What's Best

I have decided to sign Senate Bill 1070 into law because, though many people disagree, I firmly believe it represents what's best for Arizona.

-- Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, signing a new law forcing police officers to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being an undocumented immigrant, 23 April 2010

And Proudly

When I was the most junior Democrat in the Senate, I voted for John Paul Stevens. He was a Republican nominated by a Republican president who was going to be up for election, and we voted for him, and proudly.

-- Senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT), now chairman of the Judiciary Committee, on his respect for the associate justice, who is retiring, New York Times, 10 April 2010

Money Is Property

Money is property; it is not speech. Speech has the power to inspire volunteers to perform a multitude of tasks on a campaign trail, on a battleground, or even on a football field. Money, meanwhile, has the power to pay hired laborers to perform the same tasks. It does not follow, however, that the First Amendment provides the same measure of protection to the use of money to accomplish such goals as it provides to the use of ideas to achieve the same results.

-- John Paul Stevens (20 April, 1920), American jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States since 1975, concurring, Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, 528 U.S. 377 (2000); Stevens today announced his retirement from the court

Maneuverability

There won't be a lot of guilt-innocence maneuverability there.

-- Thomas H. Dunn, former defense lawyer for the Army, on possible defense strategies for Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who is accused in the Nov. 5 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, TX, New York Times, 16 November 2009

Lifers

There are just over 100 people in the world serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole for crimes they committed as juveniles in which no one was killed. All are in the United States. And 77 of them are in Florida.

-- Adam Liptak, New York Times, 7 November 2009

Too Many

When there are too many policemen, there can be no liberty. When there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace. When there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice.

-- Lin Yutang (10 October 1895 - 26 March 1976), Chinese writer and translator, as quoted in Alexander, James (2005). The World's Funniest Laws. Cheam: Crombie Jardine. pp. page 6

Civil Forfeiture

While few would argue that criminals ought to be able to keep the proceeds of their crimes, civil forfeiture allows the government to seize and keep property without actually having to prove a crime was committed in the first place. ... Proceeds from civil forfeiture at the state and local level usually go back to the police departments and prosecutors' offices, giving them a clear and unmistakable incentive to seize as much property as often as possible.

-- Radley Balko, (1975-), American libertarian writer and speaker, reason.com, 8 September 2009

Zelaya

My greetings to the United Nations. Anybody who had any doubt that a dictatorship is taking hold of my country, now with what has happened in the last ninety-three days of repression, I think that any of those doubts that might have subsisted are dispelled. But besides being subject to a coup d'etat, Honduras is being subjected to a fascist rule, which is suppressing the rights of its citizens and which is oppressing the Honduran people.

-- Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, addressing the UN via cell phone from the Brazilian embassy in Honduras, 28 September 2009

Sneak And Peek

Let me tell you why I'm concerned about these numbers. That's not how this was sold to the American people. It was sold, as stated on DoJ's website in 2005, as being necessary, quote, "to conduct investigations without tipping off terrorists." I'm going to say, it's quite extraordinary to grant govenment agents the statutory authority to secretly break in to Americans' homes in criminal cases. And I think some Americans might be concerned that it's been used hundreds of times in just a single year in non-terrorism cases.

-- Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), on sneak and peek warrants authorizing secret break-ins into US homes and businesses. Of 763 requests last year, just three had to do with terrorism investigations. 23 September 2009

Unaware

A ton of people pass me literally unaware of their surroundings.

-- Matthew Downing, Oklahoma City police sergeant, on erratic behavior by drivers talking on their phones or texting, New York Times, 19 July 2009

Read The Bills

If every member pledged to not vote for it (the health care bill) if they hadn't read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes.

-- Senator Steny Hoyer, House Majority Leader, July 2009

Looking Stupid

[W]e need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.

