law

After a complaint by the Canadian Islamic Congress, Maclean's magazine and columnist Mark Steyn appeared before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal to defend the legality of their articles about Islam.

In the UK, during the early days of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a similarly buffoonish quasi-governmental body moved to stop the film International Gorillay from being released in Britain. A hit in Pakistan, the movie portrayed Rushdie as a whiskey-soaked Jewish lothario who intended to subvert Islam by running a network of discos and casinos. Rushdie himself intervened to lift the ban, saying the offense was real, but not worth the practical or moral harm done by banning what amounted to just an exceptionally dumb movie -- even if it was a movie that encouraged his own murder. British audiences watched the film, and thanks to YouTube, you can too.

Ninety-six people were arrested in a San Diego State University drug bust.

Where's Captain Renault when you need him? I'm shocked, shocked, to learn that drug dealing is rampant at fraternities at San Diego State (one of Playboy's top 10 party schools). Actually, what shocks me is the price the student dealers were charging for cocaine: $35 a gram. In my college days almost 30 years ago, at a small, northeastern liberal-arts school with a less illustrious party heritage, a gram cost $100. So in constant dollars, the price of cocaine has fallen by 85 percent, to about $16 a gram -- imagine how many more coke-fueled novels Jay McInerney could have written at that price!

Jimmy Carter's talks with Hamas trigger a feud with the State Department.

Is there any living ex-president you'd less want to be trapped with on a desert island than Jimmy Carter? Judged by that yardstick, his possible prosecution under the Logan Act for his latest act of freelance diplomacy in the Middle East -- as some have come close to suggesting -- seems like a great idea. But let's be serious: the best thing you could do with this 209-year-old statute is junk it.

The Supreme Court heard arguments today in a case that will determine whether child rapists are eligible for the death penalty. No one has been executed in the US, except for the crime of murder, since 1964.

Before this morning's arguments on whether Louisiana can execute Patrick Kennedy' the Chief Justice read an opinion that must have made the condemned man's lawyers' hearts sink. In what might give a signal, however faint, of the Court's disposition toward capital punishment, John Roberts delivered a judgment that roundly rejected the claim by two Kentucky death-row inmates that lethal injection would be a cruel way to kill them, and therefore prohibited under the Eighth amendment to the Constitution. A healthy majority of 7-2 sided against the inmates. And on a Court that thinks pumping a man full of toxic chemicals is not likely to cause a "'substantial' or 'objectively intolerable' risk of serious harm," Kennedy could not expect a great deal of compassion.

A Senate committee heard testimony from an Illinois woman who alleges that a co-worker and a soldier raped her while she worked in Iraq for KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary and contracting giant.

Someone, somewhere, is hunting for rape statistics right now, to show that nationwide in the U.S., the rate of sexual assault is lower than the rate among contractors in Iraq. I would not be surprised if that is so. There are, for one thing, far fewer women per capita to assault among Iraq contractors than among the American population at large, and it's far more probable that a female contractor is armed or has easy access to a weapon of vengeance. On the other hand, there does seem to be a connection between gruesome crimes like this one and the climate of lawlessness and license in which military contractors operate.

A suit filed in District Court in Hawaii demands that the U.S. halt construction of the Large Hadron Collider (L.H.C.), the $8-billion particle accelerator on the Franco-Swiss border, on the grounds that it could cause the destruction of the earth, the solar system, or the universe.

The L.H.C. could reveal the nature of matter and confirm physicists' best guesses about the validity of string theory. These would be advances comparable to Einstein's or Newton's -- but they are possibilities only because we do not know what will happen when we switch the contraption on. Scientists protest that the probability of their experiments' causing the end of the universe is astronomically low, and they are telling the truth. But tinkering with the unknown is what experimental science is all about, and even the scientists must admit that there is a chance of doomsday (and, indeed, a chance of many other things) in any project like this.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in Indiana v. Edwards, a case that could limit the right of mentally-ill criminal defendants to represent themselves at trial.

A madman had his day in court yesterday. Ahmad Edwards, a schizophrenic who tried to kill a security guard in 1999, appealed his conviction on grounds that the judge hadn't let him act as his own lawyer. The Indiana court that eventually convicted him appointed a public defender after Edwards filed nonsense motions and wrote a letter addressing the judge as "old man." (Edwards has counsel representing him on appeal.) Is it possible, the Supreme Court asked yesterday, to be too crazy to represent yourself in your own trial, but sane enough to stand trial to begin with? MORE

The English Surgeon, a documentary about a London neurosurgeon who operated on Ukrainians' brains using a Bosch power-drill, raised questions about medical ethics.

Henry Marsh, the sawbones in question, has traveled to the Ukraine serially for fifteen years, always with the goal of helping Ukrainian colleagues make do with poor equipment, or none. Cutting open patients' heads and using screws and drills bought at a hardware store would be grounds for license-suspension and possibly imprisonment in England. Here, it appears to be an act of compassion -- and one that reveals a pernicious double-standard in medical ethics. MORE

This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Parker v. District of Columbia, the first Second Amendment case they've taken since 1939's United States v. Miller.

At issue is the District's extremely stringent gun control rules (which prevent anyone other than police officers from legally owning handguns), and more broadly the legal status of the Bill of Rights' most infamous subordinate clause. The Constitution is full of somewhat ambiguous provisions, but the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment — "a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" — combined with a lack of legal precedents has left the basic issue of whether or not this protects any individual right at all uncertain. MORE

Jared Massey, tased by a Utah highway patrolman six months ago over a $107 speeding ticket, won a $40,000 settlement from the state of Utah.

Massey's gratuitous tasing shows the bright side of our Orwellian future: the video popped up on YouTube, and when the public outcry began, Utah paid out quick.

The left is starting to notice that ubiquitous surveillance cuts both ways. Citing privacy concerns, the ACLU opposes video surveillance in public places, but it has also begun distributing camcorders to citizens in a St. Louis neighborhood to monitor alleged police abuses. Barack Obama touts an Illinois law that requires police to videotape interrogations in murder cases. Cell-phone video portends a future where bystanders record police behavior everywhere, protecting good cops from false complaints and making it harder for bad cops to misbehave. MORE

Two public defenders announced that their client, now deceased, killed a man nearly thirty years ago, but that attorney-client privilege kept them from telling the world -- and allowing the wrongfully convicted suspect, Alton Logan, to go free.

It's tempting to say that the public defenders should have come forward, accepted disbarment, and spared Alton Logan twenty-six years of wrongful imprisonment. Perhaps they could have sprung Logan without appreciably weakening clients' trust in their attorneys. Disbarment is a severe sanction, and after all, this case is an extreme one. Besides, what comes first -- lawyerly obligations, or human ones? MORE

The Scottish parliament is considering a pardon for Helen Duncan, the last woman jailed under the Witchcraft Act of 1735.

Some initiatives -- such as this pardon -- have merit, even though their proponents are groups that exist in part to support those who have "experienced poltergeist activity." Helen Duncan spent nine months in the clink because she predicted the sinking of a British ship (an act of clairvoyance made admittedly less impressive by the fact that it was 1944, and British ships had U-boats snapping at their keels). MORE