Crescat
Sententia

The Euro 2004 soccer tournament is about to kick off in Portugal, and once again, controlling fan violence is a major undertaking. The England-France match set for Sunday is one venue that has the Portugese authorities particularly concerned. Drunken England fans have caused more than their share of havoc in the past. But the Portugese police have a new weapon in their arsenal: they intend to look the other way at the public consumption of....marijuana. It's a harm reduction measure: toked-up fans do not present the same sorts of public order problems as do drunk fans, and police resources have higher uses than bothering fans who are smoking a joint but not harming anyone else. Incidentally, Portugal is so depraved (like Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands) that it doesn't throw people in prison when they are walking around with a little bit of a drug (including heroin or cocaine) on them for their own personal consumption. Barbarians. [Disclaimer: I could be wrong! Do not rely upon this information or misinformation!] But public consumption of marijuana is not decriminalized in Portugal, though for Euro 2004, it appears that it will be tolerated. Thanks to Last One Speaks for the pointer.

I just posted a version of this at Vice Squad, and thought that I would double dip, now that the Supreme Court has smiled upon such activity...

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith notes:

That the innocent, though they may have some connexion or dependency upon the guilty (which, perhaps, they themselves cannot help), should not, upon that account, suffer or be punished for the guilty, is one of the plainest and most obvious rules of justice

Victimless crimes tend to breed such unjust laws precisely because there is no obvious standard for the appropriate amount of punishment that should accompany a victimless crime. (For a good discussion of this theme, see Roger Pilon's "Can American Asset Forfeiture Law Be Justified?," 39 N.Y.L. Sch. L. Rev. 311, 1994.) The extent of moral fervor, then, becomes a major determinant of punishment -- and hence the extent of criminalization as well as the punishment for victimless crimes varies significantly over time, as the moral fervor shifts. Why does the moral fervor shift? Because the activities are themselves morally ambiguous, combining elements of pleasure and wickedness. (On this theme, see Jerome Skolnick's "The Social Transformation of Vice," Law and Contemporary Problems 51 (1): 9-29, 1988.)

My prior post, in which I argued that Torquemada-gate was not necessarily atypical of American moral miscues in time of war, has generated some thoughtful dissent. Both Professors Froomkin and Muller have articulated what it is in their minds that distingushes the present situation from events past. (Professor Balkin also has a post which, I think, is similar to Muller's in its assumptions and viewpoint.) Their responses resonate with me, but that is little surprise given that I share their general views concerning the immorality of torture. Nonetheless, I am not fully persuaded, and I have attempted to articulate the reasons why in an "Update" appended to my original post.

Kevin Drum has also penned a reconsideration of the matter that is worth reading. In it, I think that Drum puts his finger on the issue that ultimately separates myself from him, Froomkin, and Muller:

CC specifically suggests that torture might not be quite as universally condemned as I think, and sadly, there's some evidence to back that up.

Other polling has produced similar results. And it's not always clear that moral qualms lie behind the opposition to torture. Some seem to suggest that refraining from physical coercion is merely a matter of pragmatism:

But Mr. Biden persisted, saying: "There's a reason why we sign these treaties: to protect my son in the military. That's why we have these treaties, so when Americans are captured they are not tortured. That's the reason in case anybody forgets it."

There is no shortage of folks who are willing to publicly condone, discount, or excuse the events at Abu Ghraib. And, as I previously noted, there are even those within the legal community, such as Professor Dershowitz, who would contemplate legalizing torture under certain circumstances. Whatever moral consensus we share concerning the ineffability of torture may well be frayed or outright illusory. The events at Abu Ghraib and the administration's conduct may be a reflection of this reality rather than a betrayal of well-settled values.

The great food writer Calvin Trillin once recounted how his wife figured the home finances. Any money saved incidentally, such as by flying on a discount airline, would get allocated mentally into a sort of surplus fund to be spent on frivolous luxuries. Taking her advice fully to heart, the intrepid Mr. Trillin subsequently bedazzled an elderly seat mate on a flight by spending the entire time stuffing himself with an unremitting parade of delicacies – caviar, devilled quail's eggs, an expensive bottle of wine stowed surreptitiously in the front pouch. When I learned that the law firm I’m working for was paying my way to New York, I decided to take a page out of a superior’s book, literally. And because I was unlikely to have a seat mate in the head carriage of a Sunday morning train from Boston to Penn Station, I brought along the memoirs of the long suffering New York Times food writer, Craig Clairborne, to mull away the time as I ate my way from school to work, from unpaid frivolity to at least a brief sojourn in the heady world of paid responsibility.

