With its decision last week to strike down the Bush Administration’s unilateral creation of military tribunals for trying detainees, the Supreme Court highlighted and reinforced the rule of law in the conduct of military operations.
Several recent publications provide rich background on military law.
The 2006 edition of the “Operational Law Handbook” (pdf) published by the Army Judge Advocate General is “a ‘how to’ guide for Judge Advocates practicing operational law. It provides references and describes tactics and techniques for the practice of operational law.”
The Handbook covers the gamut of issues that arise in the field, from the Law of War to intelligence-related law to detainee operations.
See “Operational Law Handbook (2006),” Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School (598 pages, 3.7 MB).
U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the “war on terrorism” have raised a variety of novel legal issues, according to a 2004 study performed for the Army on “legal lessons learned.”
“Whether determining the applicability of the law of armed conflict to non-state terrorist actors, applying traditional and new fiscal authorities to a military occupation, or assisting in the development of rules of engagement (ROE) for an enemy that blended into civilian populations, JAs [judge advocates] and paralegals wrestled with cutting-edge legal issues during OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom] and OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom].”
See “Legal Lessons Learned From Afghanistan and Iraq: Volume 1, Major Combat Operations,” Center for Law and Military Operations, 1 August 2004 (454 pages, 7.1 MB PDF).
Volume 2 of that study has recently been made public. See “Legal Lessons Learned From Afghanistan and Iraq: Volume 2, Full Spectrum Operations,” Center for Law and Military Operations, September 2005 (368 pages, 3.3 MB PDF).
Secrecy News is honored to be a recipient of the 2006 Public Access to Government Information award from the American Association of Law Libraries.
To secure the U.S. bio-infrastructure, maintain global leadership in biotechnology, and safeguard American citizens from emerging threats to their privacy, the federal government must modernize its approach to human genetic and biological data.
To ensure an energy transition that brings broad based economic development, participation, and direct benefits to communities, we need federal policy that helps shape markets. Unfortunately, there is a large gap in understanding of how to leverage federal policy making to support access to capital and credit.
From use to testing to deployment, the scaffolding for responsible integration of AI into high-risk use cases is just not there.
OPM’s new HR 2.0 initiative is entering hostile terrain. Those who have followed federal HR modernization for years desperately want this effort to succeed.