The Extrajudicial Killing of Anwar al-Awlaki

On Friday, September 30, 2011, Anwar al-Awlaki (Aulaqi), a U.S. citizen and well-known al-Qaeda figure, was targeted and killed during a U.S. drone strike in Yemen. Samir Khan, also a U.S. citizen, was killed in the same attack. Khan was the editor of Inspire, an English-Language al-Qaeda magazine that, among other things, publishes how-to articles designed to help terrorists build bombs for jihadist attacks against Americans.  Awlaki was perhaps best known in the U.S. for planning the failed underwear bombing of a commercial airliner over Detroit in 2009 (the alleged bomber’s criminal jury trial is currently underway), and for helping plan the 2009 massacre at Fort Hood.

Al-Awlaki’s assassination continues to draw heavy criticism both in the U.S. and abroad because he is believed to be the first U.S. citizen targeted and killed by the executive branch of the federal government without regard for Fifth Amendment due process.  Ron Paul published an op-ed in the New York Daily News expressing his outrage at al-Awlaki’s execution.  Paul, in response to what he calls the illegal murder of a U.S. citizen, is calling for President Obama’s impeachment.

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Not a Pretty Picture: Potential Challenges to Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law

In August 2011, The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin publicly announced its intention to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the new Wisconsin Voter ID law. While no complaint has been filed as of date, and it is undoubtedly foolish predict the likelihood of success of any lawsuit without first reading the complaint, one would expect the promised lawsuit to face a hostile reception in the courts. This statement does not mean that the Wisconsin Voter ID law reflects good public policy. Many people believe that it does not. Nor does the above statement mean that the existing judicial precedent focusing on state voter ID laws does a particularly credible job at analyzing the constitutional issues raised by this type of legislation. Many will argue that the existing precedent is flawed. However, the current legal landscape is what it is, and the fact remains that any future legal challenge by the League of Women Voters seems unlikely to succeed.

A. The Right to Vote Under the U.S. Constitution

The text of the United States Constitution does not expressly guarantee the right to vote. Nonetheless, in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections the United States Supreme Court ruled that the right to vote in state elections is a fundamental right protected by the Equal Protection clause of the United States Constitution. A large body of precedent has reaffirmed the primacy of the right to vote under our constitutional structure, holding that the ability to vote cannot be arbitrarily abridged or denied to groups of otherwise legitimate voters.

Notwithstanding the recognition that the right to vote is fundamental, the United States Supreme Court has declined to apply strict scrutiny to all election regulations which place some minor, even-handed burden on the ability to cast a ballot.

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One Public Domain to Rule Them All

The Supreme Court heard oral argument this morning in Golan v. Holder, which considers the constitutionality of Section 104A of the Copyright Act, added in 1994 by the obfuscatorily named Uruguay Round Agreements Act. The constitutional issue is whether Congress can, consistent with the Copyright Clause and the First Amendment, remove works from the public domain by “restoring” copyrights to works that had either expired or failed to vest due to a failure to comply with technical requirements.

If that sounds a bit abstruse, here’s the issue put more concretely: can Congress restore the United States copyright to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy? Or once a work is in the public domain, for whatever reason, is it there irretrievably? The first volume of The Lord of the Rings was published in the United States in 1954 with a paltry 1,500 copies; even though the Hobbit had done well, Tolkien’s publishers did not anticipate what a blockbuster success The Lord of the Rings would be. As a result, the copies soon sold out, and instead of running another U.S. printing, Houghton Mifflin, Tolkien’s U.S. publisher, imported more copies from the UK to fill demand. But apparently Houghton Mifflin screwed up, because they accidentally imported too many: U.S. copyright law at the time contained a protectionist “manufacturing requirement” for books, requiring books sold in the United States to be printed in the United States, with only limited exceptions. A paperback publisher discovered the error in 1965 and printed 150,000 copies of the trilogy without paying any royalties to Tolkien or his publishers.

The Lord of the Rings is just one example of foreign copyright owners getting tripped up by U.S. copyright formalities.

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