Since the September 11 attacks on the United States, the Bush administration has come under fire for its methods of combating terrorism. Waging war against al Qaeda has proven to be a legal quagmire, with critics claiming that the administration's response in Afghanistan and Iraq is unconstitutional. The war on terror--and, in a larger sense, the administration's decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty and the Kyoto accords--has many wondering whether the constitutional framework for making foreign affairs decisions has been discarded by the present administration.
John Yoo, formerly a...

In 1997, a Mexican national named Jose Ernesto Medellin was sentenced to death for raping and murdering two teenage girls in Texas. In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that he was entitled to appellate review of his sentence, since the arresting officers had not informed him of his right to seek assistance from the Mexican consulate prior to trial, as prescribed by a treaty ratified by Congress in 1963. In 2008, amid fierce controversy, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the international ruling had no weight. Medellin subsequently was executed.

As Julian Ku and John Yoo...

The world today is overwhelmed by wars between nations and within nations, wars that have dominated American politics for quite some time. Point of Attack calls for a new understanding of the grounds for war. In this book John Yoo argues that the new threats to international security come not from war between the great powers, but from the internal collapse of states, terrorist groups, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and destabilizing regional powers. In Point of Attack he rejects the widely-accepted framework built on the U.N. Charter and replaces it with a new...

This volume is the first in a series of comparative studies that focuses on Korea's legal system and its political institutions under the sponsorship of the Korea Law Center at UC Berkeley Law School. Korea has experienced an astonishing pace of legal reforms within an interval of two generations. The collapse of the authoritarian regime started an irreversible process of democratization that has not yet completed its full course. The papers included in this volume cast new lights on the challenges and institutions that define the substance and the structure of current legal reforms. Although...