Restoring Habeas Corpus


Book Description




Habeas for the Twenty-First Century


Book Description

For centuries, the writ of habeas corpus has served as an important safeguard against miscarriages of justice, and today it remains at the center of some of the most contentious issues of our time—among them terrorism, immigration, crime, and the death penalty. Yet, in recent decades, habeas has been seriously abused. In this book, Nancy J. King and Joseph L. Hoffmann argue that habeas should be exercised with greater prudence. Through historical, empirical, and legal analysis, as well as illustrative case studies, the authors examine the current use of the writ in the United States and offer sound reform proposals to help ensure its ongoing vitality in today’s justice system. Comprehensive and thoroughly grounded in a modern understanding of habeas corpus, this informative book will be an insightful read for legal scholars and anyone interested in the importance of habeas corpus for American government.




Habeas Corpus


Book Description

Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Aileen Wuornos. A witch, a pirate, a slave who poisoned her master. A serial killer, a Quaker, a case of mistaken identity. The earliest to be electrocuted, gassed, and lethally injected; the last to be publicly hanged. In her first book, Habeas Corpus, acclaimed poet Jill McDonough gives us fifty sonnets, each about a legal execution in American history. From four hundred years of documentation she conjures – and honors – a chorus of the dead. The sonnets, headed meticulously by name, date, and place, are poignant with the factual, with words and actions reported by eyewitnesses and spoken by the condemned – so limpidly framed that at moments one forgets the skill that tautens and crystallizes all this into authentic poetry: The warehouse was dingy, cluttered with lumber:thirteen steps, noose, black mask. No hymn, no psalm.He spat out his gum in the chaplain’s outstretched palm.Habeas Corpus: you have the body. With a rare control of indignation by sorrow, of subjectivity by the subject’s own truth, McDonough’s unsparing sonnets reveal the enormity that is the death penalty in America: “a ladder, a hanging tree” for Mary Dyer, “an odor he'd/described in print as peach blossoms, sickening-sweet” for Caryl Chessman, “a hood, their/target, then bang, bang, bang, three noises, quick” for Gary Gilmore, “Two needles in his arm,/blood splatters on the sheet” for Charles Brooks. Taking the words of fifty out of the nearly 20,000 men and women executed since 1608, she reflects them back to us in works of self-effacing artistry. Resurrected from their obscurity these individuals speak our secret history.




Habeas Corpus


Book Description

We call habeas corpus the Great Writ of Liberty. But it was actually a writ of power. In a work based on an unprecedented study of thousands of cases across more than five hundred years, Paul Halliday provides a sweeping revisionist account of the world's most revered legal device. In the decades around 1600, English judges used ideas about royal power to empower themselves to protect the king's subjects. The key was not the prisoner's "right" to "liberty"Ñthese are modern idiomsÑbut the possible wrongs committed by a jailer or anyone who ordered a prisoner detained. This focus on wrongs gave the writ the force necessary to protect ideas about rights as they developed outside of law. This judicial power carried the writ across the world, from Quebec to Bengal. Paradoxically, the representative impulse, most often expressed through legislative action, did more to undermine the writ than anything else. And the need to control imperial subjects would increasingly constrain judges. The imperial experience is thus crucial for making sense of the broader sweep of the writ's history and of English law. Halliday's work informed the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush on prisoners in the Guant‡namo detention camps. His eagerly anticipated book is certain to be acclaimed the definitive history of habeas corpus.




Federal Habeas Corpus


Book Description

Federal habeas corpus is a procedure under which a federal court may review the legality of an individual's incarceration. It is most often the stage of the criminal appellate process that follows direct appeal and any available state collateral review. The law in the area is an intricate weave of statute and case law. Current federal law operates under the premise that with rare exceptions prisoners challenging the legality of the procedures by which they were tried or sentenced get "one bite of the apple." Relief for state prisoners is only available if the state courts have ignored or rejected their valid claims, and there are strict time limits within which they may petition the federal courts for relief. Moreover, a prisoner relying upon a novel interpretation of law must succeed on direct appeal; federal habeas review may not be used to establish or claim the benefits of a "new rule." Expedited federal habeas procedures are available in the case of state death row inmates if the state has provided an approved level of appointed counsel. The Supreme Court has held that Congress enjoys considerable authority to limit, but not to extinguish, access to the writ. This report is available in an abridged version as CRS Report RS22432, "Federal Habeas Corpus: An Abridged Sketch," by Charles Doyle.




Model Rules of Professional Conduct


Book Description

The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.




Restoring the Global Judiciary


Book Description

Why there should be a larger role for the judiciary in American foreign relations In the past several decades, there has been a growing chorus of voices contending that the Supreme Court and federal judiciary should stay out of foreign affairs and leave the field to Congress and the president. Challenging this idea, Restoring the Global Judiciary argues instead for a robust judicial role in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. With an innovative combination of constitutional history, international relations theory, and legal doctrine, Martin Flaherty demonstrates that the Supreme Court and federal judiciary have the power and duty to apply the law without deference to the other branches. Turning first to the founding of the nation, Flaherty shows that the Constitution’s original commitment to separation of powers was as strong in foreign as domestic matters, not least because the document shifted enormous authority to the new federal government. This initial conception eroded as the nation rose from fledgling state to superpower, fueling the growth of a dangerously formidable executive that today asserts near-plenary foreign affairs authority. Flaherty explores how modern international relations makes the commitment to balance among the branches of government all the more critical and he considers implications for modern controversies that the judiciary will continue to confront. At a time when executive and legislative actions in the name of U.S. foreign policy are only increasing, Restoring the Global Judiciary makes the case for a zealous judicial defense of fundamental rights involving global affairs.




Habeus [sic] Corpus and Detentions at Guantanamo Bay


Book Description




The Broken Constitution


Book Description

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An innovative account of Abraham Lincoln, constitutional thinker and doer Abraham Lincoln is justly revered for his brilliance, compassion, humor, and rededication of the United States to achieving liberty and justice for all. He led the nation into a bloody civil war to uphold the system of government established by the US Constitution—a system he regarded as the “last best hope of mankind.” But how did Lincoln understand the Constitution? In this groundbreaking study, Noah Feldman argues that Lincoln deliberately and recurrently violated the United States’ founding arrangements. When he came to power, it was widely believed that the federal government could not use armed force to prevent a state from seceding. It was also assumed that basic civil liberties could be suspended in a rebellion by Congress but not by the president, and that the federal government had no authority over slavery in states where it existed. As president, Lincoln broke decisively with all these precedents, and effectively rewrote the Constitution’s place in the American system. Before the Civil War, the Constitution was best understood as a compromise pact—a rough and ready deal between states that allowed the Union to form and function. After Lincoln, the Constitution came to be seen as a sacred text—a transcendent statement of the nation’s highest ideals. The Broken Constitution is the first book to tell the story of how Lincoln broke the Constitution in order to remake it. To do so, it offers a riveting narrative of his constitutional choices and how he made them—and places Lincoln in the rich context of thinking of the time, from African American abolitionists to Lincoln’s Republican rivals and Secessionist ideologues. Includes 8 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations