A Constitutional History Of Habeas Corpus

Habeas Corpus in Wartime unearths and presents a comprehensive account of the legal and political history of habeas corpus in wartime in the Anglo-American legal tradition. The book begins by tracing the origins of the habeas privilege in English law, giving special attention to the English Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which limited the scope of executive detention and used the machinery of the English courts to enforce its terms. It also explores the circumstances that led Parliament to invent the concept of suspension as a tool for setting aside the protections of the Habeas Corpus Act in wartime. Turning to the United States, the book highlights how the English suspension framework greatly influenced the development of early American habeas law before and after the American Revolution and during the Founding period, when the United States Constitution enshrined a habeas privilege in its Suspension Clause. The book then chronicles the story of the habeas privilege and suspension over the course of American history, giving special attention to the Civil War period. The final chapters explore how the challenges posed by modern warfare during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have placed great strain on the previously well-settled understanding of the role of the habeas privilege and suspension in American constitutional law, particularly during World War II when the United States government detained tens of thousands of Japanese American citizens and later during the War on Terror. Throughout, the book draws upon a wealth of original and heretofore untapped historical resources to shed light on the purpose and role of the Suspension Clause in the United States Constitution, revealing all along that many of the questions that arise today regarding the scope of executive power to arrest and detain in wartime are not new ones.

"The storied writ of habeas corpus-literally, to hold the body-has enjoyed celebrated status in the common law tradition for centuries. Writing in the eighteenth century, the widely influential English jurist and commentator William Blackstone once labeled the writ of habeas corpus a "bulwark of our liberties." Soon thereafter, a member of Parliament glorified the writ as "[t]he great palladium of the liberties of the subject." Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, in the lead up to the American Revolution, the Continental Congress declared that the habeas privilege and the right to trial by jury were among the most important rights in a free society, "without which a people cannot be free and happy." A few years later, while promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution in The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton celebrated the privilege as one of the "greate[st] securities to liberty and republicanism" known. Thus, as another participant in the ratification debates wrote, the writ of habeas corpus has long been viewed as "essential to freedom.""--

Eric M. Freedman "Making Habeas Work: A Legal History" explores habeas corpus, a judicial order that requires a person under arrest to be brought before an independent judge or into court. In his book, Freedman critically discusses habeas corpus as a common law writ, as a legal remedy and as an instrument of checks and balances.

"Being a reprint of The constitutional and legal development of habeas corpus as the writ of liberty ; together with 2006 revised edition, The American reception of the writ of liberty."--T.p.

This book tells the story of habeas corpus from medieval England to modern America, crediting the rocky history to the writ's very nature as a government power. The book weighs in on habeas's historical controversies - addressing the writ's role in the power struggle between the federal government and the states, and the proper scope of federal habeas for state prisoners and for wartime detainees from the Civil War and World War II to the War on Terror.

We call habeas corpus the Great Writ of Liberty. But it was actually a writ of power. In a work based on an unprecedented study of thousands of cases across more than five hundred years, Paul Halliday provides a sweeping revisionist account of the world's most revered legal device. In the decades around 1600, English judges used ideas about royal power to empower themselves to protect the king's subjects. The key was not the prisoner's "right" to "liberty"Ñthese are modern idiomsÑbut the possible wrongs committed by a jailer or anyone who ordered a prisoner detained. This focus on wrongs gave the writ the force necessary to protect ideas about rights as they developed outside of law. This judicial power carried the writ across the world, from Quebec to Bengal. Paradoxically, the representative impulse, most often expressed through legislative action, did more to undermine the writ than anything else. And the need to control imperial subjects would increasingly constrain judges. The imperial experience is thus crucial for making sense of the broader sweep of the writ's history and of English law. Halliday's work informed the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush on prisoners in the Guant‡namo detention camps. His eagerly anticipated book is certain to be acclaimed the definitive history of habeas corpus.

Federal habeas corpus is a procedure under which a federal court may review the legality of an individual's incarceration. It is most often the stage of the criminal appellate process that follows direct appeal and any available state collateral review. The law in the area is an intricate weave of statute and case law. Current federal law operates under the premise that with rare exceptions prisoners challenging the legality of the procedures by which they were tried or sentenced get "one bite of the apple." Relief for state prisoners is only available if the state courts have ignored or rejected their valid claims, and there are strict time limits within which they may petition the federal courts for relief. Moreover, a prisoner relying upon a novel interpretation of law must succeed on direct appeal; federal habeas review may not be used to establish or claim the benefits of a "new rule." Expedited federal habeas procedures are available in the case of state death row inmates if the state has provided an approved level of appointed counsel. The Supreme Court has held that Congress enjoys considerable authority to limit, but not to extinguish, access to the writ. This report is available in an abridged version as CRS Report RS22432, "Federal Habeas Corpus: An Abridged Sketch," by Charles Doyle.