Professors Strangelove

Abstract:     
With no discernible comedic intent, a number of lawyers and law professors have reprised roles from Stanley Kubrick's famous film, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Insisting that the war on terror is too important to be left to anyone other than the President, scorning opponents of torture as sissies afraid to muss their hair, and rapidly collecting promotions and personal citations, these lawyers are teaching America to stop worrying and love the waterboard - and the wiretap, and the ethnic profiling, and the indefinite detention, and all the other strategies of our new war that might be funny if they weren't so deadly serious. This essay reviews Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule, Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Keywords: national security, executive power, civil liberties

Accepted Paper Series