Opinion analysis: The meaning of consent to class arbitration

Opinion analysis: The meaning of consent to class arbitration
The basic principle of the Roberts court is that people have  been given too many rights.

Should President Trump be above the law because of the statute of limitations?

Should President Trump be above the law because of the statute of limitations?: Should a president be above the law because of the statute of limitations?
by Jed Shugerman

A Trump Transition Staffer Calls for Impeachment - The Atlantic

A Trump Transition Staffer Calls for Impeachment - The Atlantic
by J.W. Verret

Let’s start at the end of this story. This weekend, I read Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report twice, and realized that enough was enough—I needed to do something. I’ve worked on every Republican presidential transition team for the past 10 years and recently served as counsel to the Republican-led House Financial Services Committee. My permanent job is as a law professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, which is not political, but where my colleagues have held many prime spots in Republican administration.

If you think calling for the impeachment of a sitting Republican president would constitute career suicide for someone like me, you may end up being right. But I did exactly that this weekend, tweeting that it’s time to begin impeachment proceedings.

SPC President Xiao Yang & internationalizing the Chinese judiciary | Supreme People's Court Monitor

When people ask me about law in China they are mostly skeptical that it means much at all.  Perfectly understandable since the word on the street here is that intellectual property theft is rampant, and violations of rights widespread - as in the compulsory Sinfication camps in the Uyghu Muslim autonomous region of Xinjiang.
But the Chinese courts have in the past 40 years been increasingly professionalized and law codified as one hundred fifty law schools educated two full generations of undergraduates in law.  As My experience with Chinese visiting scholars and LLM students is that the Chinese universities have done what we do here: teach people to "think like lawyers".
Susan Finder - Distinguished Scholar at Peking University's Transnational School of Law in Shenzhen discusses the role of the recently deceased President of the Supreme People's Court.  He played a key role in the internationalization of Chinese law and judiciary - an essential step for China to integrate itself into the world economy.  - gwc
SPC President Xiao Yang & internationalizing the Chinese judiciary | Supreme People's Court Monitor
by Susan Finder [Peking University School of Transnational Law (Shenzhen)]

***

I’d like to focus one small aspect of his work that likely won’t be considered important enough to be included in his obituaries in either the Chinese or foreign media–his vision, as SPC president, that internationalizing the education of Chinese judges would be beneficial to China. It was done because he was able to take the view at that time that learning about foreign law was beneficial:

In rule of law construction, it is not possible to close the door; copying and blinding transferring [what is done abroad] is not possible: therefore, as for foreign legal civilization, we must creatively absorb the content that conforms to the general principles of the rule of law according to our situation. In fact, a considerable part of our rule of law construction achievements in the past 40 years have been achieved on the basis of absorbing foreign advanced experience. When we formulated the General Principles of Civil Law, the Contract Law, the Property Law, and even the General Principles of Civil Law, we absorbed a lot of advanced concepts and systems from the civil law system and even the Anglo-American legal system. The principle of crime established in the Criminal Law of 1997 is also modern, contains commonalities with the modern rule of law.搞法治建设，关起门来不行，照搬照抄也不行；因此，对外国法律文明，我们要根据自身情况创造性地吸收借鉴那些符合法治一般规律的内容。事实上，四十年来我们的法治建设成就，有相当一部分是在吸收借鉴外国先进经验的基础上取得的。我们制定民法通则、合同法、物权法乃至民法总则时，就大量吸收了大陆法系甚至是英美法系的先进理念和制度；我们在1997年《刑法》中确立的罪刑法定原则，也正是现代法治中共通性的内容。[please feel free to make corrections to this translation]

He considered sending judges abroad an accomplishment that should be included in reports to the NPC:

