The first important concept Lessig highlights is what he labels “institutional corruption” — not the kind that refers to individuals knowingly violating ethical rules, but rather “an influence, financial or otherwise, within an economy of influence, that weakens the effectiveness of an institution, especially by weakening public trust in that institution.” A classic example of such a system, he argues, is the U.S. Congress:

Yet arguably—or maybe obviously—those contributions are (1) an influence (2) within an economy of influence that has (3) (quite likely) weakened the ability of Congress to do its work, by (4) (certainly) weakening public trust in Congress. The vast majority of Americans believe money buys results in Congress; less than a quarter of Americans believe the institution worthy of their trust. When “free-market” Republicans vote to support milk subsidies or sugar tariffs, or when “pro-consumer” Democrats vote to exempt used-car dealers from consumer financial-protection legislation, it is easy to understand the mistrust and hard to believe that the influence of money hasn’t weakened the ability of members to serve the principles, or even the interests, they were elected to represent.

The Supreme Court, however, failed to acknowledge the importance or perhaps the relevance of such a concept, and therefore saw no reason to restrict the First Amendment rights of corporate speech. It choose to focus only on the narrowest sense of the term corruption: the quid pro quo. As long as an expenditure is independent, the court ruled, it could not be said to meet those requirements.

But it didn’t have to do that, Lessig argues, nor should it have. The Court could have relied on a more expansive definition of the term, as was proffered in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, when the court recognized that corruption could come from the “corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation with the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.”

The maddening part about the Court’s new decision to narrow the terms, however, was that instead of seeking to prove or provide evidence that such forms of political speech would not encourage political corruption or the appearance of such in the eyes of the public, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion simply stated that it would not:

The appearance of influence or access . . . ?will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.

But there are facts to be brought upon such a debate, notes Lessig. Public trust in Congress has reached historic lows. In many races a majority of campaign contributions come from outside a lawmaker’s state or district and therefore do not represent a legislator’s constituents. These donors hold an outsize influence on the positions those legislators later adopt:

In short, bribery is regulable because it manifests personal corruption, the deviation from a public to a venal interest. Yet Kennedy has offered no argument as to why acts that constitute institutional corruption shouldn’t likewise be regulable, as manifesting, improperly, a dependency upon funders rather than upon voters.

The charge against the current system of funding congressional campaigns thus comes to this: not only has it eroded trust in Congress (the Pew Research Center’s latest numbers indicate trust in government and faith in Congress both at historic lows), it has also engendered a focus on interests distinct from the interests of the voters. A people should have the power to avoid just this sort of distraction, a.k.a., corruption. A vibrant free-speech tradition need not disable that power.

The essay is worth reading in full.

Elana Kagan (Jay Mallin/ZUMApress.com)

So Solicitor General Elena Kagan will be President Obama’s second Supreme Court nominee. The emerging conventional wisdom is that Kagan, a rare nominee for the high court who hasn’t been a judge, is a very smart blank slate. On at least one category of issues that Kagan will face — the intersection of national security and law during a time of war — that conventional wisdom looks correct. But there’s a proxy for that set of issues, however inexact, that offers a few clues in advance of her confirmation hearings: Kagan’s deference to executive power.

[Security1] No one has chronicled Kagan’s embrace of the executive more assiduously than Glenn Greenwald, who’s appalled that Obama would pick someone with such a record. Given her relatively thin paper trail, one of the primary pieces of evidence for her perspective is her 2009 nomination hearing for the solicitor generalship, in which she expressed eagerness to bless Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) perspective that the president possesses broad wartime authorities to detain enemy combatants. (“No daylight” was how The New York Times assessed the exchange between the two.)

That assent appears to flow from a broader perspective. Charlie Savage of the Times found this weekend that Kagan, the dean of Harvard Law School from 2003 to 2009, was the tardiest and least forceful of Obama’s Supreme Court shortlist to criticize the Bush administration’s expansive assertions of executive wartime powers. Savage explored a 2001 law review article she penned defending the Clinton administration’s executive unilateralism:

In the article, Ms. Kagan argued that even if Congress has given the authority to make a regulatory decision to an agency, the president has the power to control that decision unless a statute explicitly forbids him from interfering. She wrote that it was “ironic” that “self-professed conservatives” were associated with calling for stronger executive power in recent decades because a more robust presidency could achieve “progressive goals.”

Still, her defenders note that she also wrote, “If Congress, in a particular statute, has stated its intent with respect to presidential involvement, then that is the end of the matter.” And in 2007, she gave a speech celebrating the actions of Bush lawyers who battled the White House over the legality of the warrantless surveillance program.

