The Power Of Habeas Corpus In America

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.

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.

Examines the rise of an American-run global detention system, including Guantâanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and secret CIA jails, and discusses efforts that are being made to challenge this new prison system through habeas corpus.

For most Americans, habeas corpus is the cornerstone of our legal system: the principal constitutional check on arbitrary government power, allowing an arrested person to challenge the legality of his detention. In a study that could not be more timely, Justin Wert reexamines this essential individual right and shows that habeas corpus is not necessarily the check that we've assumed. Habeas corpus, it emerges, is as much a tool of politics as it is of law. In this first study of habeas corpus in an American political context, Wert shifts our collective emphasis from the judicial to the political-toward the changes in the writ influenced by Congress, the president, political parties, state governments, legal academics, and even interest groups. By doing so, he reveals how political regimes have used habeas corpus both to undo the legacies of their predecessors and to establish and enforce their own vision of constitutional governance. Tracing the history of the writ from the Founding to Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush, Wert illuminates crucial developmental moments in its evolution. He demonstrates that during the antebellum period, Reconstruction, Gilded Age, Great Society, and the ongoing war on terrorism, habeas corpus has waxed and waned in harmony with the interests of majoritarian politics. Along the way, Wert identifies and explains the political context of fine points of law that many political scientists and historians may not be aware of—such as the exhaustion rule requiring that a federal habeas participant must first exhaust all possible claims for relief in state court, a maneuver by which the post-Reconstruction Court abandoned supervision of race relations in the South. Especially in light of the new scrutiny of habeas corpus prompted by the Guantánamo detainees, Wert's book is essential for broadening our understanding of how law and politics continue to intersect after 9/11. Brimming with fresh insights into constitutional development and regime theory, it shows that the Great Writ of Liberty may not be so great as we have supposed-because while it has the potential to enforce conceptions of rights that are consistent with the best ideals of American politics, it also has the potential to enforce its worst aspects as well.

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.

An authoritative two volume dictionary covering English law from earliest times up to the present day, giving a definition and an explanation of every legal term old and new. Provides detailed statements of legal terms as well as their historical context.

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.