-- Charles Dunstone, head of UK ISP TalkTalk, on legislation aimed at limiting file sharing, quoted on Slashdot, 7 June 2009

A Quiet Voice And A Business Suit

There are men -- now in power in this country -- who do not respect dissent, who cannot cope with turmoil, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support repression as long as it is done with a quiet voice and a business suit.

-- John V. Lindsay (1921-2000), US politician, Congressman, Mayor of New York City

Justice

If they cannot be convicted, then you release them. That's what it means to have a justice system.

-- Jameel Jaffer, ACLU lawyer, on President Obama's plan to hold terrorism suspects without trial, New York Times, 23 May 2009

No Difference

If the press is not free, if speech is not independent and untrammeled, if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live; you are a subject and not a citizen.

-- William E. Borah (1865-1940), Republican US Senator from Idaho

EULA

If your advertising giveth and your EULA [license agreement] taketh away don't be surprised if the FTC comes calling.

-- Mary K. Engle, Acting Deputy Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, 28 April 2009

Mere Instrument

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents.

-- James Madison (16 March 1751 - 28 June 1836), 4th US President, co-author, with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, of the Federalist Papers, Father of the US Constitution, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson (17 October 1788)

Madoff

As the years went by I realized this day, and my arrest, would inevitably come.

-- Bernard L. Madoff, pleading guilty to a Ponzi scheme allegedly involving $64 Billion, New York Times, 13 March 2009

Competition Of Ideas

The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.

-- Max Lerner (1902-1992), American journalist and educator

Profound Disappointment

If they adopt the Bush administration position, or some version of it, it is going to be a moment of profound disappointment for everyone in the legal community and Americans generally who believe that the Bush administration has tried to turn the presidency into a monarchy.

-- Brandt Goldstein, professor, New York Law School, on the Obama administration's stance on detainees, New York Times, 3 January 2009

Lest We Mock

He shall mark our goings, question whence we came,
Set his guards about us, as in Freedom's name.
He shall peep and mutter, and night shall bring
Watchers 'neath our window, lest we mock the King.

-- Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), author, Nobel laureate

Nothing Is Illegal

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.

-- Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)

Bad Horsemen

Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can't bother about where they're going.

-- Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), Austrian-American economist

T-Shirts

When considering what a police state might look like, I never imagined it would include commemorative t-shirts.

-- Commentor "izz" at RawStory.com, regarding a story on T-shirts produced by Denver's police union -- "We get up early, to beat the crowds," the shirt reads, followed by "2008 DNC." The words flank a grinning police officer holding a baton and wearing a hat with a crossed-out number "68," presumably making reference to activist organization Recreate 68, which staged several anti-war demonstrations during the convention.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Denver_cops_get_Tshirts_that_mock_0928.html

Review NOT

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

-- From the draft bill authorizing Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to spend ~$700,000,000,000 in tax money to purchase toxic debt from ailing financial institutions

Too Depressing

The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing

I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

-- Google's copyright man, William Patry, on ending his blog on copyright

Hamdan Sentencing

Mr. Hamdan, I hope the day comes that you are able to return to your wife and daughters and your country.

-- Military Judge Keith J. Allred, after the sentencing of Salim Ahmed Hamdan at Guantanamo Bay, New York Times, 8 August 2008.

More Wisdom

In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department.

-- James Madison (16 March 1751 - 28 June 1836), fourth US president (1809-1817), co-author of the Federalist Papers, traditionally regarded as the Father of the US Constitution, 1793

False Confessions

What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions. People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don't need false intelligence.

-- Senator Carl Levin, on a military interrogation class that was based on a 1957 Air Force study of how China obtained confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners, New York Times, 2 July 2008

Habeas

The test for determining the scope of this provision must not be subject to manipulation by those whose power it is designed to restrain.

-- From the Supreme Court's decision restoring the writ of habeas corpus to prisoners at Gitmo

Worst?

The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.

-- John McCain, NBC 13 June 2008, regarding the recent "Habeas" ruling by SCOTUS

Burden Of Proof

Any curtailment of freedom has a burden of proof.

