Pro-Spam “Anti-Spam” Law (found via Electrolite).
Nathan Newman has identified one of the key problems with the Senate’s much touted anti-spam law, so I don’t have to…
The New York Times quotes my colleague Patrick Gudridge’s charateristic appraisal of the Florida legislature’s hasty action in the Schiavo case. See In Florida Right-to-Die Case, Legislation Puts the Constitution at Issue. I especially like the comment that “It’s beautifully badly drafted.”
In response to my most recent item on Guantánamo Edward Hasbrouck asks this reasonable question: “if courts in the USA say Guantanamo isn’t under their jurisdiction, doesn’t that mean they would have to recognize Cuban jurisdiction?”
The answer to this question is unusually clear: No.
The US has signed two treaties with Cuba that relate to Guantánamo. In 1903 the US and Cuba signed a treaty (US Treaty Series No. 426) which provides,
While on the one hand the United states recognizes the continuance of the ultimate sovereignty of the Republic of Cuba over the above described areas of land and water, on the other hand the Republic of Cuba consents that during the period of the occupation by the United states of said areas under the terms of this agreement the United states shall exercise complete jurisdiction and control over and within said areas with the right to acquire (under conditions to be hereafter agreed upon by the two Governments) for the public purposes of the United States any land or other property therein by purchase or by exercise of eminent domain with full compensation to the owners thereof.
The more recent treaty, the Treaty Between the United States of America and Cuba of 1934 (US Treaty Series No. 866) abrogates the 1903 agreement in Article I, but then in Article III states,
Until the two contracting parties agree to the modifications or abrogation of the stipulations of the agreement in regard to the lease to the United States of America of lands in Cuba for coaling and naval stations signed by the President of the Republic of Cuba on February 16, 1903, and by the President of the United States of America on the 23rd day of the same month and year, the stipulations of that agreement with regard to the naval stations of Guantanamo shall continue in effect. The supplementary agreement in regard to naval or coaling stations signed between the two Governments on July 2, 1903, also shall continue in effect in the same form and on the same conditions with respect to the naval station at Guantanamo. So long as the United States of America shall not abandon the said naval station of Guantanamo or the two Governments shall not agree to a modification of its present limits, the station shall continue to have territorial area that it now has, with the limits that it has on the date of the signature of the preset Treaty.
So the Gitmo provisions survive until the US and Cuba agree to change them. And Cuban courts have no jurisdiction to intervene.
Personally, I would be prepared to read the words “the United States shall exercise complete jurisdiction and control” language of the treaty as invoking the powers of all three branches of government, not just the executive. In this view, under Art. VI of the Constitution (“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrary notwithstanding.”), the treaty would supply the jurisdiction for the federal courts that they seem to believe they lack under Article III.
The faculty is getting set to produce, G*d help us, a mission statement. The chance that this will be a pointless waste of time is high, much higher than a Retreat. But the downside is also bounded; the odds that anyone will get mad about this seem low. Unfortunately, we can’t simply decide not to do it, as the central administration hath sent out a decree unto all parts of the University, yea even unto the most autonomous of Schools, that There Shall Be Mission Statements. And so there shall be.
So I thought I should try to make lemonade from this lemon. Why not use this as an excuse to introduce the faculty to the wonders of collaborative drafting software?
The only collaborative drafting tools I have any experience using is the Wiki family (WikiWiki, Twiki), and I didn’t find those easy enough to use to feel confident about asking the faculty to use them. The lack of a version history is also a big problem.
So, ideally the tool would
I’d done a little hunting around, but nothing seems quite right.
Is the answer WebDAV? (‘Web-based distributed authoring and versioning (WebDAV) is a standards-based protocol developed to address the need to collaborate and author documents over the Web.’ says DMDirect). Sounds good, but doesn’t seem to have matured into user-friendly apps I could foist on the colleagues. Which is a shame, as I just discovered I have a WebDAV capability pre-installed on my server. And supposedly there’s some sort of WebDAV capability built into Windows XP, which is now the standard desktop in the law school — although the Microsoft documents I found on line didn’t actually explain how to do anything….
WebRFM sounds possible, but is still an early beta. I can’t use anything that crashes regularly or the faculty will abandon it. I particularly like the look of Zope’s CMF application of Web DAV, but from what I can see it too isn’t fully baked yet, and out-of-the-box might not yet be user friendly enough.
Suggestions?