Hegseth Endorses War Crime

 María Teresita Armstrong-Matta at Raw Story:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's offhand remark that the U.S. would show "no quarter, no mercy for our enemies," in Iran. In military context, "no quarter" means killing enemy combatants without allowing surrender.

This alarmed legal experts, who warned the statement could constitute a war crime. Even just saying it could count as a violation of international law and U.S. military code, they added.

Wall Street Journal national security reporter Alex Ward flagged the comment as violating international humanitarian law under the Geneva Convention.

Claremont McKenna College professor Jack Pitney cited the Defense Department's own Law of War Manual, which explicitly forbids declaring no quarter will be given. International Crisis Group senior adviser Brian Finucane, a former U.S. government war crimes lawyer, stated that even declaring no quarter constitutes a war crime punishable by up to life imprisonment under the DoD Manual for Military Commissions.

Stanford law professor Tom Dannenbaum confirmed declaring no quarter is prohibited under international humanitarian law and itself amounts to a war crime.


Watch the video below.

It violates international law. \

It violates the DOD manual on the law of war.

It violates US Code.

At Just Security,  Daniel Mauer offers the Secretary of Defense some hypothetical legal advice:

. War Crime liability under 18 U.S.C. 2441:

a. The U.S. War Crimes statute makes it a federal offense to commit a “war crime,” subject to being “fined … or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.”

b. The statute defines “war crime” by incorporating those offenses described as “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions or its additional protocols and acts specifically “prohibited by Article 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the Hague Convention IV.”

c. As stated above, Article 23(d) in that Annex is unambiguous: “it is especially forbidden . . . [t]o declare that no quarter will be given.”

d. In describing ongoing and future combat operations in the current international armed conflict between the United States and Iran, your statement “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” likely violates Art. 23(d) of the Annex to Hague IV and thereby violates 18 U.S.C. § 2441. This interpretation is reinforced when your remarks are considered alongside your previous public comments about the Rules of Engagement, “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” and the laws of armed conflict noted above in para. 2.b.

e. An intention to merely cause panic and terror within the Iranian armed forces is not a defense because Article 23(d) prohibits the “declar[ation] that no quarter will be given.” It is a speech offense; under normal principles of criminal law, a command to unlawfully kill another person, even if never performed, is still prohibited (“Whoever commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, is punishable as a principal” – see 18 U.S.C. § 2). Whether the order is ever consummated by your subordinates is immaterial to your criminal exposure under 18 U.S.C. § 2441.

f. Any U.S. servicemember who interprets your comments as an order and who subsequently commands, directs, orders, or gives “no quarter” to Iranian forces will be exposed to criminal liability under Article 118, UCMJ, for murder (a premeditated killing of another with no legal justification or excuse). Such an order is “patently” or “manifestly” unlawful; therefore, a servicemember accused of murder for ordering or giving “no quarter” cannot raise an “obedience to orders” defense in their court-martial. Alternatively, servicemembers would also be exposed to prosecution in U.S. district court for violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2441.

Congressional Output

 Many posts have discussed the state of Congress.

Paul Kane at WP:

With fewer than 40 bills signed into law as of Monday, the House and Senate set a modern record for lowest legislative output in the first year of a new presidency, according to data maintained by C-SPAN and Purdue University.

Despite that lack of productivity, the Senate held more roll-call votes (659) than any odd-numbered year of this century, with almost 60 percent of them focused on advancing President Donald Trump’s nominations to the executive and judicial branches.

The House, meanwhile, set a 21st-century record for fewest votes cast (362) in the first session of a two-year Congress. It held barely half as many votes as in 2017, which was Trump’s first year in office and when Republicans held the majority.

Perhaps not surprisingly, an unusually large number of House members — 24 Republicans and 19 Democrats — have decided to leave the chamber either to retire or run for other office. That places the chamber on pace to set a 21st-century record for retirements in one Congress, according to C-SPAN and Purdue.

Congress did pack a lot into the One Big Beautiful Bill:

Such strategy has accelerated with each new president and his congressional majority. In 2001, George W. Bush and his GOP allies pushed through a massive tax cut on the fast-track process known as reconciliation, averting a potential filibuster in the Senate. Still, the Congress managed to send 107 other laws to the president’s desk for his signature that year.

