That first time, early August and the middle of a heat wave, she thought she'd just get some air. Simply stand on the cement patio, quietly gaze at the stars caught in the net of our maple tree. But my mother had forgotten, after eighteen years of marriage and five children, how to simply stand and look. In church she was distracted by the altar boy's badly cut hair. In the park she unob trusively deadheaded geraniums. That first night, it wasn't desire or even the desire for desire that drew her into the cool, prickly grass. Instead it was the tipped-up cover on our sandbox, calling her to right it. Our ranch house was in a subdivision planted on long-ago potato fields. Sometimes as he cultivated his Big Boys, my eager father spaded up a shriveled tuber or a shard of thick white china, a won der to us children, so little concept did we have of a past. Everything was ours and brand new, and not to be happy was betrayal Our aunts and uncles, still mired in Queens and the Bronx, took the train out to sit on our new lawn furniture, enjoy burgers from my father's grill. Every house for blocks was just the same, down to the slender sapling yearning against its guy wires on the edge of the lawn. The fathers had fought in the war, and here was their reward: the rows of snug houses crouched beneath the sky, where on sultry after noons the thunder clouds massed like another, less benign prospect. Both summer and winter the mothers stayed mostly inside, only leaning out the door to shake a dust mop, call us home for lunch. I can see my mother harvesting clean socks from the aluminum wash line my father set up for her on the edge of the patio, or carrying bags of groceries in from the car, but she had far too much work to loll around in a lawn chair. Besides, sun made her squint. Night was her time, my father Canadian-Clubbed into oblivion, the younger children asleep at last. I was sixteen that summer and had my first real boyfriend. Dave was two years older but I was the one who decided whether we went to the movies or bowling, when we started kissing and where we stopped. Oldest of five, I was used
The rule of law in a democratic nation demands that the laws governing people are not secret.Yet parts of the executive branch's legal policy that govern aspects of the current war on terror are laid out in non-public opinions issued the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. Many of those opinions, which are almost always binding on the executive branch and are used to provide legal comfort to government officials in the form of protection against future investigation or prosecution, are still secret or were kept secret for years before being leaked or disseminated to Congress and the public. This Article assesses the historical pattern of politicization of executive branch legal policy in times of war or armed conflict and analyzes how secrecy in the development and implementation of legal policy compromises its quality and undermines public confidence in the integrity of executive branch constitutional interpretation. This Article critiques the lack of information disclosure from a domestic perspective and illustrates how other nations that face severe national security threats maintain greater transparency and accessibility in the development of legal policy, and thus a greater degree of integrity in their national security programs.
In recent years, immigration has become an increasingly controversial political issue and the “Official-English” movement has gathered steam. Many state and local governments have enacted Official-English laws or constitutional amendments, employers have promulgated English-only workplace policies, and the treatment of nonnative English speakers in the schools, the courts, and other aspects of public life has come under increasing public scrutiny. Such initiatives have led to an increasing number of legal challenges and an increasing number of judicial decisions addressing the implications of OfficialEnglish and English-only laws and policies. The student authors of this survey article therefore perform an important and useful service by reporting and describing Official-English and English-only laws and policies of various kinds, and gathering, organizing, and analyzing decisions that address these laws and policies in a variety of settings and under a variety of legal theories. We may think of these developments as recent phenomena fueled by modern conditions, but language issues are as old as the United States itself. Even before the Revolutionary War, for example, Benjamin
The period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Second World War was, in many respects, an age of giants in the law. This period saw the transformation of legal education through the efforts of Christopher Columbus Langdell and James Bar Ames at Harvard; remarkable legal development through the efforts of judges like John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Benjamin Cardozo, and Louis Brandeis; and a revolution in the law practice through the lawfirm-building efforts of Paul Drennan Cravath, Elihu Root, and David Dudley Field. Yet, when we think of this era in the law, we do not think of it as a golden age of litigation and advocacy. The preceding generations that included legendary courtroom advocates like Rufus Choate and Daniel Webster tend to hold that place in most lawyers’ minds. However, this period did produce one courtroom advocate who has become legendary: Clarence Darrow. When we think of Darrow, we generally associate him with his great courtroom battles on behalf of labor unions and union leaders, and we think of him as the defender of criminal defendants like Leopold and Loeb. Most of all, when we think of Darrow, we think of his performance in the Scopes evolution trial when he defeated the great fundamentalist politician and frequent presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan. When we think of Darrow, we also think of Illinois and Chicago, where he spent most of his adult life. In this article I will
Lakhdar Boumediene was first arrested on suspicion of plotting to bomb the U.S. Embassy in October of 2001 in Bosnia. More than seven years later, Boumediene is still in custody at Guantanamo Bay. Boumediene was arrested along with five other Algerian men at the request of the U.S. Embassy. The Bosnian Police conducted a threemonth investigation of the men, including a search of their homes, computers, and other documents. At the conclusion of the investigation, the Bosnian Supreme Court ordered their release for lack of evidence, at which time the U.S. government stepped in and took custody of the men, Boumediene included. The U.S. government transported the men to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay on the night of January 17, 2002. Finally, in October of 2008, the U.S. government dropped the charges regarding the embassy bombing, yet kept the Algerian men in custody, claiming the men had intended to go to Afghanistan to wage war against the United States. After nearly seven years of detention at Guantanamo,