I am one of the 450 law professors who signed a statement calling on the Supreme Court to grant review of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (No. 05-184), a case challenging the President’s creation of military commissions to try “unlawful combatants”:
We, the undersigned law professors at many law schools, urge that lawyers, jurists, and the public take every opportunity to reassert the rule of law, to reiterate America’s constitutional commitments, and to insist on humane treatment that gives each person a fair opportunity to be heard before impartial tribunals, not ones controlled by the executive.
Thanks are due to to Bruce Ackerman (Yale), David Cole (Georgetown), Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks (Virginia), Deena Hurwitz (Virginia), and Judith Resnik (Yale) for organizing the letter.
Although I completely agree with the text of the statement, I do feel ever so slightly odd about this project because letters like this shouldn’t actually influence what the Supreme Court does. And, I suspect, they don’t actually influence it either. So the project is arguably in poor taste, and probably futile. But I do believe that the issue is of enormous importance … and what else can we do?