The federal appeals court decision rejecting a lawsuit brought by former prisoners charging the CIA with abducting and transporting them to secret prisons in other countries where they were tortured is garnering widespread derision as a dangerous continuation of unwieldy executive power.

In Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dismissed a lawsuit lodged in 2007 on behalf of five men kidnapped by the CIA and sent to other countries for imprisonment and interrogation. The ACLU represented the men and argued that they had been tortured during their imprisonment. The Bush and Obama administrations argued that the lawsuit should be dismissed because it could uncover so-called "state secrets," undermining national security. The Ninth Circuit sided with the government, maintaining that it represented a "rare case" in which the government's claims to protect national security were stronger than considering whether human rights were violated.

The ACLU's Ben Wizner, who represented the former prisoners, said in a press release, "This is a sad day not only for the torture victims whose attempt to seek justice has been extinguished, but for all Americans who care about the rule of law and our nation's reputation in the world. To date, not a single victim of the Bush administration's torture program has had his day in court."

The New York Times editorial board blasted the Ninth Circuit's decision, saying it "diminishes any hope that this odious practice [extraordinary rendition, where military captives are sent to secret prisons in other countries] will finally receive the legal label it deserves: a violation of international law."

The Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan writes:

The case yesterday is particularly egregious because it forbade a day in court for torture victims even if only non-classified evidence was used. Think of that for a minute. It shreds any argument that national security is in any way at stake here. It's definitionally not protection of any state secret if all that is relied upon is evidence that is not secret. And so this doctrine has been invoked by Obama not to protect national security but to protect war criminals from the law. There is no other possible interpretation.

The Bush executive is therefore now a part of the American system of government, a system that increasingly bears no resemblance to the constitutional limits allegedly placed upon it, and with a judiciary so co-opted by the executive it came up with this ruling yesterday. Obama, more than anyone, now bears responsibility for that. We had a chance to draw a line. We had a chance to do the right thing. But Obama has vigorously denied us the chance even for minimal accountability for war crimes that smell to heaven.

For discussion on the history of the government's use of the "state secrets" privilege, see an ACS panel discussion, including Wizner, here.

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Two days after U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth refused to stay his order blocking federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit granted the Obama administration's emergency request for a stay.

In its order, the court used "standard language" indicating that the stay would give the court time to consider the merits of the motion, and should not be read as a ruling on the merits, The Blog of the Legal Times reports. The court set deadlines for the plaintiffs to respond to the stay request, and for a Department of Justice rebuttal.

In its request for a stay, the administration argued that "[d]isruption of ongoing research will result in irreparable setbacks and, in many cases, may destroy a project altogether," and that the injunction is at odds with the intent of Congress when it passed the law, Reuters reports.

Law and biosciences expert Hank Greely wrote in an ACSblog post that Judge Lamberth's initial opinion was "disappointingly bad," and predicted that the D.C. Circuit would first stay the order and then reverse it.

 

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Beyond calling for a repeal of the 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship clause, proponents of harsh crackdowns on undocumented workers and families are now targeting public school children, writes Catherine A. Traywick for The Media Consortium.

Traywick notes, "California, New York, Iowa and Colorado are among the states that have cracked down on immigrant students by hiring ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents to investigate residency statuses or unlawfully barring students from enrolling. Such blatant discrimination files in the face of the 14th Amendment and Supreme Court precedent, both of which guarantee all children the right to a public education regardless of immigration status."

Traywick's piece goes on to note that there are efforts in New Jersey to strip immigrants of social services. According to a lawsuit lodged by several documented immigrants, the state's human services department is violating the equal protection clause of the Constitution "by denying health care subsidies to legal permanent residents."

The 14th Amendment states, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."

But as noted earlier this summer by University of Baltimore School of Law Professor Garrett Epps a movement has formed that is "urging Congress and the courts to simply ignore the Citizenship Clause and pass laws purporting to strip citizenship from American children because of their parents' immigration status."