In 2017, Republicans passed a massive tax cut through reconciliation plus sent an additional 75 pieces of legislation to Trump’s desk before Christmas.

This year’s Congress also has a massive policy bill but otherwise only about half the output of Trump’s first term. Only in 2023, with a split Congress and the Biden-Harris White House already focused on a presidential election, were fewer laws passed in the first year of a Congress, according to 32 years of data kept by C-SPAN and Purdue.

...One area in which Republicans became more productive was in eliminating federal regulations via the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress a certain amount of time to consider new regulations and, with fast-track procedures, vote to eliminate them.

The act rarely had been used since its passage in 1996, but recent Republican majorities have relied on it.

The process, of course, takes time away from legislation that could be considered on the House and Senate floors.

Flat Fees and California Public Defenders

Many posts have discussed the American legal system.

Anat Rubin at CalMatters:

Nearly half of California counties pay private lawyers and firms to represent poor people in criminal cases, and most of them, like San Benito, do it through what’s known as a “flat-fee” contract, meaning they pay a fixed amount, regardless of how many cases the attorneys handle or how much time they spend on each case.

It’s a far cheaper alternative — at least in the short run — to operating a public defender office with government lawyers, and it’s created a second-tier justice system in rural stretches of the state: Seven of the eight counties with the state’s highest jail and prison incarceration rates have flat-fee contracts.

These arrangements so clearly disincentivize investigating and litigating cases that they’ve been banned in other parts of the country. But they have flourished in California, which provides no funding or oversight of county-level public defense.

...

The nation’s first public defender office opened its doors in Los Angeles in 1913, the result of a decades-long advocacy effort led by Clara Shortridge Foltz, the first woman to be admitted to the bar in California. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court established a right to an attorney in state court criminal proceedings in 1963, more than a dozen California counties were operating their own public defender systems.

But as other states funneled money to government-run public defender offices, California left its system in the hands of the counties. Elected officials in many of those counties would eventually opt for the cheapest path — a flat-fee contract.

In 1984, only nine of California’s 58 counties relied on contractors for their primary public defense systems, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report published that year. Today, that number is 25.

...
Much of the effort to ban flat-fee contracts has focused on the ways in which the model discourages investigations, one of the most critical components of criminal defense.

Defense investigators review police reports, visit crime scenes, chase down video surveillance footage and interview witnesses — work that most attorneys are not trained to do. They often find evidence that challenges the prosecution’s case and affects the outcome of a trial or the terms of a plea deal.

A recent CalMatters investigation found that poor people accused of crimes in California are routinely sent to prison without anyone investigating the charges against them, significantly increasing the likelihood of wrongful convictions.

Lawyers and Presidential Tickets

 Bruce Mehlman:

Every Democrat nominated for President or Vice President for the past 40 years was a lawyer until Tim Walz. (21/22 D’s & 7/21 R’s)

Silencing Critics by Threatening Litigation

Filmmaker Mary Strause made a docuseries critical of UnitedHealth.  The companies used the threat of litigation to coerce streaming services to take it down.

David Enrich at NYT:

In legal letters and court filings, UnitedHealth has invoked last year’s murder of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of the company’s health insurance division, to argue that intense criticism of the company risks inciting further violence.

The tactics have had an impact. Amazon and Vimeo both removed Ms. Strause’s film. The Guardian postponed publishing an investigation of the company after UnitedHealth sued over a previous article it said was defamatory.

UnitedHealth joins a growing group of companies and wealthy individuals, including President Trump, who are using legal threats and lawsuits to deter or penalize criticism.

Over the years, there have been scattered examples of embattled companies — such as Purdue Pharma, the maker of the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin — deploying legal offensives against a broad spectrum of journalists and critics, said Lee Levine, a retired First Amendment lawyer who has defended news outlets, including The New York Times.

“Some version of this has been going on for a long, long time,” Mr. Levine said. But, he added, “the incidence of it has increased.”

Perkins Coie

 

A note on Judge Howell’s ruling striking down the Perkins Coie exec order. Key point is in 1st sentence: “No American President has ever before issued exec. orders like the [this] one.” Trump apologists can change the subject or stay silent, but can’t deny she’s right. ...
1/10 pic.twitter.com/bgTxdjiZzO

— Roger Parloff (@rparloff) May 3, 2025

Rural Areas and Legal Deserts

Many posts have dealt with the problems of rural America.

