Legal Commentary

The important point that Kennedy v. Louisiana proves about Boumediene v. Bush

By Beldar

This is a post in which I attempt to connect some dots between two awful Supreme Court decisions. As usual, I meander a bit en route. You can skip to the numbered paragraphs and the bold-faced stuff near the end if you grow impatient.

Friday night, on the anniversary of our nation's independence, I much enjoyed the televised presentation from Washington of the Marine Drum and Bugle Corps and the National Symphony playing a series of John Phillip Sousa marches. Some of them ? "The Washington Post" and "Semper Fidelis," and of course "The Stars and Stripes Forever" ? I still have (mostly) memorized from my trumpet-playing days in the Longhorn Band during college and law school. Thus, the fingers on my right hand twitched as I listened, and in my imagination at least, I could still hit and hold all the high notes, and my double- and triple-tonguing was immaculate. I'm a fan of many, many types of music, and that includes marches like Sousa's written for the classic military band.

Inevitably, I was reminded of the old cliché: "Military justice is to justice as military music is to music." Military music and military justice are be splendid indeed, and their learned practitioners are certainly worthy  of respect. But they aren't to everyone's taste, and (to pick another artistic metaphor) they tend to be rendered on a more limited shape and size of canvas, using a more limited palette of colors. Sousa isn't famous for emotional violin solos or jammin' electric lead guitar riffs.

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on July 06, 2008 (boomark / email).