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Both international and domestic law take as a basic premise the notion that it is possible, important, and usually fairly straightforward to distinguish between war and peace, emergencies and normality, the foreign and the domestic, the external and the internal. From an international law perspective, the law of armed conflict is triggered only when a armed conflict actually exists; the rest of the time, other bodies of law are applicable. Domestically, U.S. courts have developed a constitutional and statutory jurisprudence that distinguishes between national security issues and domestic questions, with the courts subjecting government actions to far less scrutiny when …