Michelle Paxton at ABA:

Rural communities severely lack access to attorneys, a phenomenon known as legal deserts. Data from the American Bar Association for the year 2020 revealed that 1,300 counties in the United States have less than one attorney per 1,000 residents, and many have no attorneys whatsoever. Residents are required to drive for hours to access basic legal services to handle even routine matters. Despite efforts by many states to increase access to justice for rural America, a scarcity of rural attorneys continues. The stakes are exacerbated when rural children and families are involved in the juvenile court system due to the fundamental interests at issue. There is a lack of attorneys available to serve in juvenile court, and those willing may not have access to the necessary formal and informal supports needed to become effective advocates in child welfare and youth justice. Without these supports, attorneys may opt out of juvenile cases, and as a result, outcomes for children and families deteriorate.

How Many Federal Crimes?

In our chapter on bureaucracy, we quote James Madison's warning about "laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood."

Sarah Anderson at R Street:

How many federal crimes exist? It seems like a straightforward question, but even the Congressional Research Service ultimately gave up when they tried to answer it. Attempted studies estimate there are nearly 5,000 federal crimes in statute (passed by Congress) and likely between 300,000 and 400,000 federal crimes in the regulatory code, promulgated by federal agency rules and published in the Federal Register. Both types hold the full weight of the law to enforce and prosecute.

Considering that our Constitution outlines only three crimes—treason, piracy, and counterfeiting—and the first federal criminal law, the Crimes Act of 1790, outlined a whopping 23 separate crimes, it is safe to say we have deviated dramatically from the system our founding fathers envisioned.

In fact, many argue that the extreme level of criminalization found in our federal code turns average Americans into criminals, unbeknownst to them, presenting a significant threat to liberty and prosperity. To make matters worse, most of these crimes are not even remotely what most Americans would consider dangerous offenses. Renowned author of “How to Become a Federal Criminal,” Mike Chase, humorously but sadly reveals the nature of many of these crimes on the social platform X at @CrimeADay, including such things as selling “Swiss cheese” without holes, offering to buy swan feathers to make a woman’s hat, or riding a manatee.

Minoritarianism

Steven M. Teles, "Minoritarianism Is Everythwere,: National Affairs, spring 2025

In search of the tyranny of the minority, one would be well advised to skip over the nation's capital and look instead to the crazy quilt of jurisdictions in which America's decisions about land use and infrastructure development are made. A growing field of scholarship has shown that America's unusually high level of local control over these decisions has led to a crippling undersupply of housing, coupled with dramatically higher costs for transportation and energy projects aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

...

A recent report by University of Chicago professor Christopher Berry shows that only a fifth to a quarter of citizens participate in mayoral elections in major cities, that turnout in school-board elections is in the single digits, and that participation in special-district elections is even lower. Those who do turn out tend to be whiter, richer, and older than the electorate as a whole.

Participation is exceptionally high, however, for one group in particular: members of public-sector unions. Ordinary citizens' relatively low election-participation rates provide government's own employees with an enormous comparative advantage, as they have the means, motive, and institutional context to exercise disproportionate power over local governing decisions.

...

The structure of American law leads to a peculiar form of lawmaking. Weak party discipline and congressional individualism make it exceptionally difficult for lawmakers to construct coalitions. Legislators under these conditions have strong incentives to avoid blame. Thus the laws they write have become increasingly vague, often delegating significant lawmaking authority to executive agencies. Having been passed the legislative buck, those agencies in turn transfer a great degree of rulemaking responsibility to professional organizations, whose members fill in the details with codes of "best practice" behind closed doors.

Legislative Page Counts

 

Hey dumbass, the left is an appropriations bill which is what congress is supposed
To do, detail what it’s appropriating which takes a lot of pages.

The one on the right is a CR with NO transparency on what is being appropriated https://t.co/PUUf9f6mqX

— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) December 21, 2024

Not that anyone cares about logic but it really doesn’t make sense to hate “the administrative state” making rules in the absence of congressional specifics and *also* hate it when bills are long.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) December 20, 2024

In Loper Bright, the Supreme Court overturned Chevron deference. K&L Gates explains that Congress needs to make bills more detailed, not less:

The Supreme Court’s new mandate for more specific authorizations of authority will place an imposing new requirement on Congress to draft its bills more precisely. Write the authorization too broadly and it may not pass judicial muster. Write it too narrowly, and Congress risks missing areas of interest where it would have wanted the agency to act. This dilemma may be particularly difficult in emerging areas like regulation of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, where contours of the issues are yet to be fully understood.

