The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times

Wizard Law

As The BLT noted earlier, the adventures of boy wizard Harry Potter have sparked legal scholarship. Now in today's paper, Andrew Fois, in his commentary "Due Process for All Wizards," analyzes the law within the Potter universe.

Fois finds that government, as imagined by J.K. Rowling, is monolithic, totalitarian, and bureaucratic and that the law is "dysfunctional, without any semblance of due process and unconcerned with correct outcomes." As a result, Harry and his friends resort to self-help and embrace situational ethics.

Apparently, even with all their magical powers, the wizards and witches could still use some good lawyers.

The Law of Potter

The BLT has previously noted that legal scholars have analyzed the world of Harry Potter. For the curious, a quick reference to some law-review articles:

• Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy: Benjamin Barton of the University of Tennessee finds that Rowling's wizard world is governed by bureaucracy -- and a very bad bureaucracy at that.

• Harry Potter and the Unforgivable Curses: Aaron Schwabach of Thomas Jefferson School of Law analyzes three curses (pain, control, and death) and the inconsistencies in their legal treatment.

* Harry Potter and the Law: Nine authors analyze various issues, including the law of house elves.

* Plus: Harry Potter and the law of agency, Harry Potter and copyright law, and Harry Potter and tax accounting myths.

Harry Potter and the Magical Contract Dispute

The new - and last - Harry Potter book flies onto shelves this weekend, and lawyers aren't immune to its spell.

It's probably because they're so interested in the legal issues raised in the books. Legal scholars have speculated on the intriguing copyright issues raised by pictures of subjects that can move in and out of the frame (a paper done at Georgetown University's law school). They've also questioned whether a house-elf can, indeed, be accidentally released from indentured servitude if its master didn't intend to do so (we're talking to you, Lucius Malfoy - call your lawyer).

And who the heck elected Cornelius Fudge as Minister of Magic anyway? Recount, indeed.

Even a 2002 criminal law exam at American University Washington College of Law tossed in a gratuitous Harry Potter mention.

Questions? One of the few remaining Muggle souls who doesn't know what we're talking about? Call the Wizengamot.

Memorial Day Book Fest

Maybe reading legal literature isn’t the most thrilling way to spend Memorial Day weekend. The beach, some barbecue, a little family fun time, or even holding out for the new Hillary Clinton bios might seem more on point. But for the rabid reader facing a long weekend, here are a few new releases:

God on Trial: Dispatches From America’s Religious Battlefields, by Peter Irons.

Architect of Justice: Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism, by Dalia Tsuk Mitchell.

Young J. Edgar Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties, by Kenneth Ackerman. (Not in stores until June 2.)

Bombs Away

Put down the briefcase. Pry the BlackBerry from your fingers, and take a second to muse over art, culture, and, um, … nuclear proliferation. At Politics and Prose yesterday evening, William Langewiesche, the international editor for Vanity Fair and the former national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, read from his new book, Atomic Bazaar, and fielded questions about the rise of nuclear-armed third world countries.

Langewiesche discussed the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, A.Q. Khan, stateless terrorists groups with nuclear weapons, and Iran developing an arsenal that could conceivably make Robert Oppenheimer’s head spin. The good news, according to Langewiesche, is that the new generations of atomic states will almost certainly not use these weapons of mass destruction. Comforting, no?

The Book Flap

The idea seemed like a fine way to make a name for themselves. "No existing book or edited volume captures this most important and exciting legal debate of the decade," the two D.C. Circuit clerks wrote in their proposal for The Detention Debate: Habeas Corpus and the War on Terror.

But the plan has only called unwanted attention to the two men, Derek Smith and Blaine Evanson, who were forced to drop their book proposal this week after allegations that their involvement posed a conflict of interest with their jobs.

The problems arose when their proposal, which was emailed to constitutional scholars across the country, surfaced on a blog. University of Miami professor Steve Vladeck raised questions about how this affected their work as clerks for a Judge A. Raymond Randolph. Randolph, of course, not only authored the most recent decision about the Guantanamo detainees, Boumediene v. Bush, but was also the scribe for two cases already overturned by the Supreme Court, Rasul v. Bush and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

It was a connection the two clerks flaunted, noting that the they brought a "unique perspective" to edit submissions because "they have spent a year in the legal trenches" as clerks on the D.C. Circuit "during a year that saw several landmark detention decisions likely to end up before the Supreme Court."

But the two men forgot one key thing: to tell (or, rather, to ask permission from) their judge. That is until after the comments began surfacing in the blogosphere.

