Category Archives: National Journal

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Legal Affairs – Enough Already! Confirm the Worthy Nominees

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

If you had to design the ideal candidate for an appellate judgeship, you might imagine a lawyer who wins praise from legal luminaries of both political parties as one of the nation’s very best appellate advocates. Someone who has argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court, who has a stellar track record in both private practice and government service, and who won the American Bar Association’s highest rating. Someone who has represented clients on both the conservative side and the liberal side of ideologically charged cases, and who has encountered no plausible criticism of his fitness to serve.

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Legal Affairs – It’s Time to Stop Packing Prisons With Two-Bit Crack Users

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

Nobody could call Sen. Jeff Sessions soft on crime. The Alabama Republican is a passionate drug warrior. He won a Justice Department award in 1991, when he was the U.S. attorney in Mobile, for "significant achievement in the war against drug trafficking." Sessions says, "They could put that on my tombstone, and I’d be satisfied." He supports severe mandatory minimum sentences for truly dangerous drug dealers.

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Legal Affairs – Al Qaeda Detaineees: Don’t Prosecute, Don’t Release

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

The Bush administration has a problem for which it has suggested no good solution: Although hundreds of the suspected Al Qaeda members being held at Guantanamo and in Afghanistan appear to be would-be mass murderers, few seem to have been individually implicated in provable war crimes or terrorist acts. Should the Pentagon release such people-as domestic law enforcement officials would be legally obliged to do-and run the risk that they will turn to killing as many of us as they can? Or should it stretch the available evidence and the law as far as necessary to come up with some criminal charge to bring against all who seem dangerous?

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Legal Affairs – The Last True Believer in Judicial Restraint

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

Justice Byron R. White’s former law clerks remember him not as one of his generation’s greatest football players, but as one of its sharpest legal minds. He was, some say, the smartest person they ever met. Yet in 31 years on the Supreme Court, the most gifted scholar-athlete of his time made far less conspicuous a mark on the law than colleagues with far less potent intellects. One reason was the inelegant, cryptic, often-confusing writing style of the brusque, no-nonsense White. Another was a virtue now very much out of vogue: his modesty in the exercise of judicial power.

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Legal Affairs – The Case for Targeting Civilians, and Why It Fails

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

A fundamental principle of international law and morality is that the deliberate murder of civilians is always wrong. In war, it is a war crime. In peace, it is terrorism. No matter the justice of the underlying cause, no end can ever justify that means. This principle unites civilized people in abhorrence of both the crimes of September 11 and the Palestinian bombings of Israeli cafes, restaurants, and buses. It is the core of President Bush’s conviction that we are in a battle of good against evil.

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Legal Affairs – Be Wary of the War Crimes Court, but Not Too Wary

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

The first international court in history with the power to punish war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes of genocide committed anywhere in the world will officially become a reality on April 11 and, if all goes according to plan, will be up and running sometime next year. Like the more limited, ad hoc international tribunals established by the U.N. Security Council to pursue perpetrators of atrocities in the former Yugoslavia (including Slobodan Milosevic, now on trial at The Hague) and in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, this new International Criminal Court embodies the noble aspiration to extend the rule of law worldwide. (See this issue, p. 988.)

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Legal Affairs – Gagging Judicial Candidates Won’t Save State Courts

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

A Supreme Court test of whether candidates for elective state judgeships have a First Amendment right to express their views on legal and political issues has helped bring into focus a disturbing trend in some of the 39 states that choose judges by popular election. Judicial campaigns, once sleepy affairs that incumbents won in a walk, are getting more politicized, meaner, more expensive, and more awash in special-interest money.

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Legal Affairs – The Skies Won’t Be Safe Until We Use Commonsense Profiling

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

The government’s effort to upgrade airport security over the past six months has been massive and expensive: federalizing airport security forces; confiscating toenail clippers; frisking randomly chosen grandmothers, members of Congress, former CIA directors, and decorated military officers; stationing National Guard troops in airports; putting sky marshals on planes. Has it been effective?

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Legal Affairs – Racial Preferences in the Army: The Problem, the Solution

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

The Army has been a model of successful racial integration. It has promoted large numbers of African-Americans-Colin L. Powell, for one-and other minorities into the once lily-white officer corps. It appears to have done so without much clamor about reverse discrimination by passed-over whites. The white, black, Hispanic, and Asian soldiers now fighting side by side in Afghanistan appear largely free from the racial tensions that alienated many black foot soldiers from their white officers in Vietnam three decades ago and sapped the Army’s effectiveness as a fighting force.

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Legal Affairs – A Case of Noble Intentions but Bizarre Effects?

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

The trouble with our political campaigns, in the view of many critics and ordinary citizens, is that big contributions buy too much power; special interests, lobbyists, and campaign consultants have too much clout; gazillionaire candidates have an unfair advantage; negative attack ads pollute the airwaves; the sources of funding for many ads are hard to identify; and campaigns are too long.