Too Many Laws

In our chapter on bureaucracy, we quote James Madison's warning about "laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood."

Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze at The Atlantic:

Our country has always been a nation of laws, but something has changed dramatically in recent decades. Contrary to the narrative that Congress is racked by an inability to pass bills, the number of laws in our country has simply exploded. Less than 100 years ago, all of the federal government’s statutes fit into a single volume. By 2018, the U.S. Code encompassed 54 volumes and approximately 60,000 pages. Over the past decade, Congress has adopted an average of 344 new pieces of legislation each session. That amounts to 2 million to 3 million words of new federal law each year. Even the length of bills has grown—from an average of about two pages in the 1950s to 18 today.

...

Not only have our laws grown rapidly in recent years; so have the punishments they carry. You might think that federal criminal laws are reserved for the worst of the worst—individuals who have committed acts so egregious that they merit the attention not just of state authorities but of federal authorities, and not just civil fines but potential prison time. But if that’s your intuition, ask yourself this question: How many federal crimes do you think we have these days?

It turns out no one knows. Yes, every few years some enterprising academic or government official sets out to count them. They devote considerable resources and time (often years) to the task. But in the end, they come up short.

In 1982, the Department of Justice undertook what stands as maybe the most comprehensive count to date. A lawyer spent more than two years reading the U.S. Code—at that time, some 23,000 pages. The best the lawyer could say was that there were about 3,000 federal crimes.

Today, the U.S. Code is roughly twice the length it was in 1982, and contemporary guesses put the number of federal crimes north of 5,000. As the American Bar Association has said, “Whatever the exact number of crimes that comprise today’s ‘federal criminal law,’ it is clear that the amount of individual citizen behavior now potentially subject to federal criminal control has increased in astonishing proportions in the last few decades.”

The Fall of Roe

 Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer at NYT report on the Alliance Defending Freedom and its role in the fall of Roe.

The goal would be to remove Roe’s viability line without directly asking the court to take the more drastic — and more politically inflammatory — step of directly overturning the decision. It could be the first move in a longer strategy to end legal abortion entirely.

A.D.F.’s mission was to draft airtight legislation that would survive the journey through conservative statehouses and the inevitable legal challenges in the lower courts in order to eventually arrive at the Supreme Court. A.D.F. lawyers then identified states where they believed the bills had the best chance. They looked for favorable governors, attorneys general and legislatures. Three states stood out: Arkansas, Mississippi and Utah. Each was in a different circuit-court region. The thinking was that if the laws were debated in different circuit courts and the courts issued conflicting rulings, the Supreme Court would be more likely to take up one of the cases and arbitrate among them. It was this kind of conflict — what lawyers call circuit splits — that often attracted the interest of the justices, who saw part of their mandate as ensuring that the law was applied consistently across the country. “A circuit split would mean there had to be a resolution,” says Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a top political anti-abortion group, who was on A.D.F.’s board at the time.

While A.D.F. tried to reverse-engineer its way to the Supreme Court, anti-abortion activists on the state level were also trying to advance tighter bans. A.D.F. tracked them all. Every legislative session was another opportunity to move forward. The states where residents were most religious were the ones where the legislatures were pushing for abortion restrictions. And at the top of that list, with 59 percent of adults identifying as “very religious,” according to Gallup, was Mississippi.

...

[Jameson] Taylor knew a 15-week ban would criminalize only about 3 percent of the roughly 2,600 abortions that were performed in Mississippi that year. But stopping procedures was not the point. A.D.F.’s primary goal was to write bills as a litigation strategy, not draft laws that would make for the strongest public policy or end the greatest number of abortions. The Mississippi bill was a legal tool to provoke a Supreme Court challenge to Roe — and set in motion a much larger plan to eventually end all abortion in America.