...I figure I'll strike a match and see what happens. Can we please, please have a moratorium on the word 'homophobic?' Or at least its misuse.

Wherein what was once a blog about politics and law is rapidly becoming a blog about literature (and food. (and etiquette.))

I noticed yesterday that Anthony Rickey at Three Years of Hell is currently reading Arturo Perez-Reverte's Dumas Club. Josh Chafetz also recommended it some time back (before I had figured out how to spell his name). I read it many years ago, but it remains one of my favorite casual books, and it contains two of my favorite literary characters of all time. (Other top choices being Van Veen, William of Baskerville, Dirk Gently . . .)

Pejman Yousefzadeh is also a fan of several of Reverte's works-- The Fencing Master is another top choice. Opinions (including mine) are split on The Nautical Chart. I liked the Seville Communion, despite its focus on religion, and was a little bored (but still pleased) by the Flanders Panel, despite its focus on chess.

But, while picking up my graduation tickets today, I was pleased to discover that Reverte has a sixth novel in English. (For those whose Spanish is better than mine, he has plenty more in his native tongue.) I haven't read it yet, but I suspect I'll have it done by the time my plane lands in D.C. on Sunday night.

Incidentally, for the insatiable I have a small collection of Reverte quotes here (some are translated, a little shakily, by me).

Eugene Volokh posts about a rather broad (and, he tells us, unconstitutional) speech code. It has many of the usual things one expects from such things, but as a result of my past weeks spent listening to Ted Cohen, this prohibition caught my eye:

Examples of Inappropriate Behavior: . . . * Jokes that have the purpose or effect of stereotyping, demeaning or making fun of any protected group. An example might be jokes about persons with AIDS or an ethnic joke. . . .

Near as I can recall, I've only ever eaten in one American restaurant that claims to be in the same class as Les Nomades. That restaurant, where I ate a year or two ago in honor of my father's birthday-- was Spiaggia. I ate tonight at Les Nomades to celebrate my graduation and imminent birthday. The comparison is not even close.

Where Spiaggia is surly, rude, and made us wait 45 minutes for our reservation (made long in advance) because they were "slammed" (they explained unapologetically), Les Nomades seemed quite pleased when we arrived early and were already handing us deliciously bubbly beverages before it was even 8 o'clock (our scheduled arrival time).

Where Spiaggia's food was quite good, almost as good as Coco Pazzo's, Les Nomades' was fantastic. I ordered some fairly gamey food (quail and bison), which I only do out of a gesture of great faith. I've never trusted a kitchen that deeply since L'Avant Gout (and even that took me until my second eager trip); my faith here was not misplaced.

Normally I follow my co-blogger Amy's lead and place little stock in a restaurant's decor and ambience, figuring that what is splurged on gilt tile and prime real estate is money not spent on helicoptering the freshest salmon, or scouring for the best morels. That said, I've never felt as comfortable in a restaurant as I did at Les Nomades, which was quiet without being ominously still, bright without being glaring, brown without being drab, kind without being obsequious.

To be sure, there are people who want to go to nice restaurants to see and be seen, to see black-clad wait-staff act hip or cool or cooler-than-thou. There are people who want everything to be glass and stainless steel, who want a fortieth-story view out of their dining room, or a slightly edgy feel, or a grand entrance that makes them feel like they're out someplace . . . grand. Les Nomades is none of these things; it serves delicious, delicious, food with yummy wines with extremely helpful and nice service in an unpretentious and utterly comfortable room. If you have a very special occasion to celebrate in Chicago, go.

Even the complimentary birthday cake they brought was yummy.

There's nothing to make you (and by "you," I mean "me") like walking into a room of strangers and hearing someone I scarcely recognize say, "Oh my god, you're her sister!" One of my fellow trainees is a friend of my sister's from her Kuk Sool class. "Holy shit" several times over as the shock gradually wore off.

Now, if someone greets me like that in Kazakhstan, I'll know she's famous.

You don't need to watch too much television to be inundated with beer ads.

And, if you paying attention just the slightest bit, you'll have noticed that the current beer wars are over the Atkins dieter (or equivalent) who wants a good pint of suds... without all those pesky carbs.

While I can understand the marketing idea behind Bud Light's latest campaign, I think their latest television spot might backfire a bit:

With beer pouring in the background, we (the viewers) are reliably informed that "The fact is, all light beers are low on carbs."

As such, the slogan goes, we should "Choose on Taste"

I'm happy to oblige, but don't they want me buying a Bud Light, not an Amstel?