• More than 200 outstanding young and middle-aged judges have been selected from the national courts to study abroad and in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. More than 100 people have returned from their studies and become the backbone of foreign-related trial operations. (从全国法院选送200多名优秀中青年法官到国外和香港特别行政区进修深造，目前已有百余人学成归来，并成为涉外审判业务骨干.)（2002）
• Continue to organize judges to study and exchange in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Macao Special Administrative Region, and abroad.(继续组织法官到香港特别行政区、澳门特别行政区以及国外学习交流。)

SPC Report Emphasizes Absolute Party Leadership and Xi Jin Ping Thought ~ Susan Finder

https://supremepeoplescourtmonitor.com/2019/04/22/signals-in-the-2019-supreme-peoples-court-work-report-to-the-npc/

Hong Kong~PRC Arbitration Accord Approved by SPC of PRC

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=01dc0ebb-b220-401e-a3c8-8f88a083dc02

Did Trump obstruct justice? Congress must determine that | Corey Brettschneider | Opinion | The Guardian

Did Trump obstruct justice? Congress must determine that | Corey Brettschneider | Opinion | The Guardian:
by Corey Brettschneider (Fordham Law School)
 If Congress finds enough evidence to support this claim, it is not only up to them to impeach and remove the president; it is up to future prosecutors to indict him.
In my view, the arguments for the current DOJ policy are so flawed that it should have been overridden. The indignity to the office comes from allowing a criminal president to continue to occupy it, not from indictments. And the idea that presidents are too busy to be indicted is simply false. The constitutionally enshrined impeachment process is also time-consuming. And as the example of President Clinton’s subpoenaed testimony in Clinton v Jones made clear, presidential schedulers can figure out how to balance a president’s responsibilities as chief executive with his participation in a legal proceeding. The failure to indict the president on obstruction was Barr’s responsibility, not Mueller’s. And in light of Barr’s heavily partisan pre-release press conference, this failure is both predictable and regrettable.

John Roberts and the decline of democracy. Charles Kaiser ~ Guardian

The Chief review: John Roberts and the decline of American democracy https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/apr/21/the-chief-john-roberts-supreme-court-justice-joan-biskupic?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Blogger

Robert Mueller let Donald Trump Jr. off the hook too easily. - Rick Hasen - Slate

Robert Mueller let Donald Trump Jr. off the hook too easily
Slate
by Rick Hasen (UCLA)

The redacted Mueller Report and the Executive Summaries

It's a beige wash, not a whitewash.  Robert Mueller - the brave soldier - the all business FBI Director - was a wimp when it came to Trump.  didn't even issue a subpoena to compel Trumpolini to testify.
The redacted Mueller Report
Searchable!  Thank you Bloomberg!

And The Executive Summaries
Thank you Lawfare

Helvetica

I'm a Georgia fan, hate courier, think Tahoma is OK.  But as a subway rider, gotta hand it to Helvetica. ~gwc

Loved and loathed, iconic Helvetica font enters a new era https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2019/04/17/loved-and-loathed-iconic-helvetica-font-enters-new-era/dBwf6YWjbkvKsTYmGrN4mJ/story.html

Congrats to Pulitzer Prize-wining WSJ team for TRUMP’S HUSH MONEY

TRUMP’S HUSH MONEY - WSJ: Key articles from The Wall Street Journal’s investigation of the president’s role in secret payoffs.
Very proud of Michael Rothfeld, father of two of my granddaughters, and member of the Pulitzer Prize winning WSJ team for Trump’s Hush Money: Key stories from The Wall Street Journal’s investigation of the president’s role in secret payoffs.

Barr’s Playbook: He Misled Congress When Omitting Parts of Justice Dep’t Memo in 1989 - Just Security

As soon as William Barr's name appeared as possible Attorney General Beltway-insider and old school ties syndrome began to seep into the commentary of normally level-headed commentators (names omitted to protect the guilty).  NYU's Ryan Goodman tells a story  that shows that Barr is a con artist, rather than the "rule of law" DOJ man that many serious commentators told us. - GWC

Barr’s Playbook: He Misled Congress When Omitting Parts of Justice Dep’t Memo in 1989 - Just Security: When Bill Barr was head of Office of Legal Counsel, he gave Congress the legal conclusions and reasoning of an important Justice Department memo but left out major portions of it. When the full memo was finally released nearly two years later it was clear what Barr had covered up, writes Ryan Goodman.