Immunity and Insurrection

From Jack Smith's brief in the immunity case:

Even if this Court holds that a former President is entitled to some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, that principle does not preclude trial on this indictment. First, the specific form of criminal conduct charged here—efforts to subvert an election in violation of the term-of-office clause of Article II and the constitutional process for electing the President—does not justify any form of immunity. Second, the private conduct that the indictment alleges is sufficient to support the charges. Thus, even if liability could not be premised on official acts, the case should be remanded for trial, with the district court to make evidentiary and instructional rulings in accordance with this Court’s decision. Peetitioner could seek appellate review of those rulings, if necessary, following final judgment.

This case implicates two principles of paramount importance: the necessity of the effective functioning of the Presidency, and the equally compelling necessity of upholding the rule of law. Petitioner is charged with crimes that, if proved at trial, reflect “an unprecedented assault on the structure of our government.” J.A. 42. The effective functioning of the Presidency does not require that a former President be immune from accountability for these alleged violations of federal criminal law. To the contrary, a bedrock principle of our constitutional order is that no person is above the law— including the President. Nothing in constitutional text, history, precedent, or policy considerations supports the absolute immunity that petitioner seeks.

...

If petitioner were correct that the former President has permanent immunity from federal criminal prosecution except after his impeachment and Senate conviction—which has never happened—it would upset the separation of powers and usher in a regime that would have been anathema to the Framers. The Framers had experienced firsthand the dangers of a monarch who was above the law, and they adopted a system of checks and balances to avoid those dangers. They designed a Constitution that would ensure an effective and energetic President under Article II—but one who was accountable to justice under laws passed by Congress under Article I, enforced by the Executive Branch under Article II, and adjudicated by the courts under Article III. That careful design leaves no room for an implicit and previously unrecognized rule categorically immunizing the President from accountability for criminal conduct involving the misuse of his office.

... 

The Framers’ most relevant writings provide no support for immunity of the type that petitioner claims. “James Wilson, a signer of the Constitution and futureJustice of this Court, explained to his fellow Pennsylvanians that ‘far from being above the laws, [the President] is amenable to them in his private character as acitizen, and in his public character by impeachment.’” Vance, 591 U.S. at 816-817 (Thomas, J., dissenting) (quoting 2 The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution 480 (J. Elliot ed. 1891) (Debates on the Constitution)). Wilson therefore recognized that prosecution was the means of holding a President accountable in his “private character” for criminal acts, while impeachment was the means of addressing his “public character” as office holder. “James Iredell, another future Justice, observed in the North Carolina ratifying convention that ‘[i]f [the President] commits any crime, he is punishable by the laws of his country.’” Id. at 817 (Thomas, J., dissenting) (quoting 4 Debates on the Constitution 109). Alexander Hamilton likewise confirmed that a President, unlike a King, would be “liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” The Federalist No. 65, at 442; see id. at No. 69, at 463; id. at No. 77, at 520-521 (noting that the President is “at all times liable to impeachment, trial, [and] dismission from office” as well as “forfeiture of life and estate by subsequent prosecution in the common course of law”).

...

 Petitioner contends (Br. 22) that the lack of any prosecutions of former Presidents until this case reflects the settled conclusion that criminal immunity precludes such a prosecution. But this prosecution is a historical first not because of any assumption about immunity but instead because of the singular gravity ofthe alleged conduct. The indictment describes petitioner’s efforts to “remain in power despite losing the 2020 election.” J.A. 42. The severity, range, and democracy-damaging nature of the alleged crimes are unique in American history. Other than former 41 President Nixon, whose pardon precluded criminal prosecution, petitioner can point to no former President alleged to have engaged in remotely similar conduct.

A Duty to Uphold the Law

 From the State Bar of California:

In a 128-page ruling, California State Bar Court Hearing Judge Yvette D. Roland found licensee John Charles Eastman (SBN 193726) culpable of 10 of the disciplinary charges filed by the State Bar’s Office of Chief Trial Counsel (OCTC) and recommended that he be disbarred. Absent a challenge, the recommendation goes to the California Supreme Court for review.

As is the case for all State Bar Court disbarment recommendations, Eastman is ordered by the court to involuntary inactive status and cannot practice law in California while the Supreme Court considers the case. The order to inactive status is effective three calendar days after the order is served.

