JuridicsUSA: Thinktank: Transition from Meese to Addington at Heritage Foundation

USA conservative thinktank and infohub The Heritage Foundation has announced the retirement of of longstanding law and government policy wonk, Edwin Meese III (formerly Attorney General USA); Meese will only "semi-" retire as he will stay on at Heritage as Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow Emeritus.  Starting February 1, 2013,  David Addington will become the new chairman of Heritage's newly-renamed Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, replacing Meese himself.  Both Meese and Addington served in government during intense political and legal debates.

20 years ago, the existence of conservative thinktanks without govt/taxpayer support (most leftwing tanks are financed one way or another by govt) was pioneered by Heritage Foundation.  Nowadays, activist agencies has risen to defend various conservative and other dissentient causes in the courts.  A list of thinktanks in America, especially where policy issues come to the fore, has been compiled by Wikipedia.  From the content of the article, the authors may be respected for at least listing a plethora of conservative and other tanks.  I've attached a good part of this list to the bottom of this blog-entry.  The list refers to "Examples" (any claim to completeness woud not ring true, and datedness, or red-lettered entries (where an online URL address was not available and may indicate that an organization has gone out of existence, or at least is no longer functional).  Examples provided are categorized by jurisdiction or scope:  Global, USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Scotland, European, Denmark, Australia.

—Lawt, refWrite Frontpage juridics newspotter, analyst, columnist

Hat Tip to Volokh Conspiracy blog of law scholars


Heritage Foundation (Jan5,2k13)

Meese to Retire as Head of Legal Center; Addington to Take on Role

January 3, 2013

Washington, D.C., Jan. 3, 2013 -- After nearly 25 years of leadership and service to The Heritage Foundation, former Attorney General Edwin Meese III today announced he is “semi-retiring.” Meese will leave his full-time position as chairman of Heritage’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, but remain onboard as the think tank’s Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow Emeritus. In this capacity, he will oversee special projects and act as an ambassador for Heritage within the conservative movement.

Effective Feb. 1, David Addington will become senior vice president for legal and judicial policy, heading the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. In this new capacity, Addington will be responsible for the Legal Center’s research and education programs. Addington currently serves as Heritage’s senior vice president and deputy chief operating officer.

“It has been an incredible honor to work with one of the greatest, most honorable men of our time,” Heritage President Edwin J. Feulner said of Meese. “His lifelong dedication to the principles of government, as established by this nation’s Founders, has helped preserve freedom, opportunity and justice in America for two generations.

“Ed Meese’s wisdom, humanity and patriotism are second to none,” Feulner added, “and I can think of no one more capable or talented to take over the reins of our Legal Center than David Addington.”

The center was renamed the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies last fall, in recognition of Meese’s contributions to the rule of law and the nation’s understanding of constitutional law.

After his announcement, Meese stated: “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my tenure with The Heritage Foundation and appreciate the opportunity to continue working with such wonderful colleagues. Heritage is an outstanding organization that remains dedicated to the principles President Reagan served so well, and David Addington is an outstanding choice to lead the Legal Center for years to come.”

Meese served as the 75^th attorney general of the United States from February 1985 to August 1988. Earlier in the Reagan administration, Meese held the position of counsellor to the president and functioned as Reagan’s chief policy adviser. Meese joined Heritage in 1988 as the think tank’s first Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow. In 2001, Meese became the founder and chairman of its Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. 

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JuridicsUSA: Constitution's role: VC colleague refutes lousey juridics out of Georgetown Law School

I don't know whether it's a new school of thawt — indeed, we see much in government in the USA today that suggests the practice for which Prof Louis Michael Seidmann of Georgetown Law School has provided a certain rationale, were it possible to consider his thawt rational or a school of thawt.  Actually, it probably belongs to something best labelled for its philosophical roots in Pragmatism or for its ethical roots in an extreme ant-consequentialism, a tendentious selection of poorly-sorted takes on what seems to him natural law and what seems to him old-fashioned due to being historical in some important sense.  He despises what seems to him to be a system of governance apparently based on decisions of dead sages whose lack of eternal sagacity is now exposed.  So, Seidman wants simply (simplistically!) ignore the written text of the Constitution in all but the parts he selects for eternal life, never once looking back a moment to consider that these also stripped of their previous connections and means of amendment may develop future problems, which when given free course to develop their own inner contradictions or antinomies unchecked by the discarded constitutional parts perhaps, woud be the law of land.  I shall call Seidman's proposal "ignorism."

— Lawt, refWrite Frontpage juridics newspotter, analyst, columnist



Volokh Conspiracy (Dec32,2k12)

Seidman: “Let’s Give Up on [Parts of] the Constitution”

Jonathan H. Adler • December 31, 2012 9:29 am

Georgetown [law scholar] Louis Michael Seidman, author of On Constitutional Disobedience has an NYT op-ed ... calling for ignoring the Constitution — or at least those parts that he does not like.

As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions. . . .

Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago. . . .

If even this change is impossible, perhaps the dream of a country ruled by “We the people” is impossibly utopian. If so, we have to give up on the claim that we are a self-governing people who can settle our disagreements through mature and tolerant debate. But before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real freedom a chance.

As commenters in the open thread have already noted, the Constitution itself provides for its own revision to cure deficiencies: Article V. This amendment process has allowed for dramatic changes to the document, from the Bill of Rights and the Civil War Amendments to women’s suffrage and changes to election procedures.

