E-mail:
Jack Balkin: jackbalkin at yahoo.com
Bruce Ackerman bruce.ackerman at yale.edu
Ian Ayres ian.ayres at yale.edu
Corey Brettschneider corey_brettschneider at brown.edu
Mary Dudziak mary.l.dudziak at emory.edu
Joey Fishkin joey.fishkin at gmail.com
Heather Gerken heather.gerken at yale.edu
Abbe Gluck abbe.gluck at yale.edu
Mark Graber mgraber at law.umaryland.edu
Stephen Griffin sgriffin at tulane.edu
Jonathan Hafetz jonathan.hafetz at shu.edu
Jeremy Kessler jkessler at law.columbia.edu
Andrew Koppelman akoppelman at law.northwestern.edu
Marty Lederman msl46 at law.georgetown.edu
Sanford Levinson slevinson at law.utexas.edu
David Luban david.luban at gmail.com
Gerard Magliocca gmaglioc at iupui.edu
Jason Mazzone mazzonej at illinois.edu
Linda McClain lmcclain at bu.edu
John Mikhail mikhail at law.georgetown.edu
Frank Pasquale pasquale.frank at gmail.com
Nate Persily npersily at gmail.com
Michael Stokes Paulsen michaelstokespaulsen at gmail.com
Deborah Pearlstein dpearlst at yu.edu
Rick Pildes rick.pildes at nyu.edu
David Pozen dpozen at law.columbia.edu
Richard Primus raprimus at umich.edu
K. Sabeel Rahmansabeel.rahman at brooklaw.edu
Alice Ristroph alice.ristroph at shu.edu
Neil Siegel siegel at law.duke.edu
David Super david.super at law.georgetown.edu
Brian Tamanaha btamanaha at wulaw.wustl.edu
Nelson Tebbe nelson.tebbe at brooklaw.edu
Mark Tushnet mtushnet at law.harvard.edu
Adam Winkler winkler at ucla.edu
The Lawfare blog is a useful source for a moderately conservative spin (Steve Vladeck's posts are an exception to the spin) on developments in the law of counterterrorism -- not as useful as Marty Lederman's less frequent posts here, of course. There is, however, one real cost to reading Lawfare -- Ben Wittes's obsession with the New York Times's editorial page. His most recent post on the topic is particularly egregious. Its header is "The New York Times Declares Al Qaeda Membership Legitimate Political Activity." One clue to the difficulty is Wittes's restatement of his point: The editorial "inevitably suggests that the detainees at Guantanamo are 'political prisons,' which in turn connotes prisoners of conscience." Note how suggests and connotes turn into declares.
Substantively, Wittes's objection is that the editorial refers to Guantanamo as a "political prison," with the ensuing suggestion and connotation. But, I would have thought, the natural reading of the phrase is that Guantanamo is a prison maintained for political rather than penological (or similar) reasons, without suggesting that those detained there are prisoners of conscience. And that reading seems to me accurate enough.
Wittes's readings of the Times's editorials are not "sharp" or "astute"; they are systematically distorted by an astigmatism whose source lies in Wittes, not in the Times. (Which is not to say that the editorials are always right -- although I do observe that Wittes has taken to writing recently that the editorials he discusses do not "contain[] many factual errors in the sense of factually-false statements of the type I normally note," which is a reasonably disgraceful thing to say.) And, the effect is not only to reduce the blog's overall usefulness, but to lead this reader to distrust Wittes's readings of other documents he sometimes deals with. All in all, someone ought to take him out to the woodshed to cure him of his obsession.