“Happy Anniversary! On to the dedication”

Happy Anniversary! On to the dedicationSo read the sign this morning on my front lawn, surrounded by some 14 shovels. The reference, of course, is to Ray and Kay Eckstein Hall, the $85 million new law facility on which Marquette University broke ground a year ago today and which is scheduled to open in summer 2010. The groundbreaking was a memorable event, with more than 800 individuals attending and each being given a shovel to help dig. We intended by this democratic gesture—not just the president, dean, and major donors, but everyone wielding a shovel—to signify that Eckstein Hall will be a resource for the entire community. The speeches by Chief Justice Shirley S. Abrahamson, Seventh Circuit Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook, and Trustee Natalie A. Black, along with Father Wild as president, added to the occasion, not least because of their crispness. While the groundbreaking event is preserved in a sense in the pages of the Marquette Law Review, the focus over the past year has been on the construction and the coming building. Professor Michael McChrystal’s interview in Marquette Lawyer and April blog post concerning the building should give some sense as to why we expect that this will be the best law school building in the country. The Law School’s webpage devoted to the building project contains further information, including a time-lapse video that shows the progress over the past 365 days. All is well, except for the fact that I do not know who put those things on my front lawn this morning.

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Seventh Circuit Criminal Case of the Week

By the default, the title “Case of the Week” must go to the only new opinion of the week: United States v. Gooden (No. 08-3240).  And even Gooden only barely qualifies, as the opinion is merely a slightly amended version of an earlier opinion in the case (noted in my post here).  The only difference I can see in the amended opinion is a clarification that the notice requirements of Rule 32(h) do not apply to post-Booker variances per the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Irizarry v. United States, 128 S. Ct. 2198 (2008).

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Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

 

“Our four weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to…Justice?” Cardinal Ximénez, put aside the [dish-drying] rack and the Comfy Chair. Torture should be thrown into the ash heap of history. Spanish Inquisitors have devised a more clever means to punish the errant: universal jurisdiction.

With apologies to Monty Python, and with no intention of being too flip with a grave topic, I was struck when I heard this story on NPR’s Morning Edition on the drive to work. To quote,

Spain’s National Court operates under the principle of universal jurisdiction. As a result of a 2005 ruling by the Constitutional Court, the National Court must investigate allegations of crimes like torture and terrorism in another country if no legal action is being taken there.

Now, the court’s docket contains more than a dozen cases in countries including China, Morocco, Israel and the United States.

Thus, in March of this year, a Spanish magistrate on the National Court, Judge Baltasar Garzon “started an investigation into allegations that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five other Bush administration lawyers gave legal justification for torture at Guantanamo.” The BBC reports that “Mr. Garzon is one of six investigating judges for Spain’s National Court which, like many other European countries, operates an inquisitorial system, as opposed to the adversarial system used by the US and UK.  The investigating judge’s role is to examine the cases assigned to him by the court, gathering evidence and evaluating whether the case should be brought to trial. He does not try the cases himself.”

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