Impressive

Ra’id Juhi Hamadi al-Saedi (Judge Juhi) came to GW today to speak about the Iraqi High Tribunal, on which he was the chief investigative judge. Here are some things that struck me.

1. People were shocked hearing about some of the mass graves that were found. As usual, the media here hasn’t highlighted the good that coalition forces have done by removing a violent dictator. Also, he told some compelling stories about how much people wanted vengeance on Saddam. I think some of the students were imagining themselves as being citizens of pre-liberation Iraq, and how horrible that must have been.

2. The larger issue with these mass graves was that due to security concerns, a small city had to be built around the sites. Each city cost 5 Million dollars. This was largely US funded. Out of 250 mass grave sites, I think they excavated and investigated 5. Each of these had to be evidentially linked to Saddam in order for them to be damning.

3. He highlighted the enormity of the trial. 21 tons of documents had to be sifted through.

4. Over the past 100 years, there had been several regime changes in Iraq, normally executed (pun intended) by killing the royal family. The legal community felt that it was IMPERATIVE that the trial of Saddam be done with due process, in order to highlight the legitimacy of the new government, and to create a clear distinction between the new government and older legitimate regimes. It was an attempt to step into the modern world.

5. The reason an International War Crimes Court wasn’t set up (like in Kosovo) was because of the U.N. Security Counsel. 3 of the 5 members didn’t support the war, and made it impossible to create the court. As a result, Iraq ended up hiring independent international experts, equal for the prosecution and defense, in order to establish a legitimate domestic trial.

6. This brand new judicial system was created out of FIRE. It’s not as though they had hundreds of years of legal precedent to fall back on. The first real trial of this legal system was not on some insignificant legal incident to help work the kinks out. The first trial was of a King. He stressed that if they had messed it up, the legal system would never have recovered.

This dude’s coming to GW to speak tomorrow:

This is the dude that effectively nailed Saddam.

Ra’id Juhi Hamadi al-Saedi (Judge Juhi) served from 2004 to 2006 as chief investigative judge of the Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT). During that time, he supervised all cases before the tribunal and indicted Saddam Hussein and seven others for crimes against humanity perpetrated against the citizens of Ad-Dujayl. Juhi also indicted Saddam Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid al-Tikriti (“Chemical Ali”) for genocide arising out of the massacre of over 100,000 Kurds from 1987-1988. During the trial of Saddam Hussein, Juhi served as the court’s spokesperson, handled all press queries, and frequently appeared before Western and Arabic media. Juhi also negotiated the IHT’s rules of evidence and procedure which were ultimately adopted and used in all proceedings. Previously, Juhi investigated and indicted radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr for the murder of cleric Abdul Majid Al-Khoei, which occurred in 2003 outside one of Shiite Islam’s holiest sites, the Shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, Iraq. Juhi is a graduate of Iraq’s Judicial Institute and served as a family court judge and criminal investigative judge under Saddam Hussein. He left Iraq in May 2007 and joined Cornell University’s Law School as a Clarke Middle Eastern Fellow.

I’ll be posting my thoughts after.

Hunt me some grey wolf with a side of grizzley

Veto – In response to our Endangered Species Act Memo:

“Man, all this reading about the Endangered Species Act makes me want to go out and hunt me some endangered grey wolf with a side of grizzley.”

I’m starting to think the overall liberal flair of law school is making some people see the stupidity of it.

The Last Stand

Let me give you the state of the race today. We have 22 days to go. We’re 6 points down. The national media has written us off. Senator Obama is measuring the drapes, and planning with Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid to raise taxes, increase spending, take away your right to vote by secret ballot in labor elections, and concede defeat in Iraq. But they forgot to let you decide. My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.

What America needs in this hour is a fighter; someone who puts all his cards on the table and trusts the judgment of the American people. I come from a long line of McCains who believed that to love America is to fight for her. I have fought for you most of my life. There are other ways to love this country, but I’ve never been the kind to do it from the sidelines.”

Where to start?

1. I’m a conservative. I want McCain to win, based upon my value system, and the fact that things around me are already far too liberal. It makes me want to go kick a puppy or something, and assert my right-wingedness.

2. I’m a realist, I don’t think that McCain will win. Obama has had the media sucking from the teat of the most attractive candidate since JFK. Mainstream media is decidedly against McCain, and since they control the information that the public see, there’s little hope.

3. I admire McCain for all that he’s done. Being a fellow Naval Academy grad, that’s enough for me to respect him. I’m not one to underestimate anyone, but I doubt Obama would have lasted the first week of Plebe summer, not to mention Dark Tuesday. The Golden Boy would have found out that he’s not so golden at all, at least for a few years (if he made it). Then he probably would have been made into the poster child of the Navy.

4. A friend of mine has been insisting to me that McCain’s time being tortured is not relevant to his qualifications as President. Does this make someone automatically qualified? Nope, the years of senior Senatorial work helps. But to suggest the fact that the man turned down release, knowing that he would be brutally tortured even more lends him some credibility in my eyes. Anyone who thinks otherwise just simply isn’t worth my time, because they’ll never get it.

5. This is undoubtedly “The Last Stand”.  Regrettably, this is as determined as I’ve ever seen the media to quash it. To me, it’ll be one of the great mysteries of my life how someone with so little practical experience leading or in government, with such disturbing historical ties, and with such extremist views (Universal healthcare + income redistribution EQUALS communism; It’s that simple. Open your eyes.) will be elected over a literally battle hardened, experienced leader, who just might be able to bring us back to the free-market days that we were founded on. Americans have proven just how stupid they really are. He’s handsome, and he has a rich baritone voice. He makes me get all tingly. He’s got my vote.  Look at McCain.  He’s old and crinkly.  Gross.

