Law

Obama’s New Nuremberg Defense

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The Nazi  defendants  at the Nuremberg trials must be down in Hell kicking themselves for not thinking of this  [h/t Instapundit]:

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said over the weekend the administration did not support prosecutions for “those who devised policy.” Aides later said he was referring to CIA superiors who ordered the interrogations, not the Justice Department officials who wrote the legal memos allowing them.Then came Obama’s comments Tuesday when a reporter asked him if he backed prosecution for those who devised the interrogation policy. He had already shot down the idea of prosecuting any of the CIA agents who carried out the interrogations on grounds they were following the law at the time.

Wow, so the standard now is that you’re off the hook for crimes against humanity if the lawyers told you it was okay? Sweet! Does that work for other crimes as well?

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Helpless Felon

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Federal law expressly bans people convicted of felonies, or who have been the subject of a Dishonorable Discharge from the military, from owning, possessing, or seeking to gain possession of firearms. If they are found guilty of any of the listed offenses, then it is another felony.

It can get even worse, though. I have heard of cases where a convicted felon has been charged with possession even though they are simply living with someone who legally owns a firearm. I’ve never bothered to look up any specific cases, so take this assertion with a grain of salt, but it does point up the very real concern that exists when felons have access to guns.

This desire to keep weapons out of the hands of felons in many states extends to less lethal defense tools as well. Felons are often banned from possessing stun guns and defensive sprays. Eugene Volokh thinks this is something that needs to be changed.

“Yet felons need self-defense tools, too. They may need self-defense tools more than the average nonfelon does: Being a felon dramatically hurts your career prospects, which means you’ll likely have to live in a poorer and therefore on average more crime-ridden part of town. And the legal bar on felons’ possessing firearms makes stun guns even more valuable to them.”

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Ignoring International Law

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There is a  bizarre  idea in leftist circles that U.S. judges should apply the standards of “International Law.” To U.S. cases. From Jonathan Adler via Instapundit:

For example, Dean Harold Koh of Yale Law School, mentioned as a possible Kerry Supreme Court nominee, has supported the idea that U.S. courts should expansively apply international legal precedents without the authorization of the president and Congress.

There is one simple reason why this is  contrary  to everything America stands for. American political theory rest on the idea that all just law arises from the formally expressed will of the people. If at some stage of its development, the people did not vote on a law, the law has no validity. Even the Constitution itself was originally voted on and by design we can vote to amend it as we wish. How, then, can a U.S. judge  legitimately  use a foreign concept for which the American voters have never cast ballots? By what legal theory are free people bound by the  decisions  of others in which they have no say?  Arguing that judges can impose foreign standards against the will of America voters simply tosses overboard the founding justification for American justice that people should only be governed by law to which they consent.  

Sadly, this is just another symptom of the American Left’s  progressive  (pun intended)  abandonment  of the American concept of governance in favor of the more authoritarian European model. Incapable of  conceiving  of their own capacity for error and utterly convinced of their own moral rectitude, they have no intellectual or moral issues with using any means necessary to impose their will upon their fellow citizens. They decide what they want and then manufacture a means of getting it. Invoking some  vague  “international standard” lets them find the legal justification they want in the entrails of whatever monster of foreign law they want to slit open on that particular day. It’s not “international law” they wish to adopt but rather the sole authority to choose to decided what “international law” means on any particular day or in any particular circumstance.

The American Left is on a long, dark road.  

This Debate Would Be Over If the Other Side was Rational

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One of the tactics used by those who advocate banning privately owned firearms is that Great Britain enjoys a lower level of homicide than that found in the United States. The idea is that we could have lower murder rates, if only guns were banned.

Part of their argument is true. The US has a homicide rate about 2.5 times that of the UK.

Kevin of The Smallest Minority discusses out some painful truths about this assertion. He points out that the US homicide rate used to be much greater, but has fallen even though more states have passed laws allowing private citizens to carry concealed firearms. At the same time, the rates of all violent crimes, and all crimes in general, have been climbing in the UK even though they have been passing ever more laws restricting legal self defense.

Seems simple enough. They restrict weapons in the UK, and crime goes up. We allow more people to carry firearms here in the US, and crime goes down. Even if there are other reasons which affected this outcome (and there are), the very idea that banning guns will lead to less crime has been completely discredited. Right?

I wish!

A Vacuum of Will

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Significant piracy has been so long gone from the world that the very word “pirate” evokes only images of 17th-century sailing ships armed with blackpowder weapons. Now pirates have returned to the choke points of the world’s oceans. What has changed? Why could we deal with pirates 150, 100 or 50 years ago but we can’t deal with them today?

I think that, as with terrorism, the return of piracy indicates the collapse of international law and the liberal order it establishes. It tells us how  dysfunctional  international law has become.  

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