N.B.: If it's calories you count instead of carbs, have yourself a Yuengling Lager, which is not a light beer but only has 25 more calories than Bud Light.

Will is not the only graduating senior at the U of C. I, too, will bid farewell to the city gray that ne'er shall die this weekend.

One more note for those following the Nabokov-as-cryptomnesiac-debate. My Nabokov-expert roommate just introduced me today to Zembla, run by the same folks who publish my beloved Nabokovian, and a rich resource for all who are uselessly obsessed with old V.N.

As much as I am loathe to accept this conclusion, Brian Boyd adduces some pretty good evidence that Nabokov sometimes made mistakes in his writing (though not as many as his editors and translators tried to make when working with his books!). The only book I've reread enough times to check Boyd on is Ada, but he does seem right there. In particular, Boyd makes a good case, working from Nabokov's master copy, that he would occasionally edit and forget what he had originally meant by a passage. That sort of literary absent-mindedness can be maddening (and heretical enough that I am tempted to deny it), but does lend a bit more support to the notion of a forgetfully inspired Nabokov.

Zembla also has a few observations here about possible inpsirations for Nabokov's Lolita.

From Ada:

The house was empty, and cool, and smelled of carnations. Good morning, and good-bye, little bedroom. Van shaved, Van pared his toe-nails, Van dressed with exquisite care: gray socks, silk shirt, gray tie, dark-gray suit newly pressed-- shoes, ah yes, shoes, mustn't forget shoes, and without bothering to sort out the rest of his belongings, crammed a score of twenty-dollar gold coins into a chamois purse, distributed handkerchief, checkbook, passport, what else? nothing else, over his rigid person and pinned a note to the pillow asking to have his things packed and forwarded to his father's address.

Way back when in January, I posted a tidbit from the campaign website of then Libertarian Party contender for the presidential nomination, Michael Badnarik.

Well, Badnarik has won the LP nomination and his campaign website has gotten a facelift. His bizarre musings on prison have disappeared. For better or worse, his updated site now looks more like that of a "real" candidate, with carefully chosen words describing just a couple party-line positions, and more space for pictures, pins, and donation requests than political positions and plans. I suppose the removal of the material espousing what Michael Badnarik stood for doesn't really matter anyway. It's not like he's going to be president.

Yesterday my law firm gave its summer associates the day off to go build houses. We took cabs out to northeast D.C. (and took the Metro back; no cabs will come to that neighborhood), received instruction from a pierced and punkish Americorps volunteer on what our tasks would be, and spent the rest of the day sweating, hammering, digging. By four o’clock we were all exhausted, but a day’s work by fifteen people amounted to a bit of landscaping, half a roof, and two beams. Compare this to the amount that a professional work crew of similar size could accomplish in the same time, and you will, like me, be underwhelmed by the Habitat program.

Upon further reflection, large coffee table photo books of America were probably not a wise choice of a host family gift.

Like many others, I now have some G-Mail accounts to distribute, and like Curtis, I have no interest in auctioning them. (Call it transaction aversion.) So, if you'd like one, email me.

However, strong preference will be given to those who I either A: know in real life or B: have gotten at least two emails from in the past, and will otherwise be determined rather idiosyncratically.

The degree to which this post makes me sound like Jeremy Blachman's co-workers is mostly unintentional.

UPDATE: Thanks to all who expressed interest. Further Gmail accounts available will again be posted on the blog.

Some time ago, Crescat covered the question of the milk-chug-challenge: the famous question of whether or not it is possible to drink a gallon of milk in an hour, and if it is difficult, what the difficulty is.

My original post is here, and here is the reply from then-reader, now-co-blogger, Beth Plocharczyk.

Well it turns out a teacher in North Carolina let 38 of his students try it (13 got sick). He's been fired. I can't tell from the story whether participation was A: voluntary, and B: with knowledge of the possible consequences. If so, his firing is a travesty.

If you will pardon the rather free (read: incorrect) transliteration, that's the phrase that Russian police officers in and around subway stops have often asked me: "Documents, please". Sometimes this polite request follows a salute, sometimes it follows a grasp of my arm, and sometimes it is accompanied by the muzzle of their AK-47-style gun banging into me. So I hand them my passport and visa complete with the various stamps, and then they decide whether or not to rob me.

So as you can imagine, I was delighted to see that soon I would not have to leave the good ol' USA to have this experience. Travelers on the Boston T are now eligible to have identification demanded of them. And in today's New York Times we learn that I can also have my bag searched on the Boston T, again like back in Moscow. My cup runneth over.