It’s worth noting that she hired the most prominent of them: Jack Goldsmith, the former chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, who gained prestige by attempting to roll back Bush’s excesses on torture and surveillance. Then again, it’s also worth noting that Goldsmith advocates creating a permanent national security court to entrench a “a system of non-criminal military detention for enemy terrorists who for many reasons are difficult to prosecute and convict by trial.”

It would be foolish to assume that Kagan and Goldsmith believe the same thing in this regard, absent an explicit statement on a national security court from the nominee. But “non-criminal military detention for enemy terrorists” will very likely be among the first things that Kagan would confront on the high court. Graham and Attorney General Eric Holder pledged last month to work on a system of indefinite detention without trial for a cohort of current and future terrorism detainees. Just yesterday, Holder went further, vowing to expand the Miranda warning’s “emergency” exemption clause. Beyond that, the military commissions that the administration and Congress revised last year are still untested for terrorism prosecutions, plagued by belated rules of procedure and in the midst of a potentially defining challenge about the admissibility of coerced evidence. Two senior administration officials responsible for the new scope of the commissions expressed concern last year that the process rights allowed by the commissions may not withstand judicial scrutiny.

More generally, the Obama administration may not be claiming inherent executive authority for its expansive national security agenda, as its predecessor did– it prefers to locate that power within a brief and rushed post-9/11 statement of congressional intent — but among its claims are that American citizens whom it declares are terrorist operatives can be killed without any form of due process.

In fairness, lots of judges and legal scholars, even on the left, believe that presidential authority is at its greatest during wartime. But as Greenwald has pointed out most vigorously, the most important dissenter from that perspective is the justice Kagan may replace: John Paul Stevens, who led the charge to roll back the expansive detention authority the Bush administration asserted.

Senior Obama aides have said they seek to create a “sustainable approach” on questions like terrorism detention authority that can claim a consensus within Congress and the courts that can last beyond the Obama administration’s term in office. That’s why the administration has disappointed civil libertarians on the issue so greatly. By nominating Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, Obama stands a better chance of winning judicial affirmation to whatever system he’s building with Graham. If Kagan doesn’t look like a new Stevens, it may be that the second coming of John Paul Stevens would stand sharply in the way of Obama’s desired “sustainable approach” to the intersection of national security and the law.

iStockphoto

Amid the obstructionists’ claims that health care reform is “socialist” or a means of speeding Grandma towards her deathbed, a large focus of the conservative position on health care reform has been that frivolous lawsuits drive up health care costs and require doctors to practice “defensive medicine” that’s costly and wasteful.

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Charles Krauthammer put “tort reform” on the top of his wish-list for reducing the costs of the health care system. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas in the Washington Examiner boasts that Texas tort reform that capped injured patient’s damages was the answer to his state’s problems. And the American Medical Association has said it won’t support any health reform bill that doesn’t reduce liability for doctors. “If the bill doesn’t have medical liability reform in it, then we don’t see how it is going to be successful in controlling costs,” James Rohack, president-elect of the organization, told Politico in March. “Why spend the political capital and energy in passing a bill if it is not successful?”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

So far Republicans have mostly focused on tearing apart any reform with a role for the federal government, portraying it as the government dictating how long old people get to live. But an undercurrent of those complaints is the insistence of doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and ideological conservatives that medical malpractice claims are out of control and a leading cause of rising health care costs.

The health economists and independent legal experts who study the issue, however, don’t believe that’s true. They say that malpractice liability costs are a small fraction of the spiraling costs of the U.S. health care system, and that the medical errors that malpractice liability tries to prevent are themselves a huge cost– both to the injured patients and to the health care system as a whole.

“It’s really just a distraction,” said Tom Baker, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and author of “The Medical Malpractice Myth.” “If you were to eliminate medical malpractice liability, even forgetting the negative consequences that would have for safety, accountability, and responsiveness, maybe we’d be talking about 1.5 percent of health care costs. So we’re not talking about real money. It’s small relative to the out-of-control cost of health care.”

Insurance costs about $50-$60 billion a year, Baker estimates. As for what’s often called “defensive medicine,” “there’s really no good study that’s been able to put a number on that,” said Baker.

Krauthammer cited a study by the Massachusetts Medical Society that found that five out of six doctors said they ordered additional tests, procedures and referrals to protect themselves from lawsuits. He also relies on a much-criticized study from the libertarian Pacific Research Institute on the civil justice system to conclude that “defensive medicine” wastes more than $200 billion a year.

Baker is skeptical, and makes the point that “defensive medicine” is not the same thing as wasteful medicine. “Like defensive driving, some defensive medicine is good,” he said. “To change behavior. When you drill down those studies, you see that what it means is, doctors are more careful with patient records. They spend more time with the patient. They’re more careful to say hello and goodbye to the patient. That’s good.”

Other health economists agree that “defensive medicine” is not the main driver of costs, and malpractice liability reform is not a panacea.

“If you were to list the top five or ten things that you could do to bring down health care costs that would not be on the list,” said Michelle Mello, a professor of Law and Public Health at Harvard.

Still, that doesn’t mean the medical liability system we now have is a good one. Mello estimates the costs of so-called “defensive medicine” to be far less than Krauthammer does — around $20 billion a year. “So there’s some savings to be had and frankly the health reform package has not come up with a lot of ideas for major savings.”

President Obama at a recent town hall meeting said he wants to reduce doctors’ insurance premiums, but that, based on his conversations with health care experts, “the evidence at least is that that is a very small, maybe not even a measurable factor in the reason that health care costs are going up.”

“He gets it,” said Baker.

Although damage award caps could slightly limit the future growth of liability insurance premiums – about 6 to 13 percent over time, says Mello, “it tends to be oversold as a solution and it’s pretty unfair to patients.”

Annual jury awards and legal settlements involving doctors amounts to “a drop in the bucket” in a country that spends $2.3 trillion annually on health care, Amitabh Chandra, another Harvard University economist, recently told Bloomberg News. Chandra estimated the cost of jury awards at about $12 per person in the U.S., or about $3.6 billion. Insurer WellPoint Inc. has also said that liability awards are not what’s driving premiums.

And a 2004 report by the Congressional Budget Office said medical malpractice makes up only 2 percent of U.S. health spending. Even “significant reductions” would do little to curb health-care expenses, it concluded.

A study by Bloomberg also found that the proportion of medical malpractice verdicts among the top jury awards in the U.S. declined over the last 20 years. “Of the top 25 awards so far this year, only one was a malpractice case.” Moreover, at least 30 states now cap damages in medical lawsuits.

The experience of Texas in capping damage awards is a good example. Contrary to Perry’s claims, a recent analysis by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker found that while Texas tort reforms led to a cap on pain-and-suffering awards at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which led to a dramatic decline in lawsuits, McAllen, Texas is one of the most expensive health care markets in the country. In 2006, “Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per person enrolled in McAllen, he finds, which is almost twice the national average — although the average town resident earns only $12,000 a year. “Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns.”

Still, many health policy experts don’t believe the current malpractice liability system is either efficient or fair. Mello and others favor an alternative compensation system that takes the issue away from courts and juries and gives it instead to a panel of independent experts to judge whether malpractice occurred and what compensation should be provided. That’s unlikely to bring about significant cost savings, though, because it would encourage many more claims to be filed. Currently, only about two of every 100 patients injured by malpractice ever receive compensations. “The new system would make it a lot easier to file claims,” said Mello, and would reduce the uncertainty doctors complain about from jury awards.

Such a system implemented at a hospital could mean the hospital pays for malpractice insurance, with premium costs tied to the number of claims. The hospital then has an economic incentive to ensure its doctors are providing good care. Currently, Mello says, most insurance is not “experience-rated”, meaning premiums aren’t tied to the number of claims filed against the doctor.

But Mello, who has advised the Obama administration on malpractice reform, doesn’t expect to see such proposals coming out of Congress or the White House anytime soon. “Trial lawyers don’t embrace proposals that would remove their role in the malpractice system,” she said. And they have a lot of influence with Democrats in Washington.

The NRCC is sending out a raft of releases to local media in Massachusetts — targeting, among others, Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) who represents Cambridge.

The point here isn’t Capuano — his district is one of the most liberal in the country — but that the GOP is searching for issues that can recapture conservative Dems and independents by portraying the president as a cop-bashing liberal.

“Does Michael Capuano believe President Obama’s comments were becoming of someone who holds the highest office in the land?” said NRCC Communications Director Ken Spain.

I was just on a call with Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) in which Thrush asked the minority leader to weigh in; Boehner declined and said he only knew about the case from “newspaper reports.”

As Spencer wrote today, someone in the administration told ProPublica’s Dafna Linzner and The Washington Post’s Peter Finn that yes, civil liberties groups support the idea of an order that “would embrace claims by former President George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war.” That statement amazed the civil liberties groups that Spencer then spoke to. I’ve gotten similar reactions from civil liberties lawyers I’ve been speaking to since Friday as well.

But it turns out that there are some progressives, and some who’d even traditionally be called civil libertarians — though not representatives of the traditional civil liberties groups Spencer and I have spoken to — who have been floating the idea, but in a more limited way than the Post story suggested.