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By Robert K. Elder, author of Last Words of the Executed and a regional editor for AOL's Patch.com in Chicago. Visit the book's official website here.

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 While other books have recorded the last words of the rich, respected and famous, I sought to document the final thoughts of the most discarded members of our society in Last Words of the Executed. It's an oral history of the overlooked, the infamous and the forgotten in a history of capital punishment in America as told from the gallows, the chair, and the gurney.

It's a nonpolitical book, simply asking: If these are the most dangerous, reviled members of society - why does it remain a cultural value to record what they say? And what can we learn from them?

While doing research for Last Words of the Executed, I interviewed Rev. Carroll Pickett, a former death row chaplain who took the last words of 95 condemned prisoners in Huntsville, Texas. He was convinced that at least one of them - Carlos De Luna - was innocent. And he posed this question to me: Do the innocent die differently than the guilty?

My focus for the last seven years has been on the words themselves, but Pickett's question haunts me. Last Words of the Executed records final statements all the way back to the 17th Century and, since that time, more than 16,000 men and women have been executed on these shores for crimes ranging from kidnapping and theft to espionage and murder. Only a few of them have been posthumously found innocent and exonerated, most famously the accused Salem witches.

Sarah Good was executed with four other accused witches on Gallows Hill in 1692. When urged by Rev. Nicholas Noyes to confess, Good called him a liar, then delivered her final, famous last words:

"I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink."

We often forget that 20 people lost their lives during the witch hunt, 19 hanged and one crushed to death, with many more deaths in prison.

The last words I collected ranged from awe-inspiring to horrific; they are calls for peace and cries against injustice. Just as often, these final words are accepting, confessional, and consoling. Still others can be venomous, rage-fueled diatribes. Almost all statements fit into at least one of the well-known stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Good sounds as if she was angry. Very, very angry.

While I strived to make Last Words of the Executed an apolitical volume, there's no ignoring the passionate debate over the death penalty in the United States. In fact, many of the executed quoted in the book used their last breaths to proclaim their innocence and protest capital punishment. Roger K. Coleman, executed by the state of Virginia in 1992 for the rape and murder of his sister-in-law Wanda McCoy, is one example. As guards strapped him into the chair, Coleman declared:

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The slug's pace with which the Senate is confirming the Obama administration's judicial nominations continues to garner media attention and derision from those concerned about a federal bench that has a growing number of vacancies.

A recent Associated Press article notes that Senate Republicans have remained steadfast in their determination to stall the administration's judicial picks, which has resulted in a situation where the administration has "put fewer people on the bench than any president since Richard Nixon at a similar point in his presidency." The AP notes that "there are 45 nominees awaiting action, two for nearly 13 months."

Yesterday, The Huffington Post's Sam Stein noted that although the administration has voiced anger over Republican obstructionism "even sympathetic observers acknowledge that the president is largely powerless (if not helpless) on the matter." Stein maintains, "That's because both he and allies in Congress simply lack the tools to force the Republican Party's hand."

In a piece for the Constitutional Accountability Center's Text & History blog, Judith E. Schaeffer writes that even the president's least controversial nominees - and he has few that have drawn serious controversy - have been victims of the obstruction. Schaeffer notes that in early spring Kimberly Mueller was nominated to fill a vacant seat on the Eastern District of California "and was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 6 without opposition, yet is languishing in Senate limbo, still waiting for a confirmation on the Senate floor."

Schaeffer says Mueller is "about as uncontroversial as judicial nominees get," citing her sterling legal credentials, including the ABA's top rating and a stint as a U.S. Magistrate Judge in California.