*note – to all you liberals out there who really think all that stuff (the communism stuff, that is) is a good idea… well… that’s up to you I suppose. All that I ask is that you don’t vote for someone because you’re infatuated with him, which is what most of my generation has become.

MC Hammer

By far, one of the awesomest (though Firefox informs me that’s not a word… it clearly should be) commercials ever.

LRW

It’s occured to me that I really hate this class. Let’s make a brief annotated outline.

ICW. I hate you.

Memo. I hate you

ICW. Why do you keep getting harder?

Memo. You mean I actually have to do my own research?

ICW. Why are you do at noon? Don’t you know that’s 3AM for me?

Memo. Why am I going to be trying to bring a charge against someone who killed an endangered species by ricochet?

The better question. Why the hell am I trying to work the night shift AND go to law school?

The only thing that’s making me slightly less than pissed off right now:

Subterranean

Is where my morale is right now.  It strikes me that street lamps must be really lonely.

Extremists

Taken in full from The Volokh Conspiracy, and author David Bernstein. For those of you who don’t know, the Volokh Conspiracy is a largely libertarian/conservative blog, with some very notable contributors.

More on Obama as a Product of a Particular Liberal Culture:

On Saturday, I wrote that Obama’s ties to Ayers and Wright, and his apparent lack of self-consciousness about these ties and how they might affect his political career, “suggest to me NOT that Obama agrees with their views, but that he is the product of a particular intellectual culture that finds the likes of Wright and Ayers to be no more objectionable, and likely less so, than the likes of Tom Coburn, or, perhaps, a Rush Limbaugh.”

Some readers might be a bit mystified as to what I was getting at. Well, consider Obama’s years at Harvard Law. I attended Yale Law School the same years that Obama attended Harvard, and I had friends at Harvard, so I have some idea about the general intellectual culture that the institution (which was not dissimilar to Yale’s culture).

That culture considered extreme leftists (known as “progressives”) to be within mainstream political discourse, but run-of-the-mill conservatives (known as “reactionaries”) to be, at best, on the fringe. Consider that conservative lawyer and Obama Harvard Law classmate Brad Berenson praised Obama as president of the Harvard Law Review because “Whatever his politics, we felt he would give us a fair shake”. Are there many places in America where mainstream conservatives like Berenson have had to worry about being treated fairly because of their politics, and where a “boss” will get praise simply for not treating them like pariahs? But Obama won support and praise simply for giving conservatives a “fair shake,” with no question that people on the extreme left were entitled to such treatment.

Now consider Obama’s answer when asked at a debate about Ayers:

“George, but this is an example of what I’m talking about. This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense, George. The fact is that I’m also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, who, during his campaign, once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried out abortions.”

So, it seems that in Obama’s mind, he’s an open-minded guy because he’s as willing to be friends with a law-abiding conservative Republican senator as with an extreme leftist unrepentant former domestic terrorist–just as he was considered open-minded at Harvard for treating a mainstream conservative Berenson as a non-pariah. It is this attitude that is a reflection of the political culture of elite liberal east coast schools, and liberal univeristy ghettos such as Hyde Park, and is also reflected in Obama’s infamous “clinging to guns and religion” remark.

Being in the academy myself, I know many people who share Obama’s outlook, or who are even more left-wing. Many of them are fine individuals, write thoughtful and interesting scholarship, are a pleasure to engage with in conversation, and respect my work and my ideas, even if they think some of my views are rather loony. Like them, Obama may very well be a fine, thoughtful, individual, willing to engage with people and ideas despite his natural instinct to recoil. But that doesn’t mean I’d want to be governed by them, or him, and Obama’s 100% liberal voting record in the Senate is likely a far better indication of his underlying ideology than his willingness to be polite to Berenson and Coburn.

My commentary:

First of all, I’m a frequent visitor of the blog over at the Conspiracy, and I think that anyone who’s interested in law or politics should be too. The level of thought occuring over there is might higher than in the normal newspaper, and the things that are reported are things that have substance. They may report on something random, but it’s important because there will be a trial about it that might significantly change established law.

Now, on to Obama. Now I haven’t gone to Harvard or Yale, but I am at a top 20 law school in (roughly) the North East region. What’s the political climate like, might you ask? The climate is such that extreme liberals are considered the “far” (but not extreme) left. Conservatives are seen as… wait, we have conservatives at this school? Clearly, all socially and intellectually elite people are liberals! So essentially, I find Mr. Bernstein’s thoughts accurate. It’s like the political spectrum has been shifted a standard deviation to the left. Moderates are seen as conservatives. Conservatives are generally stared at like they don’t belong, and in disbelief that they could be such heartless bastards.

Artistic Renditions

One night at Quigley’s a few of us got bored and started drawing famous judges.  Below is Brennan, smoking weed, and stomping on the Constitution (Framers Intent)

This is Justice Scalia, or Peter Griffen depending on the lighting.

The coup de grace of the night was Judge Learned Hand (best name ever).

Two Way Mirrors

Tonight in class we discussed a case in which a couple sued their landlord because the landlord was using two way mirrors to watch them getting jiggy with it.

The husband (A citizen of France) was allocated 5k in damages.

The wife was allocated 15k in damages.

Why the 10k difference between the damages given to the husband by the land lord and the damages given to the wife???

My professor decided to put it to the class as to possible explanations.  The class responded in turn with these suggestions:

1. Because he was French.

2. Because his performance wasn’t as good as hers.

3. She was a porn star and claiming loss of revenue.

4. Proving that the landlord saw the woman naked more.

5. She spent more time in her house, and then by extension (according to the professor), nude.

6. She’s MY wife tarzan syndrome. It was a secondary injury to the husband that he was seen naked.

7. Females have more genetalia. 3, to 1. The damages were 3 to 1. Coincidence?

I love Section 21!!!