“Every California attorney has the duty to uphold the constitution and the rule of law,” said Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona. “Mr. Eastman repeatedly violated that duty. Worse, he did so in a way that threatened the fundamental principles of our democracy. The substantial evidence presented over 35 days of trial showed, and the court has now held, that Mr. Eastman abandoned his ethical and legal duties as an attorney to conspire with then-President Donald Trump to develop and implement a strategy to obstruct the counting of electoral votes on January 6, 2021, and illegally disrupt the peaceful transfer of power to President-elect Joseph Biden, knowing that there was no good faith theory or argument to lawfully reject the electoral votes of any state or delay the January 6 electoral count. Mr. Eastman’s efforts failed only because our democratic institutions and those committed to upholding them held strong. The harm caused by Mr. Eastman’s abandonment of his duties as a lawyer, and the threat his actions posed to our democracy, more than warrant his disbarment.”

Summarizing the court’s findings, the decision states, “Eastman’s wrongdoing constitutes exceptionally serious ethical violations warranting severe professional discipline,” and recommends his disbarment.

Prosecutors and Appearances

Many posts have discussed prosecutors.

 Jessica Levinson at MSNBC:

Appearances matter when it comes to members of our government, and perhaps even more so when it comes to criminal prosecutors. This is why Fulton County, Georgia, Judge Scott McAfee ruled Friday morning that while there is not an actual conflict of interest preventing District Attorney Fani Willis from pursuing the election interference case against former President Donald Trump, there is the appearance of one. McAfee therefore ordered either Willis or Nathan Wade, her appointed special assistant district attorney and former boyfriend, off the case.

Wade stepped down Friday afternoon.

McAfee’s ruling is a strong rebuke of Willis, of the lack of judgment she exercised in this instance and of her conduct. And that’s only appropriate. She fell short of acting in a way that acknowledges the enormous responsibility that she has been entrusted with. And McAfee was right to tell her so.

House Bipartisan Lawmaking

Stef Kight at Axios:

Republicans may hold the House majority, but Democratic yeas outnumbered GOP votes on every major bill that landed on President Biden’s desk this year. … A divided government, slim congressional majorities and a fractured House GOP caucus forced significant bipartisanship on measures to raise the debt ceiling, keep the government running and set U.S. defense policy…. The House passed the sprawling National Defense Authorization Act on Wednesday, with 162 Democrats voting with 146 Republicans.

…

By the numbers: The bipartisanship is not a new dynamic. Every major piece of legislation to pass both chambers this year had a majority of House “yea’ votes coming from Democrats.

• It’s how Congress raised the debt ceiling in June and avoided a government shutdown — twice.
• Nine less-significant bills — not including resolutions — made it to the president’s desk this year with nearly half of votes coming from Democrats, according to data from Quorum. All were uncontroversial, with six receiving zero no votes.
• These bills declassified information related to the origins of COVID-19 and aimed to give veterans easier access to their benefits claims, among other measures.

Jack Smith Statement

Special Counsel Jack Smith Delivers Statement
Washington, DC ~
Friday, June 9, 2023

Good afternoon. Today, an indictment was unsealed charging Donald J. Trump with felony violations of our national security laws as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

This indictment was voted by a grand jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida, and I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged.

The men and women of the United States intelligence community and our armed forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people. Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.

Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice. And our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone. Applying those laws. Collecting facts. That’s what determines the outcome of an investigation. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The prosecutors in my office are among the most talented and experienced in the Department of Justice. They have investigated this case hewing to the highest ethical standards. And they will continue to do so as this case proceeds.

It’s very important for me to note that the defendants in this case must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. To that end, my office will seek a speedy trial in this matter. Consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused. We very much look forward to presenting our case to a jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida.

In conclusion. I would like to thank the dedicated public servants of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with whom my office is conducting this investigation and who worked tirelessly every day upholding the rule of law in our country. I’m deeply proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with them. Thank you very much.

AI-Generated Research and Hallucinations

Artificial intelligence is an increasingly important topic in politics, policy, and law.

Benjamin Weiser at NYT:

The lawsuit began like so many others: A man named Roberto Mata sued the airline Avianca, saying he was injured when a metal serving cart struck his knee during a flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York.

When Avianca asked a Manhattan federal judge  to toss out the case, Mr. Mata’s lawyers vehemently objected, submitting a 10-page brief that cited more than half a dozen relevant court decisions. There was Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and, of course, Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, with its learned discussion of federal law and “the tolling effect of the automatic stay on a statute of limitations.”

