Word: legalism
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...legalizing a form of marriage because it is no longer anathema to the majority, we acknowledge the fact that social taboos are the guiding principle of the modern definition of marriage. In this new legal environment, all candidate definitions are necessarily discriminatory toward some form of relationship. Otherwise, all conceptions of marriage would be permitted. Therefore, by extension, it is unfair to categorically label the proponents of one arbitrary definition bigots for not supporting another arbitrary definition...
...while habeus corpus rights and the state's secrets privilege are somewhat abstract, everyone understands the power of the photographs from Abu Ghraib released in 2004. The American Civil Liberties Union sued in federal court under the Freedom of Information Act for hundreds of similar photographs. Strictly on legal grounds, it was an easy call for Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department to decide three weeks ago that - having fought the release of the photos in federal court, and lost, three times - that further appeals would be fruitless. So the Justice Department urged the Pentagon to strike a deal...
...politicians were not the only ones with diametrically opposed views. David Luban, a law professor from Georgetown University, described the memos from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) as "an ethical train wreck." The OLC, he said, had tried to "reverse engineer" their memos to try and make illegal actions legal. Jeffrey Addicott, from St. Mary's University School of Law, took the opposite position, saying it was "propaganda" to describe the CIA's methods as torture. "We have tortured no one," he said...
...both by Obama's rollback of the policies he championed and the buzz on the left that a sitting President might prosecute a predecessor who took those policies too far. Cheney has repeatedly charged the White House with proceeding with prosecutions against the Justice Department lawyers who found the legal basis for the policies and the CIA officers who executed them. But Cheney is reaching: Obama has stopped short of calling for anything more than a probe into the genesis of the Bush-era tactics. True, a probe might well lead to more questions about Cheney's conduct, but Obama...
...What's quite clear about Cheney's sudden chatty spree is that he wants to refocus the question about waterboarding and other interrogation techniques from whether they were legal to whether they worked. After eight years on the front lines of the war on terrorism, perhaps that is all a man can see. It certainly might explain why Cheney is making such a fuss about asking Obama to release a pair of after-action memos - which he says offer proof that the controversial methods produced evidence that, as Cheney claimed on Sunday, "saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives...