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"This book will examine lawyers' historical and contemporary relationship to the rule of law, one of the pillars of a liberal democracy. It does so by firstly identifying a range of rule of law issues confronting society; secondly by illustrating how lawyers interact with them; thirdly by examining how legal independent professions support are key to rule of law and finally; fourthly by exploring arguments that satisfactory support for the rule of law is available by other means."--

When it comes to the opaque domain of criminal justice's inner workings, statistics have a penetrating potential that scholars and officials have deployed in governing discretion, achieving accountability, and revealing systemic faults. The growth of sophisticated scholarship and ideas adapting quantitative technology to unveil the hidden, spur debate, and police bad behavior is an important movement. Yet this Article sounds a note of caution against the primacy of numbers in disciplining criminal justice practices. This Article does not take aim at numbers deployed to correct, monitor, and reveal as an adjunct to serving public values. Rather, the Article's concern is about numbers becoming an end or target in criminal justice, becoming the value rather than serving as a technology toward higher aims and principles. The concern is about how statistics of people prosecuted and cases won, divorced from qualitative details and isolated from context, are officially deployed as a proxy for performance in criminal justice, in place of substantive aims that have proved difficult to attain or denominate in determinate ways.[para] The analysis proceeds through two case studies. Part I examines how the Government Performance and Results Act responded to widespread public criticism of federal government performance by making numerical targets the standard of performance and qualitative depiction a deviation that bore the burden of justification. The case study examines how the Department of Justice tried to resist the denomination of the duty of "doing justice" in terms of output targets, repeatedly explaining the potential for perverse consequences and that justice is ill-served by reduction to numerical outputs like quantity of people prosecuted. Part I then assesses the recent reversal of commitment to this principle and the turn to officially denominating performance in terms of numbers of people prosecuted and win rates.[para] Part II examines how substituting numbers of people prosecuted for intractable goals is ...

Perhaps nothing permeates modern American society as much as prescription drugs. Evidence of this exists not just in television and magazine ads extolling the promises of Viagra and Nexium, but also in a few statistics. First, forty-six percent of Americans use at least one prescription drug daily. Further, in 2001, 3.1 billion prescriptions were issued in the United States at a cost of $132 billion. That amount is projected to increase to $414 billion by 2014.3 Such numbers explain the intensity of the recent political and legal debates surrounding prescription drugs, such as the importation of American pharmaceuticals from Canada and the issuance of prescriptions online without visiting a physician.

This treatise addresses a central topic in contemporary jurisprudence, namely whether it is possible for legal interpretations to be objective. The author claims that objectivity is possible in law, offering arguments based on metaphysics, philosophy and meta-ethics to reinforce his theory.

"How viable is the resolution of nuclear non-proliferation disputes through the International Court of Justice and international arbitration? James Fry examines the compromissory clauses in the IAEA Statute, IAEA Safeguards Agreements and the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material that give jurisdiction to these fora and analyses recent jurisprudence to demonstrate how legal resolution can handle such politically sensitive disputes. In sum, legal resolution of nuclear non-proliferation disputes represents an option that States and commentators have all too often ignored. The impartiality and procedural safeguards of legal resolution should make it an acceptable option for target States and the international community, especially vis-à-vis the procedural shortcomings and general heavy-handedness of Security Council involvement under UN Charter Chapter VII."--Pub. desc

Because of the future probability that civil wars will increase among poor nations, it is important to examine the legal status of the rebel & of rebellion, in light of international law. With recognition of human rights, the juridical evaluation of rebellion against unbearable forms of injustice (structural violence) changed. In 'permissive resolutions' of the General Assembly, the right to revolt against apartheid & colonial discrimination was recognized. The captured freedom fighter was granted the status of Prisoner of War. At the same time, it was recognized that intolerable injustice might constitute a threat to peace. Through this interpretation of 'threat to the peace', the Security Council became entitled to deal with situations of structural violence. The maintenance of peace & security changed from a static to a dynamic concept. The Diplomatic Conference on the Laws of War (1974-76) will probably draw the consequences of this legal development, & by doing so, confirm it more solidly. Modified HA.

This article examines the evolving relationship of mutual trust and fundamental rights in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice. The ECJ has long prioritized the effectiveness of instruments based on mutual trust through an unimpeded system of mutual recognition. Arguments based on a violation of fundamental rights were taken to contradict the presumption of compliance, refute mutual trust, and hinder automatic mutual recognition. The ECJ has now accepted, both in criminal and asylum law, that the presumption of compliance is not conclusive and mutual trust is not blind. The article observes an emergent, but carefully controlled dynamic of rights-based assessment through case-by-case analysis, illustrating three phases of mutual trust, but argues that this dynamic is slow, unclear and inadequate. It suggests that national authorities should take a proactive role, promoting real and constructive relationships of trust, allowing an individual assessment of rights violations via rights-based review. The latter is based on a proper understanding of trust, as an evolving concept based on evidence. Respect for rights, terminological clarity, enhanced judicial communication, and acknowledgment of shared values are the way forward.