Some people register some minor objections to ID checks of suspicious people. For instance, the first linked article above relates the story of King Downing, some ACLU-affiliated troublemaker:

An African-American, Downing came to Boston last October for -- ironically -- a racial profiling meeting. He arrived at 7 a.m. on the red-eye from Seattle, and went to use a pay phone. He was then approached by a police officer who demanded that Downing show his ID. When he refused, the officer ordered Downing to leave the airport. Since he had just arrived in town, Downing left the airport to catch a taxi. The officer followed him out of the airport, however, and again demanded ID. When Downing again refused, the officer said that Downing was under arrest and ordered backup. When surrounded by police officers -- and now late for the meeting -- Downing showed his ID and was eventually allowed to leave. His allegedly suspicious behavior? Using a pay telephone.

Oh, that's right, these Crescat folks are big on law cases. Here's the one that says that we can't be arrested just for not having ID on us. Mr. Lawson knows all about looking suspicious to ID-checking police officers: he was arrested some 15 times in less than two years' time, often for walking through the "wrong" neighborhood without ID. Better not try that on the Boston T.

The Waddling Kitchen and the New York Times dining section both have pieces on pizza-- the latter in Naples, the former in Brooklyn. As usual, I find the Waddling Kitchen essay more useful, but the Times article does have a nice quote that sums up my opinion of pineapple on pizza:

"Pizza with pineapples?" he asked. "That's a cake."

Via Eugene Volokh, Tom Franck is upset with Quidditch, the curious game of the Harry Potter books. His biggest problem-- and rightly so-- is the curiously dominant position the snitch takes. The player catching it gets 150 points and the game doesn't end until he does. Since normal goals are only worth 10 points, very very few times will the game be beyond the margin of a snitch-catch and when it is, it's sort of depressing because even catching the snitch won't help the losing team.

Of course, I understand why Rowling did it this way-- the goal is to have a game where basically nothing matters except for Harry Potter, and the other players to the extent that they can defend or attack Potter. (Not unlike the books themselves). And she wants to be able to have lots of game-winning snitch-catches, so having the games on a timer won't work.

A better solution would be:

I've been meaning to respond to this post for several days since Joe Carter was kind enough to email it to me, but it slipped my mind until now.

Mr. Carter has a post up discussing a prostitution racket by a 13-year-old girl. He hopes that this can be an illuminating point for discussing the difference between conservative and libertarian philosophies. I'm not quite sure why this prostitution racket is the best place to focus on the dividing line, since presumably conservatives and libertarians differ on the acceptability of good-old-fashioned adult prostitution. But it is an interesting case.

Thank you to Will, once again, for inviting me back to Crescat. You'll no doubt be upset to know that despite some administration assistance from yours truly, there is no secret method of adding comments to these entries. (Indeed, I checked. Even assuming they'd not changed the admin passwords, I'd have to rewrite the templates and then remove Will's admin permissions. Forget what his beloved Miss Manners would say, that would probably result in legal liability.)

Anyway, as those who have been reading at Three Years of Hell know, I'm spending my summer as an associate in a Japanese law firm, and most of my recent entries have been about my time in Tokyo. One thing immediately springs to mind: the difference in the subways between Tokyo and New York.

I was chagrined to see Professor Froomkin recycle this bit of "moral wisdom" from Kevin Drum:

Why has torture been such a hot topic since 9/11? The United States has fought many wars over the past half century, and in each of them our causes were just as important as today's, information from prisoners would have been just as helpful, and we were every bit as determined to win as we are now. But we still didn't authorize torture of prisoners. FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, Reagan—all of them knew it wasn't right, and the rest of us knew it as well.

So what's different this time? Only one thing: the name of the man in the White House. Under this administration, we seem to have lost the simple level of moral clarity that allowed our predecessors to tell right from wrong. It's time to reclaim it.

While it may be the case that prior presidents were deprived of the legal counsel of Professor Yoo et al., isn't Drum's focus awfully narrow and self-serving? If what is really at issue is the ability "to tell right from wrong" in time of war, then our present circumstances are hardly unique. When President Bush's prosecution of the War on Terror is compared to his forebearers' military campaigns in this general sense, Drum's comparison utterly falls apart.