Schaeffer blasts the Senate Republican's tactics, writing:

So why is Kimberly Mueller still waiting for a vote? The answer is simple, and unacceptable. Throughout the Obama presidency, Senate Republicans have taken judicial obstructionism to an entirely new level, abusing the Senate's procedural rules to block even the most uncontroversial of the President's judicial nominees and giving new meaning to the phrase "Just Say No." Mueller is one of many of these new pawns in this obstructionist game, which Republicans are playing to increase the backlog of nominees on the Senate floor and keep President Obama from filling judicial vacancies. This rank, hyper-partisanship diminishes the ability of our federal courts to dispense justice fairly and timely, and should concern every American, no matter his or her political leanings.

As noted here yesterday, President Obama has urged the Senate to cease with the delays, and recently Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has joined that call.

In article for The Huffington Post, ACS Executive Director Caroline Fredrickson wrote, "The vacancies on the federal bench will continue to grow, considering the glacial pace at which the Senate is moving on the president's judicial selections, resulting in a judicial system that is already overburdened coming to a grinding halt."

To follow the growing crisis on the federal bench, visit the ACS web-based project, JudicialNominations.org, which includes an interactive map detailing where the vacancies are and how long nominees have languished. Updates from JudicialNominations.org are available via its Facebook page.

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By Saeed Khan, a former president of the Muslim Association of North Central Florida. Mr. Khan is a Gainesville, Fla., resident of more than thirty years where Pastor Terry Jones has drawn widespread attention for a planned burning of Qurans.

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The Dove World Outreach Center was established in 1986 in suburban Gainesville, Fla., where its current pastor, Mr. Terry Jones, assumed his role in 1996. America was attacked by a fringe group of terrorists on September 11, 2001. Almost eight years later, Pastor Jones decided that "Islam is of the devil" and this year he wants to burn the Quran, the Muslim's holy book, on the anniversary of 9/11.

What has happened during these years that convinced Pastor Jones to take these actions? Why did he not come out earlier against Islam?

As he told The New York Times, Pastor Jones has not read the Quran and he is not familiar with any aspect of Islam. Who is speaking in Jones's ear and using him to push their agenda? When it was first conceived in 2009, the building of the community center on 51 Park in New York City was not strongly opposed. In fact, all local authorities supported it. Even Fox News contributor Laura Ingram was for it. "I like what you are doing," she told Daisy Khan, proponent of the center. All of a sudden the dialogue has changed; now the center is being referred to as a mosque, to be built on the hallowed grounds of the World Trade Center. No matter that it is not a mosque and the site is not the World Trade Center but rather an empty blighted building two blocks away. Again I ask, what happened?

I maintain that these events are the result of old fashioned politics. In the absence of an alternative plan to improve the economy and win the wars, opponents of President Obama want to create an issue. Because his faith was already in question, his opponents want to make an issue about his purported faith. This tactic appears to be working. According to the Pew Research Center's national survey conducted this month, 18 percent of Americans think President Obama is a Muslim, a 7 percent increase since 2009. Now that they have maligned and criticized the faith, the next step is to instigate problems. Former House speaker Mr. Gingrich, commenting on Park 51, compared Islam to Nazism. "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There is no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center." Mr. Gingrich even planned to join Dutch anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders in New York on the anniversary of 9/11, an affront to the memory of Muslims who lost their lives in the World Trade Center on that terrible day.

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By Stephen I. Vladeck, Professor of Law, American University Washington College of Law.

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More than two years after the Supreme Court held, in Boumediene v. Bush, that non-citizens detained at Guantánamo Bay are entitled to pursue habeas corpus relief in the D.C. federal courts, the ensuing litigation stands at something of a methodological impasse. On one hand, the judges of the D.C. district court have issued decisions on the merits in over 50 cases, fashioning a series of procedures, evidentiary rules, and substantive standards based on the text of the rather-ambiguous September 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). Applying this body of judge-made law, the various judges of the district court have granted habeas relief to the detainees roughly 75 percent of the time - a statistic that is only the more remarkable when you consider that those who are still left at Guantánamo are supposed to be the "worst of the worst," in contrast to the almost 600 individuals released by the U.S. government long before Boumediene.

