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Legal Eye for the Homicidal Guy
Last Thursday was game day in CrimLaw. I guess after a couple weeks of intense discussion about rape,* ProfCrim thought it would be good to lighten the mood with a little game about homicide. Yeah, that's just the kind of class it is.
In a well-planned exercise, ProfCrim handed everyone in the front row a poster describing a different crime. A few of the posters read as follows:
- My boyfriend tried to have sex w/me after I said no and I killed him.
- I drove home after drinking and killed a girl.
- I'm a police officer and I shot a burglary suspect in the back.
- I'm a hit person for the mob and for big bucks I killed one of the Sopranos.
- A guy called me a crossdresser and I killed him.
- I greased my son's steering wheel like I saw on Jackass and he had an accident and died.
- My dear mother asked me to kill her when her Alzheimer's made her a vegetable and I did.
Out of a class of approx. 100, no one agreed w/the way the student ranked the crimes, showing what a difficult task such ranking really is, and what a big job lawyers and judges and legislators have in making distinctions between different types of killing. But speaking of killing, I continue to be surprised at how willing people seem to be to use the death penalty. Some of them seem wholly ignorant of the growing opposition to the death penalty (also here). My peers never cease to amaze me.
In other law school news, this weekend I finally spent the weekend studying like a real student. We turned in our first legal memo last week, and our next assignment has already begun. The issue: Whether our client is eligible and likely to be granted asylum in the U.S. I spent hours researching asylum law, but unfortunately most of that time was spent fighting with the online legal research services I love so much. At first glance, I prefer Westlaw because it's just easier for me to find things there, but for some reason Westlaw crashes Safari like nobody's business. So I had to turn to Lexis, where it's much more cumbersome to search in different databases. Is it even possible to search multiple databases at the same time via Lexis?
On the plus side, I discovered DEVONthink ("Your supplementary brain!") is a great legal research tool. Whenever I find something on Lexis that seems relevant to my topic, I just highlight, hit shift-command-0, and bang! that bit is copied into my DT database and automatically filed in the appropriate category (that's the gee-whiz cool part).
On the whole, I gained a new appreciation for legal research this weekend. There are a lot of cases out there, and it's no small or easy task to decide which are the best ones to apply to your case. Speaking of which, I've got an annotated outline to work on. Happy Monday, everyone!
* L-cubed has a nice little note about whether "no" means "no" (yes, it does), with links to opinions from Greg Easterbrook and Dahlia Lithwick.
Posted 06:45 AM | law school
Quick Campaign Update
The Kerry and Gephardt campaigns are ganging up on Dean.
Wesley Clark's campaign is having growing pains, and that's putting it nicely. Jim Moore has been tracking this well, and he's also got some great thoughts and a link on what the Dean campaign could still do better.
Posted 05:16 AM | election 2004
Lying About War: A Strict Liability Offense
So far in Torts we've covered intentional torts (i.e.: assault and battery), and whether liability for unintentional torts should be decided on the basis of negligence or strict liability. The question is: Should we make people pay for damages they cause to others only if those damages were the result of their negligence, or should we make them pay no matter what (strict liability)?
I thought of this distinction yesterday morning when I caught an interview w/John Kerry on ABC's "This Week" (the one hosted by former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos). George Will was grilling Kerry on wether he'd agree w/Ted Kennedy that the most recent war against Iraq was a "fraud" "made up in Texas." Will wanted to pin Kerry down on this; he was trying to argue that calling the war a "fraud" goes beyond the question of whether Bush and Co. mislead the world about the need to go to war. I believe the way Will put it was "fraud goes to intention." So Will was essentially asking Kerry to say whether Kerry thought Bush and Co.'s intentions in going to war were fraudulent. Kerry would neither say yes or no, only that he's said clearly that he believes the President mislead the world.
And that's the bottom line: Lying to start a war is (or should be) a strict liability offense. Bush did it, now he should have to pay—by being voted out in Nov. 2004, and by having his legislative and social agenda shut down for lack of support until then.
Our legal system decided long ago that when you do something that's inherently dangerous to others, no amount of care or good intentions on your part will place you beyond accountability for your actions. When you keep an animal known to be "accustomed to biting mankind," it doesn't matter how careful you are in keeping the animal locked up; if it bites someone, you're liable and must pay for damages. When you set off explosions—as when blasting a highway tunnel, for example—it doesn't matter how careful you are in blowing the charges; if someone is injured or someone else's property is damaged by your blasting, you must pay.
Lying to get us into war is an inherently dangerous activity. By definition, it threatens the lives of every American service person, and it inevitably threatens the health of the nation (via loss of standing with the rest of the world, for example, not to mention the budget and other problems it causes). Therefore, Bush and his entire administration must pay for what they've done. We, the American people, should make them pay by withdrawing any faith we formerly had in them, by distrusting every single thing they say, and by demanding that our legislators stop supporting their failed policies.
Sure, it would be nice to understand what Bush and Co. were thinking in starting the war. Did they really think Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat? Had they drunk their own kool-aid? Maybe, the fact that Woflowitz and Pearle had been planning this war for a decade makes that seem pretty far-fetched. Did Bush and Co. really think they could waltz into Iraq, take over the oil production, and start reaping the windfall w/out any trouble? Maybe, but again, that seems pretty unlikely. Did Bush and Co. see a war against Iraq as a brilliant way to funnel what was once the largest budget surplus in history away from the public and into the hands of private corporations like Halliburton? Again, it's hard to say, but this seems the most likely explanation, since this is, in fact, what happened. (And why would Bush and Co. want to push the U.S. government closer to bankruptcy? Well, gee, Bush and Co. have always hated the "social safety net" of so-called government entitlements like social security, medicare, etc. And what better way to get rid of them than to simply say, "oops, sorry, we don't have any money to pay for them"?)
Frontline has a big special report on the possible reasons we went to war and what went wrong. However, Bush and Co's intentions in going to war will be something for history to determine. What matters now is that they lied, and for that they're strictly liable.
Posted 05:05 AM | election 2004 general politics