For example, FDR may not have authorized the torture of enemy detainees, but he did demonstrate a complete indifference to the distinction between civilians and combatants by authorizing the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo. He was no saint on the home front either. His tenure saw the confinement of U.S. citizens in concentration camps on racial grounds. See generally Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944); see also Korematsu v. United States, 584 F. Supp. 1406 (N.D. Cal. 1984). In fact, the name plaintiff in that suit has drawn an explicit parallel between the current administration's conduct and his experience under President Roosevelt. See Nat Hentoff, Fred Korematsu v. George W. Bush, Village Voice, Feb. 19, 2004. And the parallels are not by any means rhetorical. The Bush administration's contention that it may try enemy combatants by military tribunal depends upon a precedent established by FDR. See Ex Parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942) (per curiam); see also Tony Mauro, The Quirin Ruling: FDR's Troubling Precedent For Bush's Terror Courts, Counterpunch, Nov. 18, 2001. Indeed, comparisons between FDR and Bush have generally become somewhat ubiquitous. See, e.g., Ric Medrow, GOP Adopts FDR's Vision For America's Place in the World, Atlantic Highlands Herald, Feb. 27, 2003.

My purpose is neither to justify the conduct of the present administration nor condemn the current president's predecessors. As I indicated during my last stint as a guest contributor at Crescat Sententia, I find wartime torture to be deeply troubling. I do not wish to minimize the moral significance of the events at Abu Ghraib or the decisions that purportedly led to those abuses. But Drum and Froomkin are incredibly mistaken in maintaining that the Bush administration's alleged wartime moral failings are unprecedented or unique.

Update(s): There have been multiple responses to this post. I'll briefly note each below.

Dresden. Interestingly, no one has made a case for attacking Dresden. But I have received a couple of e-mails arguing that it is unfair to lay this particular episode at Roosevelt's doorstep. My correspondents assert that the blame lies with the Royal Air Force, as the individual who ordered the mission in the most immediate sense was British Air Marshal Arthur Harris.

While the RAF shoulders some responsibility, I think that this lets FDR off rather easily. Accordinging to a United States Air Force Historical Division paper on the subject, which presents a far more favorable view of the operation than I have seen elsewhere, the U.S. role is undeniable:

Allied aerial operations were ultimately the responsibility of the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, though normally he delegated the immediate authority for employment of Allied air forces to his Deputy Supreme Commander, Marshal Tedder. The latter, in turn, relied upon the commanders of the RAF Bomber Command and the United States Strategic Air Forces (General Carl Spaatz, Commanding) for the actual conduct of specific strategic aerial operations. The top commanders of the Allied strategic bomber forces were required to conduct all of their operations within the framework of bombing directives laid down to them by the Combined Chiefs of Staff (the British Chiefs of Staff and the American Joint Chiefs of Staff).

The paper also presents the allied air operations as having arisen out of the consensus of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin (and their subordinates) concerning how best to bring the war to a conclusion by the summer of 1945. Both British and American (8th Air Force) air units participated in the bombing of Dresden. The paper places all or most blame for bombing of civilian populations on the British, but even if true this hardly absolves FDR given the chain of command. Surely, given our civilian command of the military, he must bear some responsibility for strategic decisions adopted or approved through Eisenhower's office.

The paper also states that, at variance from the RAF, the United States Army Air Force policy was one of precision bombing. However, the 8th Air Force Historical Society has made available online the United States European War Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report, which gives a fair indication that its U.S. bombing campaigns were less than precise. This impression is reinforced elsewhere:

USAAF leaders firmly held to the claim that they were conducting "precision" bombing of military targets for much of the war, and energetically refuted claims that they were simply bombing cities. In reality, the day bombing was "precision bombing" only in the sense that most bombs fell somewhere in or near the desired city, whereas the night bombing campaign rarely achieved even that.

This, of course, is far from the intentional targeting of civilians. But is does provide grounds for questioning the paper's assertion that U.S. forces merely engaged in precision bombing over Dresden. Neither the aforementioned Survey nor the Historical Society's website appear to mention Dresden.

I have been unable to locate reliable material on the Internet concerning President Roosevelt's personal views of the allied bombing campaign in general or Dresden in particular. If any readers have details, please do send them along.

Froomkin. Professor Froomkin has another post on the subject, in which he distances himself somewhat from Drum's apparent point and clarifies his own views:

That excesses and moral failings in wartime are not new, no reasonable person could dispute.

* * *

The first is that we are in a post-Nuremberg age. We profess and affirm a renewed and specific commitment to the rule of law even in wartime, one that labels some (but not all) excesses as war crimes, anathema. Torture falls squarely into that zone.

The second is that the norm against torture is especially well-established, and long-established, in both our domestic (cf. the Eighth Amendment) and international legal traditions, and in world-wide morality. (For a historic example, consider the post-Civil War case of Andersonville, where the mistreatment of prisoners was strongly condemned.) The prohibition is not a new post-Nuremberg idea, even if the clear deliniation of personal responsibility for adhering to the prohibitory norm may be. The attempt to justify cruel and unusual acts as legal thus is particularly hard to accept and particularly deserving of condemnation.

