Word: legalism
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...hope that President Obama will live up to his campaign rhetoric and recommit the United States “to the rule of law, [rejecting] a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting [the legal system].” Investigating and prosecuting those responsible for the worst abuses of power under the Bush administration is a necessary step toward that restoration...
This spring, for example, Texas lawmakers are mulling a new law that would allow college students to carry firearms to campus (Utah already makes this legal). "I think people weren't concerned about it first," says University of Texas graduate student John Woods, who has emerged as a spokesman for campus efforts to defeat the bill. "They thought, 'It's a terrible idea. Why would the government consider something like this?'" But as the debate on campus has heated up, that complacency has vanished, Woods explains to TIME. Students opposed to the bill plan a big rally on Thursday...
...concealed handguns or changed existing laws to make it harder for state officials to deny those permits, according to a 2008 study in the Yale Law & Policy Review. In the past couple of years, another trend has taken root, too: the expansion of the so-called Castle Doctrine, a legal theory enshrined in common law. It is used to justify deadly force in the defense of one's home, although it's usually interpreted to include a duty to try to avoid confrontation if one can. But in the past three years, the National Rifle Association has encouraged states...
...Other legal responses have been more creative still. A year after Columbine, Kentucky lawmakers agreed to repeal a law that two years before had given every preacher, priest or minister a special legal right to carry arms to the pulpit, with a handgun in the holster underneath the frock. Still, lawmakers refused to ban pistols completely from the pews. Instead, they left it up to churches to decide for themselves whether anybody, preacher or layman, can go to church carrying a piece...
...sometimes graphic detail, the memos issued by the department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) reveal how the key conditions laid-down by the Administration were not always adhered to. Those guidelines were that the techniques were supposed to mimic the mock-torture of service personnel in an U.S. Army training program, they were to be used as a "controlled acute episode," and they were not to be used "with substantial repetition." (See pictures from inside Guantanamo Bay's detention facilities...