Specifically, a group of prominent military and criminal defense lawyers and academics on June 8 sent President Obama a letter urging him not to create a new system of preventive detention, but instead, to rely on the one we already have — with modifications, if necessary. Although they don’t specifically recommend an executive order, that’s the logical way for the administration to modify and clarify its authority.

“Our country can achieve its legitimate goals through existing laws which authorize the detention of those who should be detained in the fight against international terrorism,” says the letter, which I received just this afternoon. It’s signed by 11 prominent lawyers, including Retired Rear Admirals Donald Guter and John Hutson of the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps; Abner Mikva, a former federal appellate court judge, University of Chicago law professor, White House counsel under President Bill Clinton and a mentor to president Obama; and Thomas Wilner, a prominent corporate defense lawyer who’s represented Guantanamo detainees in some of the landmark cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Longstanding law-of-war principles authorize the detention for the duration of armed hostilities of those who engage in armed conflict against the United States or its allies,” these experts write, adding: “Some modifications to the existing system may be warranted, but no new system is necessary.”

The letter specifically tries to steer President Obama away from proposing or supporting any new legislation that would create a new preventive detention authority.

Ken Gude at the influential Center for American Progress has also suggested that the president should clarify his authority of detention under the laws of war. In a recent memo he co-authored with Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies, he and Martin write that the “ambiguities” left by the Bush administration over who is detainable under the laws of war “compound the lack of fundamental fairness in treating suspected criminals as combatants and holding them without trial.” Given how the detention authority has been used over the past eight years, “the new administration should now reassert the traditional understanding of the limits of the law of war and reject the former administration’s effort to read the word “organization” in the AUMF [Authorization for the Use of Military Force] as effecting an unprecedented extension of the traditional understanding of the military’s extraordinary powers of detention during war.”

In an e-mail this afternoon that he sent from Paris, Gude says he never specifically proposed an executive order, but supports the idea and adamantly opposes new legislation.

Gude laid out his support publicly for a limited system of preventive detention, authorized by the laws of war which allow detention of combatants during a military conflict, on CAP’s site and in The Guardian.

Even David Cole, the normally staunch civil libertarian law professor at Georgetown, has argued that the administration has that authority, calling it “an appropriate and necessary means of dealing with enemy fighters during wartime.” (Cole was pilloried for taking that position by Kenneth Anderson in Opinio Juris, who asks, “if it’s sensible and legal now, why wasn’t it sensible and legal during the Bush years? Is this the same David Cole who appeared on panels with me over the last few years and who didn’t seem in those years to have any daylight between him and the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, or Human Rights First on the principle of try-or-release?”)

Let’s set aside for now the very legitimate question of whether these progressive civil libertarians would have taken the same position during the Bush years, or if they just inherently trust President Obama to handle battlefield detention against a non-traditional enemy better than Bush did. The positions these people are taking is informed, at least, by what the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, although that case pertained only to the detention of Taliban fighters, while we were at war with Afghanistan. And it’s in line with what the federal courts have been ruling, with some variations, in a string of habeas corpus cases.

The proposal for an executive order to clarify the Obama administration’s position on the extent of its wartime authorities of preventive detention is very different, however, from the controverisal position that some more conservative lawyers and think-tank scholars like Jack Goldsmith, Benjamin Wittes and Neal Katyal (traditionally a moderate Democrat and now deputy solicitor general in the Obama administration) have been promoting. The Wittes proposal released on Friday with Brookings colleague Colleen Peppard, for example, would create an entirely new system of preventive detention that’s not limited to the president’s authority under the laws of war.

On Monday, Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and former head of the Office of Legal Counsel at DOJ under President Bush, joined Wittes, a Brookings scholar, in a Washington Post op-ed to argue that a preventive detention scheme should be debated in Congress and spelled out clearly through legislation, not by the president by executive order. To them, an executive order would be “a nearly wholesale adoption of the Bush administration’s unilateral approach to detention.”

That, it seems, is where the current debate lies. Committed civil liberties advocates such as the ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch and others may still be arguing against a preventive detention scheme entirely, but given that the Obama administration has consistently argued its right to detain “combatants” (however they’re defined) during what it continues to call a “war” — not only in the Gitmo habeas cases but in regards to the detention of some 600 men imprisoned at the U.S. Air base in Bagram, Afghanistan — it’s impossible to imagine that the administration is going give up that authority in the future.

Although as Spencer pointed out, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs did say on Monday that the president is not considering issuing an order that “relies on legal theories that we have the inherent authority to detain people,” he certainly didn’t rule out basing a preventive detention system on some other authority — whether granted by the laws of war, or by an act of Congress.

