Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

It’s Rumsfeld

Posted on March 1, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Updating ACLU & Human Rights First to File Torture Allegations Against 'High Ranking US Official' below: Reuters reports that the “high-ranking US official” being sued is indeed Rumsfeld.

Posted in Torture | Comments Off on It’s Rumsfeld

ACLU & Human Rights First to File Torture Allegations Against ‘High Ranking US Official’

Posted on March 1, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Two human rights groups plan to file a lawsuit charging a high-ranking U.S. official with violation of the U.S. Constitution and international laws prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

According to their press release,

At a 10:30 a.m. news conference [in Washington later today], the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First (formerly Lawyers Committee for Human Rights), joined by former military and government officials, will announce a lawsuit against a high-ranking U.S. government official on behalf of eight men who were tortured and abused by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The lawsuit will charge that officials at the highest level bear ultimate responsibility for the physical and psychological injuries these men suffered. The men represented in the lawsuit were incarcerated in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they were subjected to torture and other cruel and degrading treatment, including severe and repeated beatings, cutting with knives, sexual humiliation and assault, mock executions, death threats, and restraint in contorted and excruciating positions. None of the men were ever charged with a crime.

Who is the official? I have no idea, although Rumsfeld would be my first guess, followed by Gonzales, followed by whoever Rumsfeld put in charge of the information extraction program (would that be Feith?)

The case could have everything – fights over discovery of classified information, claims of multifarious sorts of immunity, and (from the sound of it) maybe even debates over the scope of the alien tort statute. Oh, and the smell of justice. Don't forget the smell of justice. Even if the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow.

Posted in Torture | Comments Off on ACLU & Human Rights First to File Torture Allegations Against ‘High Ranking US Official’

PADILLA WINS BIG!!!

Posted on February 28, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Padilla wins—bigtime in the District Court in South Carolina (warning: court site may be overloaded…here is an alternate site).

The government is ordered to release him (or charge him)… but only in 45 days…. I would imagine there will be an appeal…

[updated:] Here's what the court has to say to the government's Yoo-ish argument that the President can order any citizen jailed for whatever reason he wants, even in the face of a Congressional enactment, 18 U.S.C. § 4001(a), that says, “No citizen shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an Act of Congress.”

Accordingly, and limited to the facts of this case, the Court is of the firm opinion that it must reject the position posited by Respondent. To do otherwise would not only offend the rule of law and violate this country’s constitutional tradition, but it would also be a betrayal of this Nation’s commitment to the separation of powers that safeguards our democratic values and individual liberties.

For the Court to find for Respondent would also be to engage in judicial activism. This Court sits to interpret the law as it is and not as the Court might wish it to be. Pursuant to its interpretation, the Court finds that the President has no power, neither express nor implied, neither constitutional nor statutory, to hold Petitioner as an enemy combatant.

I could do without the suggestion that the Court “might wish” to see the President enjoy the arbitrary power of detention against any citizen, but however you slice it this is a stinging rebuke of the Administration's awful arguments.

Here's the sole fly in the ointment: “Of course, if appropriate, the Government can bring criminal charges against Petitioner or it can hold him as a material witness.” The material witness statute is itself routinely being abused.

Posted in Civil Liberties | 5 Comments

Another Good Conference I’m Going to Miss

Posted on February 28, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

This sounds both fun and useful: TaxProf Blog: Indiana To Host April 15 Symposium on The Next Generation of Law School Rankings

One of the many things that bugs me about US News's highly arbitrary law school rankings is the weight they put on graduates' starting salaries. One could well ask whether salaries are even relevant to rankings as the jobs that are hardest to get — public interest jobs — tend to pay the least. But even if one accepts the idea that money is relevant to ranking, it's weird to look only at nominal salary without any adjustment for cost of living. This is an enormous boost to the ranking of New York schools and a real downer for Miami's rankings. A very large fraction of our graduates fall in love with South Florida (or came here because they already love South Florida) and decide to stay. The large supply of entry-level lawyers — many Harvard grads seem to want to work here too — only worsens the historically low entry-level salaries in this town at all but the largest national firms. Yet, overall, with the exception of housing the cost of living isn't dire here, and there's no state income tax. None of that gets reflected in USN&WR's survey.

Posted in Talks & Conferences | 2 Comments

Run Linux Under Windows

Posted on February 28, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

I've always thought that I would want to run windows under Linux, thus my interest in things like cygwin has always been sort of low.

But these Cooperative Linux folks seem set on making Linux-under-windows a viable idea. After all, “Cygwin is not a way to run native linux apps on Windows. You have to rebuild your application from source if you want to get it running on Windows.” But with cooperative linux, maybe not?

Dog on its hind legs, or something cool? I can't quite tell, although it seems to me that Linux under Windows would not be nearly as robust as the other way around.

Posted in Software | 1 Comment

Alex Halavais on the Woes of Teaching Porn Studies

Posted on February 28, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Alex Halavais is teaching Com 497, “Cyber Porn and Society,” in the Communications department at the University of Buffalo. He's done a number of energetic and innovative things, such as offering each of the (400?!?) students a chance to have a blog of their own.

Nevertheless, Teaching Porn seems to be proving to be a mixed experience:

  • I have to check the spam folder almost as often as the inbox, since student emails seem to get dropped there easily. Likewise, when I get an email reading “Here as promised the log-in to that amazing adult site,” I have to do due diligence to make sure the author isn’t really one of my students or correspondents.
  • I keep the door to my office closed when writing lectures and when someone knocks, I have to make sure the screen is clear of anything offensive, despite the fact that I will be talking about this in front of a class of 400.
  • It’s not hard to make some ASL translators blush.

    • …

  • It’s amazing, in a class of 400, what people can take to be a double entendre.

Aside from the little things, there are ongoing challenges. Some segment of the students apparently signed up because they wanted to see porn. This is a bizarre idea to me. I do show porn in the class: either when there is no other way to illustrate something, or when the presentation is (IMHO) very tame, or when it is just too inconvenient to expurgate from, for example, a video clip. (I’ve been using some clips from documentaries that air on HBO that seem to include gratuitous pornography interspersed with some really interesting interviews.) But taking a course has to be the most difficult possible way to obtain pornography. At this stage, it appears clear that a not insubstantial number of the students are going to fail the course, despite some generous curves on the exams. I don’t know that some brief titillation is worth having to admit to failing your porn course.

And then there's the homophobia…

Posted in The Media | 1 Comment