-- Noam Chomsky, Media Matters, 6 June 2008

Liberty

The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.

-- Walt Whitman ("Notes Left Over" 1881)

Should We Wander

Should we wander [from the essential principles of our government] in moments of error or alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.

-- Thomas Jefferson, upon repealing the Alien and Sedition Acts

Political Rights

Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the in-grown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace. Where this is not the case, there is no help in any parliamentary Opposition or any Platonic appeals to the constitution. One compels respect from others when he knows how to defend his dignity as a human being. This is not only true in private life; it has always been the same in political life as well.

The peoples owe all the political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength.

-- Rudolf Rocker (25 March 1873 - 19 September 1958) anarcho-syndicalist writer, historian, social activist, "Anarcho-Syndicalism" (1938)

Equal Before The Law

We are all equal before the law, but not before those appointed to apply it.

-- Stanislaw J. Lec, poet and aphorist (1909-1966)

Keep It From The American People

The OLC Torture Memo as a Failure of the Classification System
Date:Thursday 03 April 2008 09:55
Author:Steven Aftergood

The Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo on interrogation of enemy combatants that was declassified this week "exemplifies the political abuse of classification authority," Secrecy News suggested yesterday. J. William Leonard, the nation's top classification oversight official from 2002-2007, concurred.

"The disappointment I feel with respect to the abuse of the classification system in this instance is profound," said Mr. Leonard, who recently retired as director of the Information Security Oversight Office, which reports to the President on classification and declassification policy. "The document in question (pdf) is purely a legal analysis," he said, and it contains "nothing which would justify classification."

Beyond that crucial fact, the binding technical requirements of classification were ignored.

Thus, he explained: There were no portion markings, identifying which paragraphs were classified at what level. The original classifier was not identified on the cover page by name or position. The duration of classification was not given. A concise basis for classification was not specified. Yet all of these are explicitly required by the President's executive order on classification.

"It is not even apparent that [John] Yoo [who authored the memo] had original classification authority," Mr. Leonard said.

"All too often, government officials simply assert classification. To enjoy the legal safeguards of the classification system, you need to do more than that. Those basic, elemental steps were not followed in this instance."

"Also, for the Department of Defense to declassify a Department of Justice document," as in this case, "is highly irregular," Mr. Leonard said.

[snip]

Violations of classification policy pale in comparison to the policy deviations authorized by the Justice Department memo, which was ultimately rescinded. Nevertheless, such classification violations are significant because they enabled the Administration to pursue its interrogation policies without independent scrutiny or accountability.

"To learn that such a document is classified has the same effect for me as waking up one morning and learning that after all these years there is a 'secret' Article IV to the Constitution that the American people did not even know about," said Mr. Leonard.

"There is no information contained in this document which gives an advantage to the enemy," he said. "The only possible rationale for making it secret was to keep it from the American people."

Copyright 2008 Secrecy News.

Marijuana

Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

-- William F. Buckley, Jr. (November 24, 1925 - February 27, 2008), American author and conservative commentator

Bill Of Rights

... The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a "compelling interest" in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances.

-- Harry Browne (1933-2006) author, two-time presidential candidate, co-founder of Downsize DC

Is It Obvious?

Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited by the Constitution?

Is it obvious, that what can't be done for punishment can't be done to exact information that is crucial to the society? I think it's not at all an easy question, to tell you the truth.

-- Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, interview on BBC Radio, 12 February 2008

No Map

You're asking me to tell you how we're going to get to a place we've never been, with a map I don't have.

-- Col. Steven David, military defense lawyer, when asked for details on the capital case against 6 Guantanamo detainees, NY Times, 12 February 2008

Protect Me

I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me.

-- Banksy, street artist (b. 1974)

Judicial Review

Climate change has ushered in a whole new era of judicial review.

-- Patrick Parenteau, environmental law professor, on an appeals court decision striking down Bush administration fuel economy standards as too lax, New York Times, 16 November 2007