On the other hand, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has (1) reversed several of those grants; (2) suggested in several opinions that the district courts have erred far too often in favor of the detainees; (3) ruled that detainees who can no longer be detained can also not be released into the United States (reversing the district court's conclusion to the contrary); and (4) held that detainees do not have a right to notice and a hearing before being transferred to a third-party country, whether or not the detainee fears torture or other forms of mistreatment once transferred there (again, despite the district court's conclusion to the contrary). Indeed, among the dozen or so D.C. Circuit decisions in Guantánamo cases since Boumediene, there has only been one case in which the Court of Appeals thought that the district court wrongly ruled against a detainee on the merits - and even there, it only remanded for further evidence. [In a forthcoming essay, I explain why these decisions are out-of-step both with Boumediene and with a proper understanding of the habeas remedy that the Constitution's Suspension Clause necessarily protects.]

In the Guantánamo detainee cases, then, the past two years have witnessed two of the nation's most respected courts, looking at the same facts and legal issues in the same cases, and seeing them completely differently.

The latest chapter was written by the D.C. Circuit last Tuesday, when it refused to go en banc to rehear the original three-judge panel decision in Al-Bihani v. Obama. What's telling about this development isn't the fact that the Court of Appeals left the panel decision intact, but how it chose to do so. Each of the seven active judges not on the original panel signed a short, joint statement, emphasizing that "We decline to en banc this case to determine the role of international law-of-war principles in interpreting the AUMF because, as the various opinions issued in the case indicate, the panel's discussion of that question is not necessary to the disposition of the merits."

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By Piper Hoffman. Ms. Hoffman is an employment attorney and writer. She blogs at piperhoffman.com.

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Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the largest class action in history, continues its tortuous journey through the federal court system with a knock at the Supreme Court's door. Plaintiffs won class certification in the district court over six years ago, then won again before a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel, then won again in a rehearing before the same panel, then won again after Wal-Mart got a rehearing en banc. With nowhere else to go, Wal-Mart has petitioned the Supreme Court for certiorari.

The Dukes class sues Wal-Mart for gender discrimination. The first paragraph of its Third Amended Complaint sum up its accusations:

Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world and the largest private employer in the United States ... There are two workforces at Wal-Mart. By far the largest workforce is female, which comprises over 72% of the hourly sales employees, yet only one-third of management positions. This workforce is predominantly assigned to the lowest paying positions with the least chance of advancement. The other workforce is male. This workforce is the reverse image of the female workforce-it comprises less than 28% of the hourly sales workers, yet holds two-thirds of all store management positions and over 90% of the top Store Manager positions. This disparate distribution of the genders is the result of purposeful discrimination and of practices that serve no reasonable business purpose yet have a disproportionate impact on women.

Wal-Mart's brief to the Supreme Court reads like the Hail Mary pass that it is. (Dukes's response to the petition is due September 24.) The company's attorneys shoved in every argument they could dream up, including repeating one of the Ninth Circuit dissenting opinions essentially in toto. But their primary theme can be summed up in one sentence: Wal-Mart is so big that bringing a class action against it would be unfair - to Wal-Mart.

Since that is not grounds for granting certiorari, Wal-Mart argues instead that the Supreme Court should take the case because of any number of disagreements among and even within the Circuits. But the en banc Ninth Circuit opinion, 603 F.3d 571, 582 (9th Cir. 2010), analyzes these alleged disagreements in depth and demonstrates that they are unworthy of certiorari. For instance, the district courts have demonstrated some confusion in following Miles v. Merrill Lynch & Co. (In re Initial Pub. Offerings Securities Litigation), 471 F.3d 24 (2d Cir. 2006), the case that requires courts to determine that all of the Rule 23 factors necessary for class certification are satisfied, even if the court must examine facts or questions that overlap with the merits in order to make that determination. While different circuits may have expressed their standards in different language, the Ninth Circuit shows that the Supreme Court already announced the necessary law in Gen. Tel. Co. of Sw. v. Falcon, 457 U.S. 147, 160 (1982).

