Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Law school roiled by appointment

An interesting debate has broken out at the University of Minnesota Law School over the hiring of a professor named Robert Delahunty, as reported and analyzed by David Bernstein on The Volokh Conspiracy. Delahunty, as a lawyer for the Bush administration, was the co-author with David Yoo with a well-known leaked memo in which they concluded that "neither the federal War Crimes Act nor the Geneva Conventions would apply to the detention conditions in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or to trial by military commission of al Qaeda or Taliban prisoners." The memo also argued that US soldiers in Afghanistan were not bound by international law regarding war crimes. The administration went on to officially adopt both positions.

Faculty members have written an open letter protesting Delahunty's hiring, which is provided as a PDF in the Volokh post. It's a little dyspeptic -- "We can only assume that the Law School would not have hired Enron officials to teach accounting to our students." -- but it's an interesting document. The nine professors posit, quoting an article in the American Journal of International Law, that government lawyers are in a somewhat unique position; they are not just advocates for their bosses but are in fact responsible for the results of those arguments:

[Due to the deference of courts to administration arguments,] there may be no 'safety net' other than these attorneys' own competence, care, integrity, and good faith; it is only these professional qualities that protct against legal advice or advocacy that might undermine the national interest in respect for law....

I'm not entirely persuaded, as it seems to me that a lawyer is a lawyer, and is not the same as the elected official they happen to work for, but the professors' letter is still worth reading, as is Bernstein's particularly unsympathetic post.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:35 PM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss