Legal Theory Workshop: Balancing Security and Liberty: Trying Foreign Enemy Combatants in Military Commissions
Join us for Legal Theory Workshop with Prof. Sari Kisilevsky (CUNY), who will discuss a paper she is currently drafting:
"On Dec. 31, 2011, despite widespread controversy, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law.1 Among other things, this legislation codified the government’s practice of detaining foreign enemy combatants without charge, and reaffirmed its policy of trying them in military commissions. The signing of this legislation, along with the recent targeted killing of an American citizen for engaging in terrorist activities, evidence of a secret “kill list” maintained by the President,3 and news that the US government is engaged in indiscriminate monitoring of people’s phone and internet activity are stark examples of the extent to which the US government will ignore legal procedure in its prosecution of the “war on terrorism.”
There is no legal reason compelling the trial of foreign suspects in military commissions rather than federal courts; federal courts have the jurisdiction to try these foreigners accused of war crimes and terrorism suspects, and established rules for governing such trials. The primary justification that the government has offered is its need to “balance” Americans’ liberty against a heightened threat to security. In times of danger, the thought goes, the government must limit people’s liberty in light of this heightened threat in order to protect people from the increased risks to their security. I will call this the argument from balance. My aim in what follows is to evaluate its moral legitimacy with respect to the US government’s policy of trying enemy belligerents in military commissions rather than in federal courts."
About the speaker
Assistant Professor of Philosophy Sari Kisilevsky previously held the Pearl and Nathan Halegua Chair in Ethics and Tolerance. In addition to her affiliation with Jewish Studies at Queens College, Professor Kisilevsky is a scholar with CUNY School of Law, where she teaches philosophy of law, political philosophy, and ethics. She received the Faculty Publication Program Fellowship Award for the spring 2011 semester, and the college’s President’s Award for Innovative Teaching in 2010. Her presentations have included the Force and Freedom: Workshop on Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom: Kant’s Moral and Legal Philosophy, organized with Martin Stone, Cardozo/New School and Lon Fuller’s The Case of the Speluncean Explorer to the Honors in Social Science 200. She served as Program Committee Chair (with Jonathan Peterson, University of Toronto) of Philosophy of Law and Social and Political Philosophy for Congress 2010 of the Canadian Philosophical Association. In 2011 she presented “Security, Liberty, and Procedural Justice: Rethinking the Balance,” at Nassau Community College, and “Easy Cases and Social Sources: Toward a New Defense of Legal Positivism,” at The Nature of Law: Contemporary Perspectives, Mac- Master University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Her publication of “Equity, Necessity and the Rule of Law,” Proceedings of the 10th International Kant Congress, was published by de Gruyter publishers, Berlin.
The Workshops
The Legal Theory Workshop Series brings leading scholars from around the world to the Faculty throughout the teaching year to present work-in-progress. All members of the McGill Law community, students and faculty alike, are invited to attend.
