Ryan Cooper

Damon Linker : "No, Condoleeza Rice is not a war criminal." They mean that leading members of the Bush administration are war criminals in the precise legal sense that they violated the imposing body of rules and regulations that have grown out of the post–World War II Nuremberg Trials and Geneva Conventions. These rules are known as "international law." There's a reason I placed the term in quote marks — because I think it's inaccurate to describe these rules and regulations as laws. They are, strictly speaking, bilateral and multilateral treaties between and among governments. Laws, by contrast, are written, enacted, and executed by governments, and they apply exclusively to those residing within territorially defined political communities (be they city-states, nations, or empires). Citizens of liberal democracies hold, moreover, that laws gain legitimacy — and become binding — only with the consent of the governed. And that standard is (tacitly) met...

A new New York Times   poll finds that Americans' opinion of the Supreme Court fell in the aftermath of the health care decision: The nation is now evenly divided, with 41 percent of Americans saying they approve of the job the court is doing and the same share voicing disapproval, according to a new poll conducted by The New York Times and CBS News. In a poll a few weeks before the health care decision, the court’s approval rating was 44 percent and its disapproval rating 36 percent. More than half of Americans said the decision in the health care case was based mainly on the justices’ personal or political views. Only about 3 in 10 of them said the decision in the case was based mainly on legal analysis. This surprise anyone else? If the Court had truly voted along it's political preferences, I would have expected a 5-4 decision to at least toss the mandate out, if not strike down the entire law. But Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the four liberal justices to uph...

We'll never know. (Let me say first that I called this one wrong. I though the mandate at least was going down. Rarely so glad to be wrong.) But here's a negative look : By voting with the liberals to uphold the Affordable Care Act, Roberts has put himself above partisan reproach. No one can accuse Roberts of ruling as a movement conservative. He’s made himself bulletproof against insinuations that he’s animated by party allegiances. But by voting with the conservatives on every major legal question before the court, he nevertheless furthered the major conservative projects before the court — namely, imposing limits on federal power. And by securing his own reputation for impartiality, he made his own advocacy in those areas much more effective. If, in the future, Roberts leads the court in cases that more radically constrain the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce, today’s decision will help insulate him from criticism. And he did it while rendering a...

Two things. First, an encouraging court result, where the DC Appeals Circuit upheld the responsibility of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. Garrett Epps has the goods . The weirdest part of the case was where the industry group did one of those broken borrowed kettle-type arguments, where you say (1) the kettle isn't broken, (2) it was broken when I borrowed it, and besides (3) I never borrowed that kettle in the first place: A group of state governments, and a number of industry groups, immediately challenged the new rules in federal court. Their arguments, essentially, were three. First, they said, we don’t really know whether global warming is occurring or if it is caused by humans. Second, even if it is a real phenomenon, the courts should require agencies to pretend it isn’t, because believing in global warming would cost too much. Finally, and remarkably, they argued that the new permit requirements were illegal because they did not regulate greenhouse gases strictly ...

With the Supreme Court decision about the fate of Obamacare coming down Thursday, there is a lot of hand-wringing on the left about the state of American institutions. James Fallows says looking at the last decade-plus of jurisprudence, this represents a " long-term coup :" It's a simple game you can try at home. Pick a country and describe a sequence in which: First, a presidential election is decided by five people, who don't even try to explain their choice in normal legal terms. Then the beneficiary of that decision appoints the next two members of the court, who present themselves for consideration as restrained, humble figures who care only about law rather than ideology. Once on the bench, for life, those two actively second-guess and re-do existing law, to advance the interests of the party that appointed them. Meanwhile their party's representatives in the Senate abuse procedural rules to an extent  never previously seen  to block legislation...

Joe Wilcox provides a good roundup . These two points get to the heart of the issue: This is a software EULA which for the first time attempts to restrict what I can do with the output of the app, rather than with the app itself. No consumer EULA I've ever seen goes this far. Would you be happy if Garage Band required you to sell your music through the iTunes Store, or if iPhoto had license terms that kept you from posting your own photos online? It’s a step backward for computing freedom and we should resist it... Restricting use is what EULAs have traditionally done. This one does something different: it restricts what you can do with the output of the software after the software is closed and put away. If you make a document using iBooks Author, you aren't allowed to sell that document except through Apple, ever, for the rest of your life. And a bit about the legal background: Qualifying that I'm not a lawyer, I know a few things about copyrights, as someone who writ...