These are good replies. But I am not entirely certain that they are correct. Notwithstanding the Geneva Convention and other treaties, I am not convinced that torture is universally and unequivocally condemned as contrary to our morals. This article in The Atlantic gives some indication that condemnations of torture and other unsavory interrogation tactics may be somewhat aspirational in character:

The history of interrogation by U.S. armed forces and spy agencies is one of giving lip service to international agreements while vigorously using coercion whenever circumstances seem to warrant it. However, both the Army and the CIA have been frank in their publications about the use of coercive methods.

Some of the American public's reaction to Abu Ghraib would seem to indicate approval of such methods. Indeed, torture is not infrequently celebrated in American popular culture. Denzel Washington's interrogation methods in Man on Fire come to mind. (Note: I am not endorsing these views; I am merely noting that they exist.)

Muller. Professor Muller, who has probably forgotten more about Korematsu than I have ever known, has a similarly good reply:

For a moment, though, let's confine our focus to the Justice Department. In that Department we are seeing unique and unprecedented moral failings. No episode reveals this more clearly than FDR's treatment of Japanese Americans.

Under the leadership of Francis Biddle, FDR's Attorney General, the Justice Department opposed the eviction and incarceration of American citizens of Japanese ancestry. Biddle's top assistants went toe-to-toe with the War Department's top brass, and ultimately the War Department won the fight. But the Justice Department fought the plan, stated in no uncertain terms that they thought the plan illegal and unnecessary, and wanted no part in the evacuation or in the enforcement of exclusion orders that they viewed as unconstitutional. Take a look at the words of Attorney General Biddle here (you have to scroll down a little bit to the entry for Biddle).

The leadership of this Justice Department, by contrast, appears to have been only too eager to provide Defense and the President with a rationale for whatever they wanted to do.

For many of us who are lawyers, these are unique and unprecedented failings in a department that is supposed to protect the rule of law.

I have to confess that this is a particularly nice riposte. Muller manages to turn my one of my own counterexamples against me, and he does so in a fair and persuasive fashion. I don't think that his point can be lightly cast aside.

Conceding this, however, I do think that there are sound reasons for qualifying Muller's critique. First, to reiterate the point that I made in response to Professor Froomkin, it seems to me that norms concerning torture are not as well-settled as we might like to believe. When viewed in this light, I am not so certain that the conduct of DOJ lawyers is quite the betrayal that Muller perceives. With values unsettled, it is not inconceivable that the legal system could incorporate such interrogation methods. Consider, for example, the the aforementioned Atlantic article's depiction of the Israeli legal system:

The Geneva Convention makes no distinction: it bans any mistreatment of prisoners. But some nations that are otherwise committed to ending brutality have employed torture lite under what they feel are justifiable circumstances. In 1987 Israel attempted to codify a distinction between torture, which was banned, and "moderate physical pressure," which was permitted in special cases.

* * *

In 1987 a commission led by the retired Israeli Supreme Court justice Moshe Landau wrote a series of recommendations for Michael Koubi and his agents, allowing them to use "moderate physical pressure" and "nonviolent psychological pressure" in interrogating prisoners who had information that could prevent impending terror attacks. The commission sought to allow such coercion only in "ticking-bomb scenarios"—that is, in cases like the kidnapping of Jakob von Metzler, when the information withheld by the suspect could save lives.

Muller posits that lawyers—and DOJ lawyers in particular—ought to be fighting such efforts. But Professor Yoo et al. are hardly the only lawyers contemplating such methods. Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz has openly advocated torture's incorporation into the legal process, albeit in a far more controlled and limited fashion. See, e.g., The Torture Warrant: A Response to Professor Strauss, 48 N.Y.L. Sch. L. Rev. 275 (2003-04); Torture Without Visibility and Accountability Is Worse Than With It, 6 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 326 (2003).

In the end, I think that Israel's own experience counsels directly against following its lead. As the Atlantic article notes, in 1999, the Israeli high court apparently stripped such methods of their formerly legal status. However, I get the impression that many Americans, both inside and outside of the government, are willing to contemplate the prospect of using coercive interrogation methods. If such sentiments are indeed a moral failing (as Froomkin, Muller, and myself all agree), it seems to be a widely shared one.

For the curious, my final column in the Maroon, reflecting on four years at the U of C, is now online.