The men referred comments to Randolph who said in an interview, "They messed up and I have instructed them to withdraw it."

Asked whether he thought the proposal created a conflict of interest, Randolph replied, "The most I’ll say is maybe there is a technical way to defend it, but it doesn’t comport to my standards."

Randolph, who has a total of four clerks, would not say whether the men had been assigned to any of the Guantanamo cases, but said Smith and Baines will finish out their year-long clerkship with him.

Bookmark These

Just in time for your weekend bookstore browsing pleasure, here’s a short list of some recently released and upcoming books aimed at the legal set. They’ll make you sound smart at the next dinner party or at the very least look good on the coffee table. Some of them are out now, but a couple won’t be out until later this month.

Gerard N. Magliocca, an associate law professor at Indiana University-Indianapolis, has penned a book of “intriguing parallels” between Andrew Jackson and George W. Bush. Talk about executive power. Andrew Jackson and the Constitution: The Rise and Fall of Generational Regimes looks at what happens when the political ideas and constitutional interpretations of one generation are replaced by those of another. It was released April 2.

Set to be released on Monday is Geoffrey Stone’s newest, War and Liberty. It’s being described as a “popularization” of his tome, “Perilous Times,” the book that looked at the conflicts between civil liberties and national security in wartime. That book won Stone a number of awards and increased his talking head profile.

And you’ll have to wait until April 23 to get a copy of Power and the Idealists by Paul Berman, an expansion of a New Republic essay that he wrote in late summer 2001 called “The Passion of Joschka Fischer.” (Fisher was the 1968 radical who became Germany’s foreign minister.) That essay so impressed former President Bill Clinton that he allegedly stayed up all night reading it. Yay, insomniacs.

Tort Wars

Whether you’re a tort reformer or the opposite (a tort lover?), you might want to mosey over to Olsson’s Books at Dupont Circle (1307 19th St. NW) on Wednesday March 14 at 7 pm. Stephanie Mencimer, a Legal Times alumna (among other distinctions), will be discussing and signing her powerful new book, “Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue.” The book deconstructs some of the poster children of the tort reform movement, including the scalding McDonald’s coffee case. And as the title suggests, she charts the interlocking political and corporate forces fueling the campaign. Legal Times reviewed the book in December.

Who's the Boss?

Buried in the New York Times today was Supreme Court doyenne Linda Greenhouse's slapdown of ABC News reporter Jan Crawford Greenburg.

As detailed in this blog and other places, Greenburg's been making the rounds, pushing her insider tome on the high court. It's given her a bit of a celebrity vibe among the set that covers the Court.

Greenhouse apparently wanted to show that there still a lesson or two to teach. In the Times today, she took to task Greenburg's recent blog item on the health of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which we dutifully relayed here. (If there's anything we are, we're dutiful.) Greenburg wrote that it took Ginsburg 15-20 seconds to leave the Supreme Court room after a recent argument, sparking a new round of speculation on another vacancy on the Court. Turns out, Greenhouse wrote, that Ginsburg had just taken her shoes off and was trying to get them back on.

In other words, Greenhouse was basically saying, sometimes we don't have to go all Politburo in decoding the Court. Sometimes it's just about not wanting to walk out of the room in your stocking feet.

UPDATE: Jan Greenburg responds on her ABC News blog — and in a very genteel (read: Southern) way.

Weekend Reading Fun

For those folks who can’t stand the thought of catching “Zodiac” this weekend or cleaning out their basements, here are some recent releases that have come into Legal Times. Check them out.

• Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror, by Frederick A.O. Schwartz Jr. (yes, that family) and Aziz Huq, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. The authors ask, “Must we truly adopt tactics that are deeply unbecoming to our nation’s proud history and actually harm our security?” It’s an interesting question. Whether the reader feels “unbecoming” is more a matter for Miss Manners than legal types is yet another one.

• Melvin Belli: King of the Courtroom, by Mark Shaw. Speaking of “Zodiac,” California personal injury lawyer Belli, the “king of torts,” was involved. How, we’re not sure. Read the book. We do know that it was Belli who represented Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who…Oh, just read the book.

• Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World, by Maureen Webb, who started the book in the course of doing analysis for the International Campaign Against Mass Surveillance. Webb asks, “Did you know that your government is watching you?” Well, yeah.

• Inventing Human Rights: A History, by Lynn Hunt, UCLA history professor, starts with the 18th century and the French revolution. And then she “takes an in-depth look at the state of human rights today.” Not good — that’s our guess.