Law Commons^™

Patriotism, Nationalism, And The War On Terror: A Mild Plea In Avoidance, Winston P. Nagan, Craig Hammer

UF Law Faculty Publications

Professor Viet Dinh, a major drafter of and architectural influence upon the USA PATRIOT Act, provides an indirect scholarly justification for the far-reaching powers of the act in his article, Nationalism in the Age of Terror. Part II of this Commentary begins by exploring the ostensible underpinnings of Dinh's article by examining his understanding of nationalism. Part III explains why crony nationalism is not the best defense against global terrorism. Part IV then analyzes some significant United States foreign policy undertakings that have arguably negatively affected United States national security. Finally, in Part V we conclude by gleaning lessons from …

Civilian Immunity And The Rebuttable Presumption Of Innocence, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

"Terrorist" is a word that at once vilifies and justifies, serving the same function in today's politics and popular imagination as was served by the term "Nazi" a half century ago, or "communist" thereafter, or "witch" in our colonial days, in that it is "always, or even necessarily, wrong." Few appellations today are as effective to ostracize a person, movement, or organization from civilized company, and an astonishing array of actions and reactions can be fully warranted when having as their intent a response to the mere threat -- much less an actual act -- of terrorism.

This Essay does …

Indefinite Material Witness Detention Without Probable Cause: Thinking Outside The Fourth Amendment, Michael Greenberger

Faculty Scholarship

A constitutional issue recently addressed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in United States v. Awadallah, 349 F.3d 42 (2003), has not received the widespread attention of high-profile litigation concerning the Justice Department's other controversial counter-terrorism policies. It is equally important. The issue arises out of Attorney General Ashcroft's announcement shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that the aggressive detention of material witnesses [was] vital to preventing, disrupting or delaying new attacks. Since that time, the Department of Justice has used the federal material witness statute (18 U.S.C. Section 3144) to …

Anthrax Hoaxes, Ira Robbins

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

INTRODUCTION: "[Y]ou are a disgusting piece of dirt."' Judge Steven Shutter, a county judge in South Florida, used these words to describe a twenty- four-year-old woman whom he labeled a terrorist2 and who was condemned by the media.3 Aside from name-calling, Judge Shutter raised the woman's bail from $3,500 to $25,000 when he learned the nature of the offense, 'just in case" the woman might be able to afford the lower bond.4 Given the strength of Judge Shutter's animosity toward her, one might assume that Yasmin Kassima Sealey- Doe had provided assistance to the terrorists who attacked the World Trade …

Other People's Patriot Acts: Europe's Response To September 11, Kim Lane Scheppele

All Faculty Scholarship

After September 11, many countries changed their laws to make it easier to fight terrorism. They did so in part because the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1373 under its Chapter VII powers. The resolution required all Members of the United Nations to criminalize terrorism, to prevent their territory from being used to plan or promote terrorism, to crack down on terrorism financing, to tighten up immigration and asylum procedures and to share information about terrorists and terrorist threats with other states. This article examines what happened to the Security Council mandate when it got to Europe by first …

Law In A Time Of Emergency, Kim Lane Scheppele

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the domestic and foreign policy responses of the Bush administration to the events of 9/11 and contrasts them with the primary responses of America’s democratic allies in Europe. Both sets of responses are understood through the lens of Carl Schmitt’s writing on the nature of the state of exception, which in many ways provides a blueprint for contemporary American conceptions of emergency powers while providing a notorious and unsuccessful attempt to justify emergency powers to contemporary Europeans. I argue that the divergence in the standard understandings of two formative historical events help explain European and American differences …

Unpatriotic Acts: An Introduction, Sadiq Reza

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Prospects For Human Rights Advocacy In The Wake Of September 11, 2001, Juan E. Mendez, Javier Mariezcurrena

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Race, Immigration, And The Department Of Homeland Security, Victor C. Romero

Journal Articles

Despite the wisdom of separating the service and enforcement functions of our immigration bureau, the new tripartite system under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security risks fueling the "immigrant Arab as terrorist" stereotype, rather than helping to re-establish the reality that noncitizen terrorists, like U.S. citizen ones, are a rare species.

'A Flame Of Fire': The Fourth Amendment In Perilous Times, John Burkoff

Articles

The important questions we need to ask and to answer in the perilous times in which we live is whether the Fourth Amendment applies in the same fashion not just to run of the mill criminals, but also to terrorists and suspected terrorists, individuals who are committing or who have committed B or who may be poised to commit B acts aimed at the destruction of extremely large numbers of people? Professor Burkoff argues that we can protect ourselves from cataclysmic threats of this sort and still maintain a fair and objective application of Fourth Amendment doctrine that respects our …

Punishment And The War On Terrorism, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Certain features of the war on terrorism impose novel and controversial punishment schemes. For example, President George W. Bush has unilaterally invoked executive authority to detain thousands suspected of terrorism over protracted times and to create military tribunals. The government has imprisoned two American citizens, denying them access to counsel for more than a year, and it has incarcerated 650 individuals without process at Guantanamo Bay. Bush administration officials recently announced that they would try some Guantanamo detainees in military commissions; however, these bodies will accord fewer protections than the civilian system or even courts-martial under the Uniform Code of …

