Word: kurland
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Dark Area. What makes the current legal question so difficult is that, as the University of Chicago's Philip Kurland observes, the President and Congress are clashing "in a dark gray area where there are no judicial precedents." Never before has Congress subpoenaed a President. Only once has the Judiciary Branch issued a subpoena to a President. That was in 1807, when Chief Justice John Marshall, performing his collateral role as a district-court judge in Richmond, was trying Aaron Burr for treason. Burr wanted Thomas Jefferson to produce letters written to him by one of the prosecution witnesses...
...precedent by warning Congress that he would not turn over papers that might reveal military secrets or might otherwise be "injurious" to the public. But it is a matter of tradition more than of law, since the Constitution makes no mention of such a presidential right. Says Kurland: "We do not even have a good definition of Executive privilege. It certainly does not mean an individual official's interest-including the President's. We've not yet arrived at the Louis XIV state...
...raised a storm by suggesting that a criminal-defense lawyer owed such complete allegiance to his client that he should balk at practically nothing, including even in some cases perjury. But this is closer to the no-holds-barred philosophy of war than to that of law. Professor Philip Kurland of the University of Chicago Law School has written about the Watergate mess: "Whatever one might properly expect of professional spies or advertising men, surely the lawyers owed a duty to the law whose keepers they...
Generally, in fact, except on criminal questions and perhaps on obscenity, the court will not retreat in major ways from Warren court decisions. Observes Constitutional Law Professor Philip Kurland of the University of Chicago: "After you break an egg, you can scramble it. but you can't put it back together." Instead, the Justices will simply not march onward...
...court will be less venturesome in staking out new positions," contends Kurland's Chicago colleague, Phil Neal. As a result, new constitutional claims by a variety of special-interest groups?tenants, ecologists, the poor, welfare recipients, consumers?are not likely to be warmly received. A similar desire to stay out of new constitutional waters may well doom such pending contentions as the claim that the death penalty is cruel and inhuman punishment, thus a violation of the Eighth Amendment...