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With the crisis over judicial vacancies continuing to grow - there are more than a hundred vacant seats on the federal bench - a new ACS-sponsored website, JudicialNominations.org, is tracking where the vacancies reside nationwide, highlighting the Senate obstruction of the judicial nominations process, and providing essential resources for understanding the ongoing matter.

The Associated Press reports that a "determined Republican stall campaign in the Senate has sidetracked so many men and women nominated by President Barack Obama for judgeships that he has put fewer people on the bench than any president since Richard Nixon at a similar point in his first year term 40 years ago. The delaying tactics have proved so successful, despite the Democrats' substantial Senate majority, that fewer than half of Obama's nominees have been confirmed and 102 out of 854 judgeships are vacant."

JudicialNominations.org offers all those concerned about the ability of federal courts to operate efficiently to stay on top of the judicial nominations process. The website brings together for the first time an array of information, including an interactive map that allows the user to select an individual district or circuit courts and identify the number of vacancies in that area, how long those vacancies have existed, whether anyone has been nominated to fill the vacancy and how long nominees have waited for confirmation. The website also provides links to congressional statements, videos, upcoming hearings and other events, and the latest nomination news.

Politicians and judges alike have noted the growing crisis of federal court vacancies. During a recent judicial conference, Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy blasted the slow pace of judicial confirmations. "It's important for the public to understand that the excellence of the federal judiciary is at risk, Kennedy said. "If judicial excellence is cast upon a sea of congressional indifference, the rule of law is imperiled."

As President Obama noted earlier this summer, "If we want our judicial system to work - if we want to deliver justice in our courts - then we need judges on our benches. And I hope that in the coming months, we'll be able to work together to ensure a timelier process in the Senate."

Visit JudicialNominations.org to stay abreast of the crisis on our federal bench and receive updates from the website via Facebook, by clicking the "like" tag on JudiciaNominations.org's Facebook page.

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For some Americans, Labor Day is a fleeting break to take stock of personal or professional advancements and to mark the dwindling days of summer. But for lesbian, gay men, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) workers it can too often serve as a reminder that equality in the workforce has yet to be achieved, as Professor Maxine Eichner notes in a new ACS Issue Brief.

Eichner, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law, notes that Congress has taken steps to protect workers from discrimination, such as passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which "prohibited discrimination on a number of bases: race, religion, color, national origin and sex," as well as other federal laws protecting against discrimination based on age or disabilities.

But there is no similar federal legislation to protect LGBT workers from discrimination in the workforce, and Eichner notes, the states have largely failed to provide protections as well. "Twenty-nine states, including all of the South, and most of the Midwest and West, afford no employment discrimination for gays and lesbians. Moreover, the twenty-one state statutes that offer some protection generally are significantly limited in scope," she writes.

Eichner says it's time for Congress to act by finally passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). She explains:

ENDA would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity with respect to hiring, firing, and terms of employment. The bill would also protect workers from retaliation. In this way, ENDA is an important step toward ensuring fairness for LGBT workers. The legislation stands for the proposition that like other employees, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees should be judged on their work performance, rather than on their sexual orientation or gender identity.

As it stands now, far too many LGBT workers are confronted with discrimination within the workplace. Citing a CareerBuilder.com study, Eichner notes that twenty-eight percent of LGBT workers reported suffering from workplace discrimination.

"In one reported case, a gay maintenance worker had his hands and feet bound by his co-workers. In another, a transgender corrections officer was smashed into a concrete wall. Further accounts of LGBT workers who are subjected to harassing comments and unequal working conditions once their status was discovered abound," Eichner writes.

The Issue Brief, "The Employment Non-Discrimination Act: Requiring Fairness for All Employees Regardless of Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity," is available here.