It's vaguely on the subject of wildlife, urban, suburban, and rural (see several of the posts below).

Does anyone know if the departments that handle the removal of roadkill from the interstates and other highways have suffered budget cuts? It seems that in the past month, I've seen more roadkill per mile than ever before. My family members, who have not spent the last four years in urban Chicago, agree with me that we've seen a lot. Granted, I've been driving through states I don't normally drive through (OH, PA, VA, NY), so perhaps there's just something different about animal-car collision rates in these states than ones I've driven through more before (LA, AR, MS, IL, TX, NM, CO, WY). But in the Rocky Mountains have lots of deer, I see far more deer, and a higher proportion are alive, so I'm leaning again to the budget rather than state explanation.

1) A few years ago, West Virginia announced that it would now be legal to take home your own roadkill. They were much mocked for this policy, but the fewer dead deer lying on those dotted lines, the better.

2) All this reminds me of one time, years ago, when my younger sister was a toddler or not much older. We were driving through Arkansas with my grandmother. My sister had some interest in roadkill, so whenever my grandmother saw an armadillo or anything, she'd point it out to my sister. But my sister wasn't very quick at spotting what my grandmother pointed out to her, so she'd miss it and get upset. My grandmother would tell her that there were lots more, and point out more roadkill, which my sister would miss seeing again. And so forth.

A bunch of people in the blogosphere are writing about the possibility that Vladimir Nabokov borrowed or stole "Lolita" from some obscure German author named Heinz von Lichberg. I saw this most recently in a guest-post at the Volokh Conspiracy, but it was covered earlier by Ed Cohn of Gnostical Turpitude, who links to several online articles about the stuff (which the Conspiracy post does not).

Nabokov is a tricky fellow . . .

One of my much-loved former professors, (who shall not be named) overheard a few minutes ago:

This is one of those times that if it were socially appropriate and not destructive I would go have a whiskey. But I guess I'm only going to have lunch . . .

I must side with Will rather than Amber when it comes to urban wildlife: just because you live in a city doesn't mean you can't see, well, rabbits (saw ten of them, chewing on grass in the main quad here, on my way home Sunday night) or deer or even peregrine falcons!

Below, Amber laments the lack of much wildlife in urban areas. I share her mixed feelings about metropoli-- there are many conveniences for the young and tight-budgeted, but one misses certain furry creatures (one of the reasons for last weekend's bramble).

But rabbits--

I, like Professor Leitzel, also set my alarm extra early to behold the transit of Venus across the sun and I, like Professor Leitzel, was also disappointed. Whenever there is an eclipse or comet or some other astronomical anomaly, I get terribly excited and cut a small round hole in a piece of paper far in advance. This morning, when no shadow was visible in my little sun image, I of course, did the thing all the newscasters told me not to - I looked directly at the sun. Besides a headache and yet unknown damage to my eyes, I came away with nothing. I had one final idea, to pop the lenses out of polarized sunglasses and shift them in a way as to filter out a significant amount of light, but alas, this idea came to me around 7:03, just minutes before the meandering planet was to be out of view. And where can you find polarized sunglasses that early in the morning? So I turned on the television and saw the pretty unremarkable image on the news, a tiny dot at the edge of a muted sun. As unremarkable as it was, I still don't regret my sacrifice of precious sleep and I know that I'll be excited for the next astronomical anomaly (I only hope that it's something that occurs when dark). For those of you who also missed observing the little spec of Venus move across the solar disc's projection path, you can behold it here.

On a more maddening note, the venerable law professor Erwin Chemerinsky is today's Constitutional Law lecturer in my bar exam study class (Bar/Bri).

He just mentioned the "seminal" case of Griswold v. Connecticut [finding a right to purchase and use contraceptives], and hoped aloud that we had no "misconceptions" about it.

You know, studying for the bar is bad enough without the horrid puns...

(If you're looking for food and sex, I've got ya covered.)

(If you're looking for food or sex, scroll on.)

After two years of living exclusively in urban areas with no meaningful access to a car, small things you once took for granted loom large. Heidi Bond remarks, on her solo blog, on the regional variations in squirrel locomotion (and has anyone ever noticed that Pepe La Pew leaps and bounds exactly like a squirrel and nothing like a skunk? What animal were those animators thinking of? But I digress). My own amusement with these tiny creatures is blown out of all proportion, and the reason is that they are one of the few examples of wildlife one sees in an urban setting. Pigeons and sparrows do not count; their plumage blends in with the concrete and dirt of the city, and they seem more at home in city than country. Rats are similar; maybe it’s the expressiveness of a squirrel’s tail that gives the impression of verve and wildness.

