Deborah Pearlstein

When the Senate rejected President Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court close to 20 years ago, a half-dozen books and numerous articles were written marking the nomination as a watershed in Supreme Court politics. Opponents of the nominee mobilized more aggressively, more successfully, and in a more organized way than […]

Addressing an audience of academic and business leaders in New York City earlier this month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff emphasized the importance of risk-management principles in designing an effective approach to minimizing the threat of terrorism. “In business,” Chertoff said, “[y]ou weigh the risks of a particular action, you conduct a cost-benefit […]

The Supreme Court’s growing docket of cases involving international law seems to have left both Congress and the White House with a bad case of the shakes. Between Senator John Cornyn’s proposed resolution last month stating that judicial consideration of foreign judgments “threatens the sovereignty of the United States,” and the Justice Department’s scramble before […]

Almost a year since the first photos of torture from Abu Ghraib appeared, there remains a steady stream of new documents out of Afghanistan and Iraq revealing an ever-larger number of detainees brutalized in U.S. custody. One might have imagined that evidence of such a systemic problem in U.S. detention and interrogation operations (roundly condemned […]

While the Bush administration contemplates long-term options for detaining the 500 or so foreign nationals still held at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, it might do well to take a look at the Supreme Court’s technical decision last week involving the government’s power to detain in the United States those non-citizens whose home […]

While the administration has hurried to interpret George W. Bush’s re-election as a ratification of his political approach to the war on terrorism, the president’s legal approach to that effort has so far suffered a rather thorough repudiation in the courts and in the court of public opinion. With the decision on November 8 by […]

With most of the nation’s eyes on a tight presidential race heading into its final days, it is hardly surprising that the growing allegations of torture and abuse of detainees carried out by U.S. authorities have largely fallen off the political radar screen. Neither campaign has much interest in saying anything that could be seen […]

When the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on April 28 in the cases of detained U.S. citizens Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement how the Court could be sure that government interrogators were not torturing the detainees. Clement was indignant. You just have to “trust […]