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Evidence abounds that the indigent defense system is in crisis. Yet we lack data on "even the most basic questions" related to indigent defense, such as "how many defendants are represented by the indigent defense systems in this country, how many misdemeanor defendants have a right to counsel, or what percentage of defendants who are entitled to court-appointed representation go unrepresented." writes Erica J. Hashimoto in an ACS Issue Brief released this week.

According to a small-sample survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 30 percent of defendants charged with misdemeanors are denied their right to counsel. But these results omit many defendants with suspended terms of incarceration who may have also had a right to counsel. And anecdotal evidence in some states, such as North Dakota, shows that systems fail to appoint counsel at arraignment routinely in misdemeanor cases, "despite the fact that most defendants pled guilty at the hearing and many were sentenced to jail time." All of this suggests that a significant percentage of misdemeanor defendants are deprived their right to counsel, and that more data is necessary to determine the extent of the problem and craft solutions, explains Hashimoto, associate professor of law at the University of Georgia School of Law.

In her Issue Brief, "Assessing the Indigent Defense System," Hashimoto urges the Bureau of Justice Statistics to collect a range of data on misdemeanor defendants, as they do on felony defendants in the 75 largest counties. Beyond that, BJS needs to collect data on representation rates in smaller counties and jurisdictions, where "there may not be an experienced indigent defense bar, and other bar members may not view it as their obligation to ensure that all felony defendants are represented."

On the issue of effective assistance of counsel, there is some more data available. Surveys of public defenders show those in the 100 largest counties are assigned between 50 and 80 percent more cases than permitted by maximum caseload standards, and "there appears to be no dispute that lawyers with those types of caseloads cannot provide effective assistance." Thus, Hashimoto says, we must gather information about where public defender caseloads are highest, how we can most effectively control caseloads, and at what point in the process defendants are assigned public defenders.

"None of these steps will fix the indigent defense system overnight," Hashimoto concludes. "But until we have data establishing the nature and magnitude of the problems and the most effective mechanisms for addressing those problems, we cannot begin the process of systematically solving them."

Hashimoto's Issue Brief is the third in an ACS series on strengthened roles the federal government can play in addressing the persistent crisis in indigent defense.

The first two Issue Briefs are "A Legislative Approach to Indigent Defense Reform" by Cara H. Drinan and "From Error Toward Quality: A Federal Role in Support of Criminal Process," by James M. Doyle.

Hashimoto's ACS Issue Brief is available here.

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Five years after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on New Orleans and exposed a shockingly wobbly government response to the disaster, a report from the Institute for Southern Studies says the government is still unprepared to handle a similar disaster.

The report, "Learning from Katrina: Lessons from Five years of Recovery and Renewal in the Gulf Coast," maintains that "many of the problems exposed in the botched federal response to the storm - from breakdowns in disaster planning to a misguided and mismanaged recovery - have yet to be addressed in Washington," writes Chris Kromm, a co-author of the report, for the Institute's online magazine.

The study notes that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which was widely criticized for its action in the Gulf, "is just now releasing its new disaster framework - and it still omits internationally recognized standards for protecting storm victims."

The full report is available here (pdf).

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The first law in the country to give domestic workers protections similar to those enjoyed by other workers was signed into law in New York State Tuesday.

The law protects over 200,000 nannies, housekeepers, elder companions and other domestic laborers by guaranteeing overtime pay after 40 hours per week, time off for at least 24 consecutive hours each week and protection against sexual harassment, the Associated Press reports.

"This is a remarkable victory for domestic workers and advocates," the American Civil Liberties Union said on its Blog of Rights. "But perhaps even more remarkable is that it has taken us this long to grant these most basic protections to the hardworking women and men whose labor forms the backbone of our economy."

In New York, 93 percent of domestic workers are women, 95 percent are people of color, and 99 percent are immigrants, the blog reports, "making clear that the exploitation, abuse, and enslavement of domestic workers is directly related to discrimination based on sex, race, class, and immigration status."

In signing the bill into law, Gov. David Paterson (right) noted that a similar law has been introduced in California. "I profoundly hope that New York's efforts in this area will serve as a national model, and remove the exclusions which have wrongly applied to this class of workers for too long," Paterson said.

