due process

Praising an Italian court’s recent ruling that CIA agents broke the law in an extraordinary rendition case, The New York Times today highlights a growing phenomenon that hasn’t received sufficient attention: European courts appear more willing than their American counterparts to enforce the laws protecting basic human and civil rights.

The influential Center for American Progress, which has close ties to the Obama administration, is now calling on President Obama to push back the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention center to July. That’s despite the president’s day-two directive to close the notorious prison by January. Closure has been impeded by the inability to send [...]

The National Defense Authorization Act, passed yesterday by the House of Representatives, includes a largely overlooked provision that modifies the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allows the government to try certain terror suspects — now called “unprivileged enemy belligerents” instead of the Bush-era term, “unlawful enemy combatants” — in military proceedings rather than Article [...]

A finding that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ right to own a gun could also provide more solid ground for recognition of the right to abortion, to sexual privacy, to gay marriage, and to a wide variety of other rights that conservative justices on the court and “originalist” Constitutional scholars have long opposed.

A federal court on Tuesday ruled for the first time ever that the government cannot freeze an organization’s assets for suspected ties to terror financing without first obtaining a warrant.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio had filed the lawsuit in November 2008 on behalf of an Ohio-based charity called KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development, [...]

What is “incorporation?”
Among the many legal terms mentioned over the last four days of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, the term “incorporation,” when it comes to the Second Amendment right to bear arms, is probably the most confusing.
Incorporation in this context refers to whether the Bill of Rights applies to the states, as [...]

In yet another 5-4 ruling Thursday, the Supreme Court denied a man imprisoned for a rape and attempted murder he says he didn’t commit the right to the DNA evidence that would prove his guilt or innocence.
Concluding that this is a matter for state legislatures, not the federal courts, to decide, Chief Justice John Roberts [...]

Attorney General Eric Holder today faced a slew of questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee about just what sort of legal process the Obama administration plans to provide for detainees that the president deems “too dangerous” to release, yet who for whatever reason cannot be tried in a U.S. court or military commission. Asked by [...]

Assuming for the sake of argument that the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment does apply to U.S. conduct outside of U.S. territory, (though as I noted before the Office of Legal Counsel  lawyers thought it did NOT), the May 30, 2005 OLC memo signed by Steven Bradbury concluded [...]

Following up on my post yesterday about the Obama administration’s court filing in the case of Rasul v. Rumsfeld — in which four British former prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are seeking damages for being tortured, humiliated, abused and indefinitely detained without charge or access to counsel — SCOTUSblog today points to a few key points [...]