Monday, September 30, 2019

ICIG Statement on Processing of Whistleblower Complaints.pdf

Donald Trump today disparaged as "almost a spy" the person who reported his misconduct.
The Office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community has affirmed its compliance with law in its review of the complaint by an Intelligence Community employee about the conduct of Donald Trump and others.  The IG's review of the complaint led it to conclude that the matter is urgent.   The Department of Justice directed the IG, contrary to statue, to refuse to forward its findings to the Intelligence Committees of the United States Congress.
ICIG Statement on Processing of Whistleblower Complaints.pdf



Friday, September 27, 2019

Former NSA Inspector General Sees lawyers' misconduct in reclassifying Trump phone call records

The former (GW Bush administration) Inspector General of the National Security Agency on the vulnerability of the lawyers who mis-classified the record of the Trump-Zelensky conversation.



Thursday, September 26, 2019

China’s Imperatives for National Security Legislation by Fu Hualing :: SSRN

China’s Imperatives for National Security Legislation by Fu Hualing :: SSRN

China’s Imperatives for National Security Legislation

China’s National Security: Endangering Hong Kong’s Rule of Law?, Cora Chan and Fiona De Londras (eds) (Hart, 2020)
19 Pages Posted: 20 Sep 2019

Fu Hualing

The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Date Written: September 12, 2019

Abstract

China’s Party-State has given priority to stability and security and increasingly sees Hong Kong’s democratic aspiration as a threat to China’s national security. In response, Hong Kong has engaged in a mega constitutional dialogue with its authoritarian sovereign. The court has disqualified members of LegCo for their secessionist speeches, and severely punished those who have resorted to violence. The court has treated non-violent civil disobedience with leniency and tolerance, holding the line against the authoritarian intrusion from Beijing as long as the protest is conducted in a peaceful manner.

Trump, Giuliani, and Manafort: The Ukraine Scheme | by Murray Waas | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books


Trump, Giuliani, and Manafort: The Ukraine Scheme | by Murray Waas | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
by Murray Waas

New information in this story suggests that these two, seemingly unrelated scandals, in which the House will judge whether the president’s conduct in each case constituted extra-legal and extra-constitutional abuses of presidential power, are in fact inextricably linked: the Ukrainian initiative appears to have begun in service of formulating a rationale by which the president could pardon Manafort, as part of an effort to undermine the special counsel’s investigation.

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

Trump and the quid pro quo


Tuesday, September 24, 2019

R. v. The Prime Minister - the Judgment of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom

R. v. The Prime Minister - the Judgment of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom: The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has declared unlawful the Prime Minister's "prorogation" (suspension) of Parliament.  It rules that...

Detained: how the US built the world's largest immigrant detention system

Detained: how the US built the world's largest immigrant detention system https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/24/detained-us-largest-immigrant-detention-trump?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Blogger

ABA: immigration courts near collapse

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2019/09/immigration-courts-irredeemably-dysfunctional-and-on-the-brink-of-collapse-by-nolan-rappaport.html

7 national security Democrats: If true, Trump’s actions are impeachable - The Washington Post

7 national security Democrats: If true, Trump’s actions are impeachable - The Washington Post
This flagrant disregard for the law cannot stand. To uphold and defend our Constitution, Congress must determine whether the president was indeed willing to use his power and withhold security assistance funds to persuade a foreign country to assist him in an upcoming election.

Monday, September 23, 2019

Trump's Ukraine Call: A Clear Impeachable Offense - The Atlantic

Trump's Ukraine Call: A Clear Impeachable Offense - The Atlantic
by Tom Nichols (Professor - Naval War College)
Now, however, we face an entirely new situation. In a call to the new president of Ukraine, Trump reportedly attempted to pressure the leader of a sovereign state into conducting an investigation—a witch hunt, one might call it—of a U.S. citizen, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden.
As the Ukrainian Interior Ministry official Anton Gerashchenko told the Daily Beast when asked about the president’s apparent requests, “Clearly, Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.”

Sunday, September 22, 2019

Conway and Katyal: Trump's breach of trust demands impeachment

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-done-plenty-to-warrant-impeachment-but-the-ukraine-allegations-are-over-the-top/2019/09/20/51eff90c-dbf1-11e9-bfb1-849887369476_story.html

That last phrase — “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” — was a historical term of art, derived from impeachments in the British Parliament. When the framers put it into the Constitution, they didn’t discuss it much, because no doubt they knew what it meant. It meant, as Alexander Hamilton later phrased it, “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” 
Simply put, the framers viewed the president as a fiduciary, the government of the United States as a sacred trust and the people of the United States as the beneficiaries of that trust. Through the Constitution, the framers imposed upon the president the duty and obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and made him swear an oath that he would fulfill that duty of faithful execution. They believed that a president would break his oath if he engaged in self-dealing — if he used his powers to put his own interests above the nation’s. That would be the paradigmatic case for impeachment.

Saturday, September 21, 2019

The U.S. has no rules for when the president is a national security threat - The Washington Post

The U.S. has no rules for when the president is a national security threat - The Washington Post
by Asha Rangappa
"Unfortunately, once a person who is willing to act against the interests of the United States assumes the awesome powers of the presidency, the laws and investigative techniques we use in ordinary national security situations are woefully inadequate. Like the breach of multiple hulls in the Titanic, the mechanisms designed to keep our democracy afloat are giving way one by one."

