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Book review: overcoming the ubermensch

Jordan Paust, Beyond the Law: The Bush Administration’s Unlawful Responses in the “War” on Terror, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Notes

  1. Consider this assessment from Philip Bobbitt: “[I]t is unlikely that the abuses that have taken place at Guantanamo and at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad would have occurred, at least on the scale that is now being publicly reported, if the existing regulations governing the treatment of prisoners had not been trumped by an executive claim of inherent constitutional authority to conduct torture, or at least highly coercive interrogations approaching torture, in spite of the prevailing statutory and regulatory framework.” Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent 275 (2008). For one of the best discussions on the Abu Ghraib scandal, see Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure (2008).

  2. Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency 11–12 (2007). Indeed, Goldsmith identifies this fear to be the source of the motivation to “stretch the law to its limits.” Id.

  3. Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 126 S.Ct. 2749 (2006).

  4. Id. at 25, 400. The market state is the state we associate with a neo-liberal economic order; it is the state we associate with “globalization.” A key feature of “globalization” is the necessity of the state to “compete with global, private actors for authority and influence.” Id. at 486. As Bobbitt puts it, the market state operates to maximize individual opportunity in the marketplace, tends toward privatization of many heretofore state-run activities, and “depends on the international capital markets and, to a lesser degree, on the modern multinational business network [including the news media and NGOs] . . . in preference to management by national or transnational political bodies.” Id. at 44–45. Market states acquire their moral superiority in the geo-political world by being a “states of consent.” Id.

  5. Id. at 181. See also id. at 62 (“Al Qaeda is a reaction to the emergence of the globalized market states of consent).

References

  1. Gourevitch, P., & Morris, E. (2008). Standard operating procedure.

  2. Martinez, J. S. (2008). Process and substance in the “War on Terror,” 108 Colum. L. Rev. 1013.

  3. Giroux, H. (2004) The terror of neoliberalism: authoritarianism and the eclipse of democracy, 12.

  4. Bauman, Z. (2007). Liquid times: living in an age of uncertainty, 9.

  5. Shue, H. (2004). Torture, in torture: a collection. In S. Levinson (ed.) 2004

  6. Hatfield, M. (2006). Fear, legal indeterminacy, and the American lawyering culture, 10 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 511, 523.

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  7. Schwarz, F. A. O., & Huq, A. Z. (2008). Unchecked and unbalanced: Presidential power in a time of terror, 105-106.

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  1. Northeastern University School of Law, 400 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Daniel R. Williams

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Correspondence to Daniel R. Williams.

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Williams, D.R. Book review: overcoming the ubermensch. Crime Law Soc Change 51, 549–559 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-009-9190-4

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