I’ll be writing more soon about what that Congressional act might look like.

I marvel over Dershowitz’s new-found perspective on academic freedom. Can this be the same Alan Dershowitz who launched a massive and successful campaign against Norman Finkelstein to deny him tenure at DePaul University because of his criticism of the Israeli government and of Alan Dershowitz himself? In the Dershowitz perspective, academic freedom apparently shields those whose viewpoints are very close to his own, but not his critics.

Dershowitz was one of the early supporters of the idea that torture might very well be a good idea on people we suspect of terrorism — only, of course, in that theoretical ticking time bomb case, where interrogators somehow know that the person they’re torturing could save us all, if they just torture him brutally enough.

None of this has affected Dershowitz’s tenured position at Harvard — but then, he wasn’t writing memos for the Department of Justice authorizing torture and other techniques of brutality that plainly violated domestic and international law.

For now, Yoo is a “Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law” at the illustrious Chapman University School of Law in Orange County, where his friend, Dean John Eastman, had to issue a public apologia explaining the appointment, saying that even if most scholars think Yoo got the law wrong in his memos authorizing torture, some disagree, or think he “at least made a fair stab at it.”

That’s a pretty low bar to set for a tenured professor at one of the nation’s top law schools. And if the Department of Justice ever issues that internal Office of Professional Responsibility memo that’s still awaiting Attorney General Eric Holder’s approval, Yoo may find himself depending on the kindness of his friends in Orange County for far longer than he anticipated.

As I reported earlier, she had some vehement Republican critics. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) made a point of noting, in announcing her confirmation, that every solicitor general who’s served since 1985 endorsed her nomination.

“The confirmation of Elena Kagan to be the nation’s advocate before the Supreme Court is an historic step for women,” said Kathryn Kolbert, president of People for the American Way, in a statement released this evening. “Just over a century ago, women weren’t allowed to practice law or vote—today’s vote is a sign of how far we’ve come.  She will be a passionate and articulate advocate for our laws and Constitution.”

Despite some tough questioning about past experience and legal positions by Republicans — including Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who today castigated Kagan for opposing military recruiting on college campuses; and Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa), who complained that he hasn’t been able to get enough information about Kagan’s views — she is widely expected to be confirmed, as even Specter acknowledged on the Senate floor today.

As TWI’s Kate Klonick has written, Kagan — a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, a former clerk to  Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and now Dean of the Harvard Law School — would be the first female solicitor general in U.S. history.

Kagan is also considered to be a potential future nominee to the Supreme Court.

As I wrote when the administration first announced it would stop using the term “enemy combatant” in a late Friday afternoon filing in federal court, the Obama Justice Department, while discarding the old terminology and giving a nod to the legitimacy of international law and the role of Congress, basically held on to much the same right of indefinite detention that the Bush administration had pronounced.  Sure, now the president would have to believe that the detainees had a “substantial” connection to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but the government’s brief provided no definition of “substantial,” and surely Bush officials would have claimed that all those prisoners — “the worst of the worst” as they were fond of calling them (and former Vice President Dick Cheney still does) — were “substantially” assisting al-Qaeda or the Taliban in one way or another.

As Feldman points out, the key will be how the Obama Justice Department starts applying this “new” non-enemy combatant category of detainee when it comes to deciding what to do with these prisoners.

If the new legal arguments actually affect who goes free and who stays in custody, then they will amount to meaningful change. Without real-world effects, though, even the most elegant new legal arguments are nothing but words.

Absolutely.  But Feldman refers only to the 241 prisoners still held at Guantanamo Bay.  There’s also another 600 prisoners who were deemed “enemy combatants” by the Bush administration that are being held at the American detention facility at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Recall that the Obama administration recently insisted, like the Bush administration, that those detainees do not even have the right to habeas corpus — that is, to challenge their detention in a U.S. court. And the new administration is still hiding critical information about who is being held at the base — which is directly relevant to determining their legal rights.

The Obama administration has surely already proved itself more adept at using legal language to justify its detention policies. As Feldman points out, these were policies created by the last administration and the Obama team is now stuck trying  to deal with the mess they were bequeathed, without letting dangerous people go free. The new administration is also under serious pressure from a host of Republicans who, apparently eager to undermine Obama’s efforts, are loudly proclaiming that closing the Guantanamo prison is a “dangerous” idea.

Still, Obama promised a return to respect for the rule of law, not just in word but in deed. As long as potentially innocent men remain imprisoned without charge or trial — and in the case of Bagram, without the right to challenge their detention or even speak to a lawyer — then the new administration will not have followed through on its promises.