Friday, September 20, 2019

Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Lewandowski: exemplary examination of a hostile witness by Barry Berke

Corey Lewandowski yesterday joined a rogues gallery of famously hostile witnesses before the Congress.  Like Oliver North (Iran Contra) - examined by Arthur Liman -  former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was defiant and contemptuous in his testimony before a Congressional committee.  But he met his match in this examination by Judiciary Committee counsel Barry Berke.  HERE it is.

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Fair trial and free press - New York State Bar Assocation

NEW YORK FAIR TRIAL FREE PRESS CONFERENCE 2019
A hypothetical exploring issues involving the media, law enforcement, lawyers and the courts, with participation by an experienced panel and the audience.
Free for all NYSBA Members & Non-Members

Program Co-Chairs
Sandra S. Baron, Esq. | Resident Fellow, Yale Law School
Anne L. LaBarbera, Esq. | Thomas LaBarbera Counselors At Law PC
J. Elliott Lewis, Esq. | S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University

Moderators
Hon. Albert M. Rosenblatt | Former Associate Judge, New York State Court of Appeals | McCabe & Mack LLP
Rex Smith | Times Union

NYC Program Faculty
Hon. Jenny Rivera | New York State Court of Appeals
Hon. Richard J. Sullivan | United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
Stephen Brown | Manhattan Federal Court Reporter | New York Daily News
David Caruso | Associated Press
Jonathan Dienst | WNBC-TV, New York
Carey Dunne, Esq. | General Counsel | Manhattan District Attorney's Office
Captain Robert Gault | New York Police Department
Pat Hurtado | Bloomberg News
Matthew A. Leish, Esq. | Assistant General Counsel | Tribune Publishing Company
Tina Luongo, Esq. | Attorney in Charge of the Criminal Practice | The Legal Aid Society of New York
Anthony Ricco, Esq. | NYC
Rebecca Rosenberg | New York Post
Anna Skotko, Esq. | Deputy Chief, Appellate Unit | United States Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York
Mary Kate Tischler, Esq. | Vice President and Associate General Counsel | News Review and Litigation | CBS Law Department

Monday, September 2, 2019

AmericanStudies: September 2, 2019: Academic Labor: Adjunctification

AmericanStudies: September 2, 2019: Academic Labor: Adjunctification:
by Ben Railton
 [Usually around this time I’d be sharing Fall Semester Preview posts. I’m on sabbatical, so no teaching for me this Fall; instead I thought I’d connect Labor Day to issues ofacademic labor this week. Leading up to a special weekend tribute post!]
On the disastrous and dehumanizing trend at the heart of 21st century academia, and what to do about it.
I don’t imagine it’s news to most readers of this blog that over the last couple decades, institutions of higher education in America (and I imagine around the world, but as usual on this blog I’ll focus in this post and series on America) have come to rely more and more fully on underpaid, unbenefited, too often unappreciated, always painfully precarious adjunct and contingent faculty labor. Wherever you look you can find striking statistics in support of that claim, but I would note two examples from the always reliable American Association of University Professors (AAUP): more than half of all faculty appointments are now part-time; and over 70% of all instructional appointments are non-tenure-track (meaning even if they’re not part-time, they don’t allow the instructors the chance of moving toward tenure and stability; such full-time non-tenure-track positions almost always have time limits as well, making them at best a temporary alternative to contingency). That AAUP site lays out the wide range of disastrous and destructive effects of these trends, not just for the faculty members but also for the institutions, for their students, and as a result for all Americans (since the success or failure of our education system affects us all).
I would never want to argue for a hierarchy of those disastrous effects; indeed, it is precisely the combination of all of them that makes adjunctification as destructive (and short-sighted, if it even offers short-term financial benefits which that AAUP site persuasively argues it does not) as it is. But for those of us in the Humanities, one particularly horrific such effect is the dehumanization of our peers and colleagues. I don’t mean simply that adjunct faculty are generally treated as entirely interchangeable and replaceable cogs in a machine, although that is how far too many institutions and administrators (and, yes, tenure-track faculty; that piece was written by my friend and NeMLA colleague, and consistent advocate for adjunct faculty, Angela Fulk) seem to treat them. No, I mean the way that contingency consistently strips away even the most basic layers of human security, such as having a home or having enough food. Such stories of adjunct life might seem extreme, but I would argue the opposite—that they are frequent, if not indeed commonplace, reflections of an extreme system. I also refuse to give any credence to those who would argue that these faculty members should simply do something else for a living—besides being itself an inhuman response to inhuman conditions, that argument represents a destructive distraction from the core issue here: that numerous teachers are living in such conditions in 2019 America.
So what can we do about this unavoidable and awful reality of 21st century higher education? The next few posts in this series will focus on my experiences with some of the ways through which particular communities, from labor unions to scholarly organizations to state legislatures, can help us collectively address and change the realities of adjunctification. But when it comes to us tenure-track or tenured faculty members, it seems to me that the first step is a simple but crucial one: to admit that luck, purely and entirely, is far and away the most important factor in our having such positions compared to our colleagues who do not.

Law at the End of the Day: The G7 Declaration on the Situation in Hong Kong, and China's Response: Two Analyses on the (Re)Construction of New Era Empire from the Coalition for Peace & Ethics

Law at the End of the Day: The G7 Declaration on the Situation in Hong Kong, and China's Response: Two Analyses on the (Re)Construction of New Era Empire from the Coalition for Peace & Ethics: A blog about globalization, governance, law, corporations, religion and culture in changing times.