On Friday the thirteenth October 1989, by happenstance the same day as the “Black Friday” market crash, news leaked of a legal memo authored by William Barr. He was then serving as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It is highly uncommon for any OLC memo to make headlines. This one did because it was issued in “unusual secrecy” and concluded that the FBI could forcibly abduct people in other countries without the consent of the foreign state. The headline also noted the implication of the legal opinion at that moment in time. It appeared to pave the way for abducting Panama’s leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega.

Members of Congress asked to see the full legal opinion. Barr refused, but said he would provide an account that “summarizes the principal conclusions.” Sound familiar? In March 2019, when Attorney General Barr was handed Robert Mueller’s final report, he wrote that he would “summarize the principal conclusions” of the special counsel’s report for the public.

When Barr withheld the full OLC opinion in 1989 and said to trust his summary of the principal conclusions, Yale law school professor Harold Koh wrote that Barr’s position was “particularly egregious.” Congress also had no appetite for Barr’s stance, and eventually issued a subpoena to successfully wrench the full OLC opinion out of the Department.

What’s different from that struggle and the current struggle over the Mueller report is that we know how the one in 1989 eventually turned out.

When the OLC opinion was finally made public long after Barr left office, it was clear that Barr’s summary had failed to fully disclose the opinion’s principal conclusions. It is better to think of Barr’s summary as a redacted version of the full OLC opinion. That’s because the “summary” took the form of 13 pages of written testimony. The document was replete with quotations from court cases, legal citations, and the language of the OLC opinion itself. Despite its highly detailed analysis, this 13-page version omitted some of the most consequential and incendiary conclusions from the actual opinion. And there was evidently no justifiable reason for having withheld those parts from Congress or the public.

Opinion | Brent Staples’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Work at The Times - The New York Times

Opinion | Brent Staples’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Work at The Times - The New York Times: The editorial board member’s work tackled head-on the uncomfortable truths about race in America.

CREW Calls for Release of Full Mueller Report, Citing Barr’s Conflicts - CREW

CREW Calls for Release of Full Mueller Report, Citing Barr’s Conflicts - CREW: Barr's conflicts include his involvement with President Trump’s legal team, as well as his 19-page memo criticizing a possible obstruction charge.

Washington—The only appropriate way to address Attorney General William Barr’s potential conflicts of interest and apparent lack of impartiality is for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report in its entirety, according to a request sent today to DOJ by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

CREW’s letter raises potential conflicts of interest for Barr, including his involvement, while in private practice, with President Trump’s White House legal team, Trump’s personal lawyers, and lawyers who represented likely subjects of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, as well as Barr’s 19-page legal memo criticizing possible obstruction of justice charges against the President written before he was nominated to be our country’s top law enforcement officer.

The letter further critiques Barr’s decision to issue a four-page summary on the Mueller report: “Your subsequent decision as Attorney General to release a four-page summary in which you conclude that President Trump did not obstruct justice further contributed to the impression that you prejudged the matter based on your prior involvement and undermines public confidence in DOJ’s decision-making process,” the letter reads. “This action appeared to be an attempt to skew public opinion in advance of the full release of the report. Your actions in this matter have already damaged the public’s trust in your service as Attorney General on a matter with national security implications.”

“After 215 criminal charges, 38 indictments or pleas, five prison sentences, 500 search warrants, 2800 subpoenas, and 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, there is overwhelming public interest in the Special Counsel Report,” CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said in the letter. “The American people are entitled to full transparency into the Russian government’s attack on the 2016 Presidential election process, any established links between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump campaign, and any actions taken by President Trump to obstruct the related federal investigations.”

Click here to read the letter.

