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McCormack on Lawyers & National Securities

By Lawrence Solum

Wayne McCormack (University of Utah - S.J. Quinney College of Law) has posted The War on the Rule of Law (Journal of National Security Forum, Vol. 36, p. 101, 2010) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Each year, the Journal of the National Security Forum asks a set of ten questions to various authors and observers and publishes their views on some or all of the questions. I have chosen to address several, but not all, of the questions for this forum because I want to talk about the role of lawyers and national security. I believe that the policies of the U.S. Government following 9/11 were shaped by panic, that several of those policies constituted an attempt to repudiate centuries of developing legal principles, and that the principles so repudiated represented both human values and pragmatic realities in the face of serious threats to national security. In short, I believe that the Bush Administration, acting through various lawyers, mounted not so much a ?War on Terror? as an assault on the Rule of Law, and in the process added fuel to the recruiting efforts of the jihadists. Rather than making us safer, they increased the threat to our national security.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on June 14, 2010 (boomark / email).