There was just one hitch: No one — not the airline’s lawyers, not even the judge himself — could find the decisions or the quotations cited and summarized in the brief.

That was because ChatGPT had invented everything.

The lawyer who created the brief, Steven A. Schwartz of the firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, threw himself on the mercy of the court on Thursday, saying in an affidavit that he had used the artificial intelligence program to do his legal research — “a source that has revealed itself to be unreliable.”

This case was not unique. Gerrit De Vynck explains at WP:

Recently, researchers asked two versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot where Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Tomás Lozano-Pérez was born.

One bot said Spain and the other said Cuba. Once the system told the bots to debate the answers, the one that said Spain quickly apologized and agreed with the one with the correct answer, Cuba.

The finding, in a paper released by a team of MIT researchers last week, is the latest potential breakthrough in helping chatbots to arrive at the correct answer. The researchers proposed using different chatbots to produce multiple answers to the same question and then letting them debate each other until one answer won out. The researchers found using this “society of minds” method made them more factual.

“Language models are trained to predict the next word,” said Yilun Du, a researcher at MIT who was previously a research fellow at OpenAI, and one of the paper’s authors. “They are not trained to tell people they don’t know what they’re doing.” The result is bots that act like precocious people-pleasers, making up answers instead of admitting they simply don’t know.

The researchers’ creative approach is just the latest attempt to solve for one of the most pressing concerns in the exploding field of AI. Despite the incredible leaps in capabilities that “generative” chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard have demonstrated in the last six months, they still have a major fatal flaw: they make stuff up all the time.

Figuring out how to prevent or fix what the field is calling “hallucinations” has become an obsession among many tech workers, researchers and AI skeptics alike. The issue is mentioned in dozens of academic papers posted to the online database Arxiv and Big Tech CEOs like Google’s Sundar Pichai have addressed it repeatedly. As the tech gets pushed out to millions of people and integrated into critical fields including medicine and law, understanding hallucinations and finding ways to mitigate them has become even more crucial.

Indicting Political Leaders

Richard Pérez-Peña at NYT:

In just the past 15 years, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac of France, Park Geun-hye and Lee Myung-bak of South Korea and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy have all been prosecuted for corruption and found guilty. The list of those criminally charged also includes former democratically elected leaders of Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Peru, South Africa and Taiwan.

In the 1980s, Kakuei Tanaka, a former prime minister of Japan, was convicted. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is currently on trial on corruption charges.

“It’s always a big deal when a former president or prime minister is indicted, but in most democracies, it is normal when they’re credibly accused of serious crimes,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard who has written about dozens of countries’ transition to democracy. The United States, he said, has been an outlier in its reluctance to charge a former leader.

“Political systems have to handle it,” he added. “They have to. Because the alternative — saying some people are above the law — is much worse.”

The essence of authoritarianism is getting away with crime. That's why this indictment is so important

— Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) March 31, 2023

Lawyers, Oaths, and the Insurrection

Many posts have discussed oaths .

 Jessica Levinson at MSNBC:

Simply put, with power comes responsibility. Thus, before law students can become lawyers, they must prove that they are of good moral character. This may involve not only taking an exam but also completing something called a moral character application, which is in many ways akin to a background check. Part of this application includes obtaining references who can attest to one’s character. And that’s where law professors like me enter the picture.

Furthermore, once one passes that moral character vetting process, not to mention the bar exam, future lawyers must also take an oath to become a member of the bar. The oath requires that applicants pledge to uphold the U.S. and state constitutions of where they plan to practice, and to faithfully execute their duties as a lawyer. In California, for example, applicants are required to swear to “faithfully discharge the duties of an attorney and counselor at law to the best of my knowledge and ability. As an officer of the court, I will strive to conduct myself at all times with dignity, courtesy and integrity.” put, before someone can enter the hallowed halls of our profession, we need to know we can trust that person. Less than ethical lawyers could abuse that trust — and their clients' trust — by, say, misusing or stealing a client’s money. Other examples could include breaking a trust on a far larger scale. For example, one could advise the president of the United States to file frivolous lawsuits based on lies but not law, or to devise an unconstitutional scheme to steal a presidential election. In these cases, you’ve fundamentally shown yourself undeserving of holding a position of public trust.