Notre Dame - nous la rebatirons. Tous ensemble. - Macron

Cette cathédrale Notre-Dame, nous la rebâtirons. Tous ensemble. C’est une part de notre destin français. Je m’y engage : dès demain une souscription nationale sera lancée, et bien au-delà de nos frontières.

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) April 15, 2019

“Notre Dame is our history, our literature, part of our psyche, the place of all our great events, our epidemics, our wars, our liberations, the epicentre of our lives ... So I solemnly say tonight: we will rebuild it together.” - Emmanuel Macron

The moment #NotreDame’s spire fell pic.twitter.com/XUcr6Iob0b

— Patrick Galey (@patrickgaley) April 15, 2019

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Thousands of Parisians – many weeping and some praying – watched as vast orange flames soared from the roof for hours, threatening one of the greatest architectural treasures of the western world. There were gasps on the southern bank of the river Seine as locals watched fire sweep across the roof, which slowly caved in.

Hints, but no proof of crime, in Mueller's hunt for a Trump-Russia conspiracy - Reuters

The hunt for a Democrat at the FBI must evoke Greek mythology, so it was inevitable that we would be dependent on types like Comey.  And we were Mueller and Rosenstein never even tried to depose Trump or call him before a Grand Jury. (Remember how that worked out for Bill Clinton?)  Maybe he figured that with the deck stacked at SCOTUS it was pointless.  But what was the harm in trying? 
Hints, but no proof of crime, in Mueller's hunt for a Trump-Russia conspiracy - Reuters: As recently as February, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team dropped hints that the inquiry into Russia's role in the 2016 U.S. election might unearth evidence of active cooperation between Moscow and President Donald Trump's campaign.

How the Great Leftist Thinkers of the 20th Century Contended With Zionism - The New York Times

How the Great Leftist Thinkers of the 20th Century Contended With Zionism - The New York Times: In “The Lions’ Den,” Susie Linfield tours the minds of eight thinkers, including Hannah Arendt and Noam Chomsky, investigating their relationship to the Jewish state.
Reviewed by J.J. Goldberg
"“The Lions’ Den” illustrates the individual struggles of Jewish leftists in the World War II generation to reconcile their conflicting impulses, the particularist pull of Zionism and the universalist pull of socialism. Their stories precisely anticipate the tension today’s Jewish liberals experience trying to reconcile their own pro-Israel particularism and their social-justice universalism."

Pete Buttigieg reacts to Trump incitement against Rep. Ilhan Omar

After 9/11 we all said we were changed. That we were stronger and more united. That’s what “never forget” was about. Now, a president uses that dark day to incite his base against a member of Congress, as if for sport. As if we learned nothing that day about the workings of hate.

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) April 13, 2019

Benedict's Letter is a Regrettable Text - Michael Sean Winters - National Catholic Reporter

Why was there no one to protect the retired Pope Joseph Ratzinger from this damaging text?
by Michael Sean Winters //National Catholic Reporter

When a friend first sent me Pope Emeritus Benedict's article about the root causes of clergy sex abuse, I thought the text was a hoax. Here, it seemed, was a caricature of both Joseph Ratzinger's once powerful intellect and of conservative explanations for the sex abuse crisis. Apparently the text is authentic, so we must search for other reasons why it gets so much wrong — and so much that the retired pope would know is wrong. Let us examine the difficulties with this text.

First and foremost, Benedict knows as few others do, that the crisis is a double affliction: There is the fact of the abuse and the fact of that abuse being covered up. Nowhere in this text does he explore the second affliction. Yet he knows that when, as Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he completed his investigation into the evil deeds of Fr. Marcial Maciel, no action was taken against this most horrible of perpetrators. He would have known about the allegations leveled against then-Archbishop Theodore McCarrick before his promotion to the Archdiocese of Washington and to the cardinalate, and that those allegations were unanswered or ignored. He knew the circumstances that forced Cardinal Bernard Law to resign his see and spend the rest of his life occupying a sinecure in Rome. Why no mention of any of this?