Some local laws provide more limited protections to domestic workers, such as a law in Maryland's Montgomery County that requires employers to provide domestic workers with a contract.

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Judith Armatta is a lawyer, journalist, and human-rights advocate who monitored the trial of Slobodan Milosevic on behalf of the Coalition for International Justice. Joining efforts to promote the rule of law, Armatta worked for the American Bar Association's Central and East European Law Initiative, opening offices in Serbia and Montenegro. During the Kosova War, she headed a War Crimes Documentation Project among Kosovar Albanian refugees in Macedonia.

The trial of Slobodan Milosevic, who is described variously as the Butcher of the Balkans or the Martyr of a New World Order, before an international war crimes tribunal was touted as "The Trial of the Century." As it stumbled into its fifth year amid heavy criticism over its length and management, Milosevic was found dead in his cell. There would be no judgment in this problematic trial.

As the first indictment of a head of state for 66 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in an international tribunal committed over a decade during three wars, the trial was destined to be epic. A defiant Milosevic heightened the drama as he appeared in court denouncing the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia as illegitimate and a tool of NATO and the United States, refusing counsel and insisting on using the trial to accuse his accusers. Twilight of Impunity examines whether justice is possible where an accused sets out to destroy the institution that seeks to hold him accountable - by using its legal process against it.

My purpose in writing Twilight of Impunity was three-fold: 1) to increase knowledge of the trial by providing accurate factual information and legal explanation, 2) to inform further discussion by assessing its achievements and failures, and 3) to strengthen the investment of policy and opinion makers and the educated public in war crimes trials as a significant element of peace-building in war-torn countries.

Twilight of Impunity makes the four-year-plus trial accessible to professionals and an educated public by extracting highlights and analyzing their importance for establishing guilt or their failure to do so and by explaining developing international law in plain language. Through specific examples of events that occurred during the trial, it corrects misconceptions about the trial and the growing revisionist history of the Balkan wars.

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An evangelical Christian lobbying group and a far right-wing candidate for Nevada attorney general have lodged a sweeping lawsuit against the health care reform law. Joel Hansen, the  Independent American Party candidate, and the Nevada Families Eagle Forum claim that the Affordable Care Act violates "at least half a dozen constitutional amendments, including the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, 10th and 13th," reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Hansen, at press briefing about the lawsuit, said that unlike the other legal challenges to the health care reform law, his is not about states' rights. Instead, Hansen said, "It's about individual rights. It violates the First Amendment because a lot of people are pro-life and this law forces them to contribute to (paying for) abortions. That's a violation of religious freedom."

Hansen, whose party supports legislation "to return authority over abortion and public prayer to the states," and "to control the Federal Courts," also maintained, as the newspaper reported, that "many religious Americans do not buy insurance because they liken it to gambling, and forcing them to buy insurance would be another First Amendment violation."

In its June 2010 newsletter, the Nevada Families Eagle Forum, edited by Mr. Hansen's sister Janine, warns of turbulent economic and political times, and calls for a spiritual renewal of sorts. "The first thing to do is to make sure your hearts are right. I go to the source of God's wisdom, the Bible," she wrote.

A string of state attorneys general have joined lawsuits challenging a provision of the health care reform law that requires certain individuals to purchase health care insurance or pay a fee to offset their use of health care entities, such as visits to an emergency room. Those lawsuits primarily argue that Congress does not have the authority to enact such a law. Many constitutional law scholars and experts disagree, arguing that Congress has authority under the commerce clause and the power to tax and spend. In an interview with ACSblog, Simon Lazarus, public policy counsel of the National Senior Citizens Law Center (NSCLC) and author of an ACS Issue Brief on the constitutionality of health care reform, chided the state attorneys general for bringing the lawsuits, saying they were frivolous and politically motivated. See video of Lazarus' interview here.

 

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