Quote of the Day: The Law Is Serious Business (Seriously)

31 May 2012 at 5:19 PMPosted in:


Asians, China, Civil Rights, Crime, New York Times, NYU Law School, Quote of the Day, Torture, Violence

Quote of the Day: The Law Is Serious Business (Seriously)

By Christopher Danzig

Chen Guangcheng

The fundamental question the Chinese government must face is lawlessness. China does not lack laws, but the rule of law.

– Chinese civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng, in an op-ed piece in yesterday’s New York Times. Guangcheng is currently studying law at the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at NYU Law School.

(Keep reading to see how Guangcheng describes the lawless conduct he and his family have allegedly faced — at the hands of law enforcement — in his homeland.)

As much as some liberals tend to pooh-pooh the American tendency towards self-congratulation (disclosure: guilty as charged), reading tales like this really helps to keep things in perspective. We are lucky to live in the United States. Guangcheng provides some background about criminal law in China:

Although China’s criminal laws, like those of every country, are in need of constant improvement, if faithfully implemented they could yet offer its citizens significant protection against arbitrary detention, arrest and prosecution. Countless legal officials, lawyers and law professors have labored for decades to produce constitutional and legislative rules intended to prevent a recurrence of the nightmarish anti-rightist campaign and other “mass movements” of the 1950s and the later abominations of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

No doubt, America has more than its fair share of criminal justice problems. But at least people don’t disappear or receive beatings from police for basically no reason. Oh yeah, and in the U.S., attorneys aren’t banned from defending politically unpopular individuals:

But those protections have been frequently ignored in practice, as they were in my case and in the case of my nephew, Chen Kegui. After the local police discovered my escape from my village in April, a furious pack of thugs — not one in uniform, bearing no search or arrest warrants and refusing to identify themselves — scaled the wall of my brother Guangfu’s farmhouse in the dead of night, smashed through the doors and brutally assaulted my brother.

After detaining him, the gang returned twice more, severely beating my sister-in-law and nephew with pickax handles. At that point, Kegui tried to fend them off by seizing a kitchen knife and stabbing, but not killing, three of the attackers.

Kegui, who is 32 years old, was then detained in Yinan County and, absurdly, charged with attempted homicide. No one has been able to reach him, and he has most likely been tortured even more severely than his father was. Although China signed the United Nations convention against torture in 1988 and has enacted domestic laws to implement it, torture to extract confessions is still prevalent.

Moreover, none of the lawyers his family has sought to retain have been allowed to work on the case. Instead, the authorities have announced that Kegui will be forced to accept the assistance of government-controlled legal-aid lawyers.

Best of luck to Guangcheng in his civil rights work and his legal studies. It takes a lot of courage to speak out as he has. We hope his time in America goes well and that he continues to stay safe.


http://abovethelaw.com/2012/05/quote-of-the-day-the-law-is-serious-business-seriously/

Hating on Hate Crime Laws

03 Apr 2012 at 11:31 AMPosted in:


Crime, Law Professors, New York Times, Quote of the Day, Violence

Quote of the Day: Hating on Hate Crime Laws

By David Lat

[T]he fact that it is constitutional and commonplace does not quiet the nagging sense that hate crime legislation resembles something from an Orwell dystopia. Horrific crimes deserve stern justice, but don’t we want to be careful about criminalizing a defect of character? Because our founders believed that democracy requires great latitude for dissent, America, virtually alone in the developed world, protects the right to speak or publish the most odious points of view. And yet the government is authorized to punish you for thinking those vile things, if you think them in the course of committing a crime.
– Bill Keller, former executive editor of the New York Times, in an op-ed piece discussing the cases of Tyler Clementi and Trayvon Martin.

(A law professor makes a cameo in the column, after the jump.)


Bill Keller cites the work of former University of Illinois law dean Heidi Hurd:

Back in 2001, Heidi M. Hurd, a professor who comingles law and philosophy, wrote an article entitled “Why Liberals Should Hate ‘Hate Crime Legislation.’ ” The thesis sounded contrarian; hate crime laws evolved out of a great liberal cause — civil rights — and have been propelled by activists and politicians most of us would call liberal. Hurd, though she is a Democrat, was referring not to the contemporary political left but to traditional, John-Locke-and-John-Stuart-Mill liberalism, which holds that the state is licensed to temper bad behavior, not to perfect human nature. Hate crime laws, she wrote, crossed that line: “The law now regulates not only what we do, but who we are.”

…. The distinction Hurd makes — convincingly, I think — is that when you penalize intent you are punishing matters of choice. One can choose not to pull the trigger, not to throw the rock, not to steal the purse.

“You can’t choose not to be prejudiced or biased — at least not willy-nilly, on the spot,” she told me, when I called her the other day at the University of Illinois. “We pass moral judgments all the time against bigots and chauvinists and homophobes and so forth. But this is a question not of what we should morally blame people for, but of what we should deprive them of liberty for.”

You can read the rest of Keller’s very interesting column, which includes additional commentary from Professor Hurd, over here.

Tyler and Trayvon [New York Times via ABA Journal]

Please read complete article at link below:


http://abovethelaw.com/2012/04/quote-of-the-day-hating-on-hate-crime-laws/#more-148151