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"PAUL CAMPOS BECLOWNS HIMSELF YET AGAIN, and Brian Leiter pinches the red rubber nose."

By Ann Althouse

Says Glenn Reynolds ? you can tell it's Glenn from the all caps ? linking to Leiter.

Here's the underlying Campos compost:

Leiter thinks various members of the Bush administration are war criminals, and that their worst crimes - crimes for which they should apparently be subjected to Nuremberg-style prosecution - include the systematic torture of helpless prisoners in the name of a phony "war on terror."

Anyone who believes this must also acknowledge that John Yoo's eagerness to make specious legal arguments in support of torture seems to have led directly to lots of people being tortured, some to death.

Under such circumstances, it takes a twisted sense of moral priorities to get outraged about the (very slim) possibility that Yoo might lose his academic sinecure because he went out of his way to help the U.S. government commit war crimes.

In the end, I suspect that for Leiter, as for so many professors of this or that, words such as "torture" and "war crimes" are indeed nothing more than words, with which they can continue to play their petty and useless academic games.

I don't know what's more common among law professors ? "eagerness to make specious legal arguments" or willingness to apply the label "war crime." And sure, there are plenty of petty and useless academic games ... but why is Campos so sure he's outside of these games as he makes his pronouncements?

Full post as published by Althouse on April 18, 2008 (boomark / email).