The U.S. government is compromising democratic values for the sake of maintaining an expensive and ineffective drone base in the West African country of Niger — all while exploring new drone bases in three nearby coastal countries: Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Benin.The rationale for both the existing base and the aspirational ones is to constrain jihadist insurgencies. The problem is, there's no publicly available evidence that the base in Niger has done any good. In fact, regional trends — in terms of political violence, but also in terms of overall political instability — suggest that expeditionary counterterrorism does more harm than good.The U.S. military's Air Base 201 is situated outside Agadez, northern Niger, and was built in the late 2010s at a cost of some $110 million or more (and upwards of $30 million per year to operate and maintain). Operations began at the site in 2019, involving "intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance" (ISR) drone flights. The New York Times calls it "vital" but it has yet to demonstrate its worth to the public.During the 2010s, Niger was considered the most reliable Sahelian country in the eyes of Washington, Paris, Berlin, and others. Ruled by an elected civilian, Mahamadou Issoufou (in office 2011-2021), Niger had seemed to be entering a new chapter, leaving behind the coups and rebellions that still plagued neighboring Mali. As crises grew in virtually all of Niger's neighbors — especially in Libya, Mali, Nigeria, and soon Burkina Faso as well — Niger appeared to be more a victim of spillover violence than of its own homegrown insurgencies.By 2019, however, it should already have been clear that Niger was brittle — and that France's assertive counterterrorism operations in Mali were yielding only fleeting gains. In Niger, the 2016 election had been lopsided at best and farcical at worst, with Issoufou's main opponent, Hama Amadou, spending much of the campaign in detention on shaky charges connected to human trafficking. Niger was also beginning to produce its own militants — and its own spate of human rights abuses by the military. In Mali, France had killed many top jihadist leaders, but violence was only growing. If American airpower was meant to support the tracking of top targets, and if removing those targets did not fundamentally disrupt the insurgencies, then what good was all that surveillance capacity?Starting in 2020, coup after coup struck the countries of central Sahel. In Mali and soon after in Burkina Faso, coup-makers both channeled and stoked anti-French sentiment, eventually expelling French troops and other Western-backed security missions, such as the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali. French counterterrorism ran aground not just at the level of strategy, but also politically. The French failed to maintain the goodwill of populations who cared little if Abdelmalek Droukdel or Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi had been killed when that did nothing against the grassroots fighters, bandits, and ethnic militias that made ordinary people's lives hellish. Surveillance capacity, moreover, is even less effective when it comes to sorting out who is who at the level of ordinary fighters — just ask the French, who horrified Malians by striking a wedding party at the town of Bounti in January 2019, believing the targets were terrorists.Niger's government has been the most recent to fall to a coup, in July 2023. The combination of the coup and the U.S. military's assets triggered an awkward dance in Washington, as the administration sought — and continues to seek — an impossible balance. On the one hand, there is the imperative to uphold the plain meaning of legal restrictions on U.S. assistance to junta-run countries (a determination the U.S. finally reached in Niger's case in October). On the other hand, the administration seems to feel compelled to engage the junta with an eye to protecting the drone base. Administration officials have hinted to the junta that if it puts forward even a minimally credible transition plan, the administration will explore ways to restore military cooperation.The sunk costs of the Niger base appear to be one of the primary arguments in its favor, as well as the argument that the base is vital for counterterrorism success. Yet throwing good money after bad makes little sense, and the argument about counterterrorism is impossible to falsify, given classification practices — and even if all the data were out in the open, backers of unlimited counterterrorism budgets often make the equally unfalsifiable claim that things would be worse without those expenditures. Meanwhile, there is a circularity involved in the logic of the U.S. military presence in Niger as well. As the New York Times puts it, "The American military is still flying unarmed drone surveillance missions to protect its troops posted in Niamey and Agadez" — in other words, the drone base becomes its own justification.Meanwhile, the U.S. government appears to be simultaneously considering the possibility of maintaining the Niger base and the possibility of shifting resources elsewhere; namely, to Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Benin. The Wall Street Journal reports on "preliminary talks" about opening bases in those countries. The logic, in the Journal's own words, is as follows: "Drones would allow U.S. forces to conduct aerial surveillance of militant movements along the coast and provide over-the-shoulder tactical advice to local troops during combat operations."This logic should sound awfully familiar, as it was the same thinking that has now failed in Niger and beyond. None of the core problems have been solved: whether tracking and killing top leaders translates into wider gains; whether it is possible to distinguish insurgents from non-combatants at the level of rank-and-file fighters; and what the wider theory of change and success is.Nor has the fundamental political problem been solved or, it seems, even acknowledged: the reference to "over-the-shoulder tactical advice" is very telling. What might seem like a simple military matter is in fact a political one: again and again in the Sahel, it became evident that soldiers often dislike having someone else peering over their shoulder and telling them what to do. All that assistance and advice can also have unintended consequences, as occurred in Niger. It's not that establishing drone bases in coastal West African countries will inexorably lead to coups — but securitizing the relationship and militarizing those countries' response to insurgency will only hurt. Cote d'Ivoire has won some acclaim for its response to a nascent insurgency, for example, but more for its social programs than for its combat operations.And, finally, for U.S. forces, the temptation to do more than peer over the shoulder and whisper into the ear is always there. Best of all would be to wind down the base in Niger, avoid making the same mistakes elsewhere in the region, and keep the Sahel's juntas at arm's length.