Seidman cites what he characterizes as a proud history of “constitutional disobedience” to suggest that ignoring the document would be all to the good, suggesting that the country would be better off if political disputes about everything from budgetary policy to military conflict were merely debated on the policy merits. Yet Seidman conspicuously ignores the various policy measures throughout our nation’s history that would have remained the law of the land were it not for the Constitution, including numerous restrictions on the freedom of speech and the detention policies struck down by the Court  [Supreme Court of the United States] in Boumediene.

Seidman suggests that liberal constitutional values such as the freedom of speech and religion, equal protection, and due process “are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution” and that “we should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.” But our political history shows quite clearly that the political process is more than willing to trample such principles, often with substantial popular support even with a constitutional obligation to respect. Yet the whole point of a constitution is to prevent such abuses and constrain popular majorities.

Seidman writes that if we followed his advice: “The Supreme Court could stop pretending that its decisions protecting same-sex intimacy or limiting affirmative action were rooted in constitutional text.” So supreme court opinions would be nothing more than policy briefs and appeals to moral principle? It seems to me that is a recipe for undermining the legitimacy of judicial review and ultimately relegating all such questions to the political process — and producing quite a few results I doubt Seidman would much like (e.g. greater limits on expression, lesser protection of criminal defendants, and more expansive national security authority). There are reasonable arguments for constraining (or even eliminating) judicial review — I don’t agree with them, but I think they are reasonable — but I don’t take that to be Seidman’s argument. To the contrary, he seems to want to keep judicial review, but just for those constitutional provisions he likes, but that’s hardly the basis for a principled argument for “constitutional disobedience,” as such.

Of course the constitution doesn’t settle all questions, and wouldn’t even if everyone accepted the same approach to constitutional interpretation. Our understanding of the Constitution changes over time, even if the document itself does not (other than when we amend it). Seidman is correct that a constitutional order such as ours depends upon “entrenched institutions and habits of thought and . . . the sense that we are one nation and must work out our differences.” But that does not mean that the Constitution itself serves no role, or that lessening constitutional constraints on government action is desirable or beneficial. The Constitution is not perfect — far from it. But Seidman’s op-ed does not convince me we’d be better off to disregard it.

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Categories: Constitutional Amendments, Constitutional Law, Constitutional Theory, Popular Constitutionalism     59 Comments

JuridicsUSA: Puerto Rico wants in: Does the USA have to accept it, them?

Secession has been very much bandied about since the Republicans lost the Federal elections 2012 to the Democrats under President Barah Obama.  The state of Texas hurries into my mind as an outstanding locus of state secession from the Federal union.  It's great to have some remarks at hand from a lawyer, a scholarly lawyer like Eugene Kontorovich.

— Lawt, refWrite Frontpage juridics newspotter, analyst, and columnist


Volokh Conspiracy (Nov19,2k12)

The Opposite of Secession Posted: 18 Nov 2012 01:16 PM PST (Eugene Kontorovich) While secession by U.S. states is often seen as the domain of kooks, America also has an accession movement – and a parallel succession movement that seems to have relatively significant support in its locality and is certainly not treated as kooky. One of the more significant, but less discussed questions in the last election was the question of Puerto Rican statehood. The matter was put to the island’s inhabitants; 54% of voters said “no” to an up/down question about maintaining the current territorial status. A second question asked about preferred alternatives; a clear majority favored statehood over full independence or some kind independent associative status. (The formulation and ordering of alternatives is key here, as the three alternatives introduce the possibility of intransitive collective preferences. The coming Scottish independence vote could turn on a turn of phrase.) The United Nations has long described the U.S. control of Puerto Rico as a form of colonialism, and demanded that the island’s inhabitants be allowed to exercise their rights to sovereignty and self-determination. (Americans tend to laugh off such decisions, but it is a fairly typical exercise at Turtle Bay.) The Puerto Rican vote raises many interesting questions about accession. First, is a simple majority enough to determine the will of the Puerto Ricans on this matter? Here, the rules of secession are important for determining the rules of accession. Normally, a simple majority, or even a plurality, is good enough for most democratic decisions. However, if those decisions become automatically entrenched (require a supermajority to reverse), they should and generally do require a supermajority to enter as well If succession is illegal, as Eugene and the Supreme Court have suggested (a matter I will question in subsequent posts), joining the Union as a state is an almost irrevocable decision. It is more permanent than a Catholic marriage or the national debt. Even a supermajority vote by the would-be succeeding state would presumably not be enough to terminate the relationship – not even a unanimous vote. Decisions of such permanence should require a significant supermajority. On the flip side, were succession possible, the rule should be easy come, easy go. Even if Puerto Rico wanted statehood, would the U.S. be obligated to grant it? The political philosophy of the Constitution is manifestly not pure democracy – witness the electoral college. Yet democracy is surely part of our political values. The situation of territories is different from the District of Columbia, which the Constitution specifically contemplates to be a non-state. The Constitution also permits territories without representation, yet they are quite different from the federal district: they can be numerous and of indefinite size and population, while the District is a small area located between two states. Thus D.C. is a small exception to democratic principles, territories a broader one. This is why the Constitution implicitly treats territorial status as a temporary, transitory state. Accepting Puerto Rico as a state would have obvious electoral consequences, and the Republicans would be well within their rights to resist it, as would any state concerned about the dilution of its votes. There is no requirement on the U.S. to accede to a territory’s statehood wishes. Yet if the majority of Puerto Ricans do not want to be governed as a territory, it becomes a bit embarrassing for the U.S. to perpetuate this form of government. Thus the remaining option is one that may not have majority support anywhere, independence. Depending on how things go over the next few years, perhaps Puerto Rico could join Catalonia, Scotland, Kosovo (but not the Serb region thereof), Kurdistan, Other Kurdistan, South Sudan and Flanders in the Association of Newly Seceded States. I wish them much seccess.