RTFA: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic…

“If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network,” Yoo wrote. “In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.”

Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a “national and international version of the right to self-defense,” Yoo wrote. He also articulated a definition of illegal conduct in interrogations — that it must “shock the conscience” — that the Bush administration advocated for years.

Ultimately, after millennia of consideration, the human practice of law and legal progress has concluded: that there are no laws. Who saw that one coming?

I find myself exclaiming, “wow,” with increasing regularity, probably due to the fact that it’s such an interesting time to be alive.

RTFA: http://www.slate.com/id/2175730/entry/2175733/

Sometimes a law was passed by another generation with different ideas of right and wrong, but the political will necessary to repeal the law does not exist. Sometimes, as we’ll see with polygamy or obscenity, the issue is too sensitive to discuss in rational terms. And sometimes the law as written is a symbol of some behavior to which we may aspire, which nevertheless remains wholly out of touch with reality. Whatever the reason, when politics fails, institutional tolerance of lawbreaking takes over.

There will, of course, always be some lawbreaking that goes unpunished simply because law enforcement is expensive—not every shoplifter is caught, and it’s not worth expending the resources to catch every kleptomaniac. But the areas we will look at here are different: What’s going on here is that the parties all know the law is being broken, accept it, and—while almost never overtly saying so—both the “criminals” and law enforcement concede that everyone likes it better that way. The law in question thus continues to have a formal existence, and, as we shall see, it may become a kind of zoning ordinance, enforced only against very public or flagrant behavior. But few, except sometimes a vocal minority, actually think we’d be better off if the law were fully enforced.

The importance of understanding why and when we will tolerate lawbreaking cannot be overstated. Lawyers and journalists spend most of their time watching the president, Congress, and the courts as they make law. But tolerance of lawbreaking constitutes one of the nation’s other major—yet most poorly understood—ways of creating social and legal policy. Almost as much as the laws that we enact, the lawbreaking to which we shut our eyes reflects how tolerant U.S. society really is to individual or group difference. It forms a major part of our understanding of how the nation deals with what was once called “vice.” While messy, strange, hypocritical, and in a sense dishonest, widespread tolerance of lawbreaking forms a critical part of the U.S. legal system as it functions.

Interesting meditation on laws and law breaking in the US.

RTFA: http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2007-09-27-ch…

He’s now got a human name � Matthew Hiasl Pan � but he’s having trouble getting his day in court.
Animal rights activists campaigning to get Pan, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, legally declared a person vowed Thursday to take their challenge to Austria’s Supreme Court after a lower court threw out their latest appeal.
A provincial judge in the city of Wiener Neustadt dismissed the case this week, ruling the Vienna-based Association Against Animal Factories has no legal standing to argue on the chimp’s behalf.
The legal tussle began in February, when the animal shelter where Pan and another chimp, Rosi, have lived for 25 years filed for bankruptcy protection.

Definitions! It’s not like, “it thinks so it’s a person.” It’s more like: people can think; what else thinks?

Freud could think. I say we try to legally reclassify the chimp as “Sigmund Freud.”