Living in the city brings with it innumerable benefits, but it also means that you never have the chance to walk to class on a misty morning and step quietly past the rabbits as they crop grass, curse voluminously upon stepping in an armadillo hole, or exchange stares with an opossum or raccoon. You won’t glimpse a deer moving in the field (although your suburb dwelling coworkers may encounter them more closely than they’d like and tell you all about it). The only wild things in the city are people. And perhaps squirrels.

A full solar eclipse when I was in elementary school. Comet "of the century" Kahoutek, which was to be the basis of my junior high school science project in 1974. That line-up of Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter just a few weeks ago. And now, we can add this morning's transit of the sun by Venus to the list of astronomical phenomena that I did not see.

In order not to see the rare transit, I awoke at 5:20 AM and headed to the shores of Lake Michigan, with a pair of sunglasses someone had thoughtfully left in my car six years ago. The masses of people I expected to find on the lakeshore to share in the non-sighting were largely absent -- had they identified a better method for not viewing the mini-eclipse? There were a few folks, however, who came prepared, some with homemade devices for failing to reflect the vision of the Venusian path across Sol. Others arrived with more elaborate equipment, specially designed not to observe an event that only occurs once every seven hundred and four billion years.* These people seemed to be placed in locations that would capture the attention of any supermodels who had come to the lakeside with Venus on their minds, but in the excitement had forgotten to bring along their welding goggles. At any rate, as far as I could tell, all of us managed not to see the transit.

Thanks to Will Baude and the other Crescat denizens for inviting me back for the graduation week jamboree. At my home of Vice Squad, I assiduously avoid going off-topic: at Vice Squad, its all-you-can-eat smash-face vice policy, all the time. I stuck with that rule when Crescat hosted me for a week last November, too – and now you can see why. No promises for what the rest of the week will bring, though I will try to live up to that adult billing Will bestowed upon me -- or maybe not. It's good to be back, at any rate. Thanks again.

*In truth, the transit occurs every hundred years or so -- before today, the most recent Venusian transit was in 1882 -- but we are blessed with a rapid transit repeat slated for 2012. So if you failed to fail to see today's transit, make sure to miss it next time.

Dan Drezner has a long post about Jennifer Lopez's marriage to Marc Anthony. I just want to note that -- ashamed as I am to own a Jennifer Lopez CD (I bought it in high school!), her old duet "No Me Ames" with Marc Anthony is a quite lovely and lively piece of music, and also fun for semi-Spanish speakers like myself to try to transcribe and parse out.

I'm not, however, going to follow Chris's lead with gratuitous links to pictures of Jennifer Lopez wearing her habitual deshabille. Other than the picture already on Professor Drezner's site, of course . . .

Will tries gamely to turn the topic of conversation from sex to food. I'll indulge with a recipe for a quick yet tasty breakfast:

1. Grate about a handful of cheese. Cheddar works well. Add some spices (Montreal Steak Spice works well) to the cheese.
2. Grill some frozen hashbrown potatoes in a skillet on medium for about 10 minutes, turning every few minutes to brown evenly.
3. Sprinkle cheese over hashbrowns, turning the mixture for about one minute to melt the cheese.
4. Optional: add an egg or some ham along with the cheese.
5. Serve with HP sauce.

... and speaking of games, the Tampa Bay Lightning thumped the Calgary Flames 2-1 in game 7 of the Stanley Cup final [psst — ice hockey — and no, I don't have any idea why they're playing ice hockey in Florida.]. Oh, the shame! I was so looking forward to the riots on the "Red Mile" (17th Ave) in Calgary had the Flames won.

And, just to bring this post around full-circle and thwart Will's designs, I'll end with an entirely gratuitous link to FlamesGirls.com.

From a letter sent to me 8/12/98:

Tis truth (with deference to the college)
Newspapers are the spring of knowledge,
The general source throughout the nation,
Of every modern conversation
What would the mighty people do,
If there, alas! were nothing new?

- John Holt's New York Journal, 4/19/1770

Now that the American Constitution Society is around to, um, compete co-exist with the Federalist Society, we should expect a no-holds-barred competition for the hearts, minds, and souls of law students and lawyers.

The ACS appears to have struck the first blow: they now offer a copy of the Constitution for you to download onto your iPod.

I'm not exactly sure why you'd want the Constitution on your iPod (although the thought of reading Article IV while groovin' to some music is appealing ), but the ACS wants you to have just that.

As I said when I posted this at my own blog, "I love ya, ACS, but this is a sure sign of the Apocalypse."