Letter From Ground Zero

The Supreme Court of the United States has had two historic encounters with George W. Bush. The first was its decision to stop the recount of the presidential vote in Florida in December 2000 and, in effect, to put Bush in the White House. The second was the series of decisions rendered in June in the cases regarding the detainees in Guantánamo and the two American citizens being held as "enemy combatants."

I was watching television coverage at the moment the Court stayed the Florida recount and witnessed a vote counter lift her hand to examine a ballot and then, when the news of the decision came, drop it, with evident sadness, back onto the uncounted pile. The law, usually seen as a support and foundation of democracy, had in this case visibly stopped it cold.

The decision sent a shock wave through the legal community. Some 673 law professors from 173 law schools signed a statement asserting that "by stopping the vote count in Florida, the US Supreme Court used its power to act as political partisans, not as judges of a court of law." Professor Robert Post, then teaching constitutional law at UC Berkeley, wrote that the decision made him feel "shame" before his students. There rose up before his eyes "a searing and disorienting vision of a world without law."

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