new york times

Despite President Obama’s previous criticism of former President George W. Bush’s “signing statements” that limit the president’s responsibility to comply with a bill passed by Congress, it turns out Obama has been doing much the same thing since he took office.  Charlie Savage reported in The New York Times on Sunday that Obama has issued [...]

I’d bet that Judge Ellen Huvelle of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., is really mad now.
After telling the government last week that it has “no evidence” supporting its case against Mohammed Jawad — the Afghan teenager arrested for allegedly throwing a hand grenade at U.S. soldiers, tortured, then transferred to Guantanamo Bay where [...]

The Washington Post’s editorial today arguing for prosecution only of “those who went well beyond the often-extreme measures authorized by the [Office of Legal Counsel] memos” that justified abusive interrogations is calling more attention to the rumor, first reported by Daniel Klaidman in Newsweek, that Attorney General Eric Holder is seriously considering such prosecutions.
According to [...]

The Church and Pike committees of the 1970s exposed CIA lawlessness; created modern legal and congressional intelligence oversight structures; and cleaved the CIA’s history into before and after periods.

What is it with Paul Krugman, anyway? The Nobel economist with the dour outlook is becoming the most unlikely of pop icons. First, there was, “Hey Paul Krugman,” a ditty praising his virtues, especially compared with those of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, that flew around the blogosophere. Now, via Calculated Risk, comes “The Krugman Blues,” [...]

The $150,000 in fines so far charged to Los Angeles clothing maker American Apparel for allegedly employing illegal immigrants may be a welcome change from the notorious factory raids by federal agents that led to hundreds of jailed and deported employees. As The New York Times reported on Friday, it suggests a shift in strategy [...]

When I watched Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s questioning of the government’s lawyer in the extraordinary rendition case of Arar v. Ashcroft in December, which I wrote about in detail Wednesday, I was struck by Sotomayor’s immediate grasp of the troubling implications of the government’s position.
As Sotomayor put it to Jonathan Cohn, the Justice Department [...]

The media have overlooked substance and context to focus on her style, but Judge Sonia Sotomayor has provided a window into her views on executive power and national security along the way.

Whereas Fox News appears to have read Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s 2003 lecture to Indiana University law students as an approval of broad executive power in the war on terror, Charlie Savage at The New York Times today has the opposite take.
According to Savage, Sotomayor “expressed skepticism” in that lecture “about the expanding government [...]

Amid the debate over Sotomayor’s supposedly “activist” move joining the per curiam opinion in the reverse discrimination case of Ricci v. DeStefano, there’s been little actual analysis of the legal standards the Second Circuit Court of Appeals panel’s decision was based on.
Although that may be because the panel did not issue a long written opinion [...]