Over at the CoOp, Adam Shinar, a Clark Byse Fellow and JSD candidate at Harvard, has a review of the new book edited by Austin Sarat and Nasser Hussain, When Governments Break the Law: The Rule of Law and the Prosecution of the Bush Administration. Fellow blogger Steve Vladeck and I both contributed chapters to this book, so I’m doubly grateful to Shinar for his kind review. As he notes, the book proceeds from the assumption that the Bush Administration did indeed break the law in its prosecution of the war on terror, not because that question is not open for debate but in order to move past it and consider what measures, if any, should be taken if that assumption is true. The book is really thus about what the rule of law demands in these circumstances. My own contribution notwithstanding, I think the book turned out well. I appreciate the review and hope others who are interested in rule-of-law issues in this context will find the book useful.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on November 3, 2010 at 04:53 PM
Comments
I was just wondering about this. It seems that the Administration gave General Motors an illegal tax break last year– that is, proclaimed a tax ruling clearly contrary to the statute, as a special favor. http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2009/08/gms-tax.html
I don’t know if that is altogether correct or not, but it did raise the question of what to do if the IRS simply declares it is going to exempt a particular person from income tax for 2010. Could the IRS be sued? Prosecuted criminally by the next Administration?
Posted by: Eric Rasmusen | Nov 5, 2010 10:28:48 PM