Risk Realization, Emotion, And Policy Making, Chris Guthrie

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In their study of terrorism and SARS, Professor Feigenson and his colleagues report "significant positive correlations between people's risk perceptions and their negative affect." In their review of the judgment and decision-making literature, Professor Slovic and his colleagues document the interplay between reason and emotion in assessing risk. And in the context of a soldier's concerns for himself and his family, Professor Moran provides a powerful narrative of fear. But what happens when such threats are actually realized? Do we accurately predict the emotional impact of such events? Or are there meaningful and predictable differences between the feelings we forecast …

Targeting The Foreign Born By Race And Nationality: Counterproductive In The "War On Terrorism"?, Thomas Michael Mcdonnell

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Times of emergency may justify certain restrictions on liberties, but the nature of the terrorist challenge calls for a much more measured and nuanced response. Al Qaeda is said to have cells operating in as many as sixty countries. Furthermore, Al Qaeda is best described as a decentralized network of extremist Islamic groups and individuals rather than a unified military organization. To reduce or eliminate the threat they pose requires the cooperation of the governments, police officers, and individual citizens in the countries where Al Qaeda linked individuals and groups operate. Such help is necessary to obtain intelligence, arrest, capture, …

The Death Penalty--An Obstacle To The "War On Terrorism"?, Thomas Michael Mcdonnell

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

September 11 seared our collective memory perhaps even more vividly than December 7, 1941, and has evoked a natural demand both for retribution and for measures to keep us safe. Given the existing statutory and judicial authority for capital punishment, the U.S. Government has to confront the issue whether to seek the death penalty against those who are linked to the suicide attacks or to the organization that sponsored them or both. Meting out the death penalty to international terrorists involves difficult moral, legal, and policy questions. The September 11 crimes were not only domestic crimes, but also international ones. …

Preface, Symposium: Criminal Defense In The Age Of Terrorism, Tanina Rostain, Donald Zeigler

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Foreword: Terrorism On Trial, Michael P. Scharf, Amy E. Miller

Faculty Publications

While the Lockerbie approach is currently out of vogue, are there nonetheless lessons from Lockerbie that policy makers can draw on in determining how to best use law as a weapon against terrorism in the future? To explore this important and timely question, the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center assembled a group of high level United Nations officers, former U.S. government officials, noted prosecutors and defense counsel, and prominent journalists and scholars for a day-long symposium at Case Western Reserve University School of Law on October 8, 2004, entitled "Terrorism on Trial." The conference, which was cosponsored by the …

Non-State Actors In The Nuclear Black Market: Proposing An International Legal Framework For Preventing Nuclear Expertise Proliferation & Nuclear Smuggling By Non-State Actors, Thomas V. Burch

Scholarly Works

While there are a number of disincentives that prevent states from participating in the nuclear black market, most of these deterrents do not apply to non-state actors. This article focuses on the difficulties this situation presents in a time of global terrorism. The author points out that terrorists already have the money, means and motive to build or purchase nuclear devises. In analyzing this issue the author proposes two options. First, member parties could amend one of all of several existing treaties of the subject. Second, the international community can draft a new treaty or convention on nuclear smuggling and …

Wings For Talons: The Case For Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Over Sexual Exploitation Of Children Through Cyberspace, Christopher L. Blakesley

Scholarly Works

To cope more effectively with the changed landscape of child exploitation, it is necessary for laws to expand their extraterritorial reach. Some statutes in the “child exploitation arena” have already been ruled to apply extraterritorially. The prime example of this is 18 U.S.C. § 2252 (2004) (certain activities relating to the material involving the sexual exploitation of minors). Two of the more useful statutes in combating online pedophiles are 18 U.S.C. § 1470 (2003) (transfer of obscene materials to minors) and 18 U.S.C. § 2422 (2003) (coercion and enticement). These latter statutes, however, have yet to receive significant or …

Defining Terrorism As The Peacetime Equivalent Of War Crimes: Problems And Prospects, Michael P. Scharf

Faculty Publications

This article examines the proposal to define terrorism as the peacetime equivalent of war crimes in the context of answering two questions: First, why might it be useful to define terrorism by reference to the existing laws of war? And second, what are the potential negative consequences which might counsel against such an approach?

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 …

The Legal Case Against The Global War On Terror, Mary Ellen O'Connell

Journal Articles

In the first confusing days after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush declared a war on terror. Many of us heard this declaration as stirring rhetoric to rally the nation. We understood it as a declaration that the President would direct a strong response against those responsible. We had heard this sort of rhetoric before when the nation faced powerful challenges-from illegal drugs and chronic poverty. Many of us understood President Bush's declaration of war to refer once again to the determined, persistent struggle to overcome a social blight-this time terrorism. We did …

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

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 …

The Globalization Of Human Rights: Consciousness, Law And Reality, Douglass Cassel

Journal Articles

Human rights have suffered sharp setbacks in the four years since the paper that follows was delivered in London in the summer of 2000. The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the Bush Administration’s ensuing “war on terrorism,” have led not only to a demotion of human rights on the list of American foreign policy priorities, but also to gross violations of human rights by Washington. Among other recent assaults on the rule of law are the prolonged detentions of hundreds of prisoners without trial or due process of law at the United States Naval …