Juvenile Literature

. and highly addictive. On the one hand, I find myself buying books that I actually do need but never quite got around to pushing the one click button because I was deterred by the shipping price, and trying to figure out the shipping options. Jean-Marie signed up for the flat rate prime program, and I do find myself clicking the button more. Truth is, though, I don’t have time or interest in shopping in a store for anything this Christmas that I can buy online. When I look at the grocery section on Amazon and realize that cool coffee and chocolate and that kind of goo-gah can be bought and have delivered with no additional pain or expense - well, I’m going online for everything I possibly can this year. Amazon prime is convenient

In yesterday’s Charleston Daily Mail, Steve Roberts, president of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, was quoted as calling for a statewide electronic health record system to reduce health care costs and increase the value of care.

The full article, Chamber of Commerce promotes electronic record-keeping, can be read via the Charleston Daily Mail.

For more information on the State Chamber’s position check out the Chamber’s 2008 Policy Paper on Health Information Technology. WV Chamber of Commerce President Calls for EHRs

HealthBlog by Bill Crounse, MD, a new (at least to me) health care IT blog to follow. Dr. Crounse is the Worldwide Health Director for Microsoft. I’ve added HealthBlog to my RSS reader and look forward to the great green content being generated by Dr. Crounse.

I picked up a reference to HealthBlog via a post by Jay Parkinson, MD giving his impression of the opening keynote address and morning session at the World Healthcare Innovation and IT Congress in Washington, D.C. (Dr. Crounse’s comments include a summary of Kevin Kelly’s keynote on mega trends: Global, You, Do and Open). HealthBlog by Bill Crounse, MD

- OregonLive.com (The Oregonian)UPDATED: :08 a.m. PDT, December 30, 2007

Honours: Order of the British Empire, Civil - DBE and CBE (Independent)Order of the British Empire

A knight’s tale: Author retells old English epic (Contra Costa Times)“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” seldom receives its due as an enduring piece of early English literature. Partly that’s because, after being composed by an anonymous medieval poet around 1400, the manuscript disappeared into a private collection for centuries, only re-emerging when, as Simon

Due to prior commitments and client demands I wasn’t able to attend the Create West Virginia Conference held this week at Stonewall Resort.

Over the past two days I received a number of emails and facebook comments from friends and colleagues about the quality of the content and expressing excitement about the event. If you didn’t attend and want to get a flavor for the sessions be sure to check out some of the presentations on the Create WV website and wrap up comments and photos on the Create WV Blog. For more read what other are saying about the conference.

I was particular interested in the presentation by Anthony Salcito, General Manager U.S. Education for Microsoft, after reading the live blogging notes by Lee Kraus who blogs about learning and technology issues out of central West Virginia. Read through Mr. Salcito’s presentation for some eye opening facts about what we all face as a result of the growing global community. His slides remind me a bit of the video, Shift Happens - Globalization.

Photo courtesy of one of West Virginia’s most creative artists, Charleston Jupiter Hamilton. Create WV Conference Wrap Up

Larry Solum, over at Legal Theory Blog, gives thanks by remembering Rogers Albritton. Here. I don’t think Larry will mind if I just repost the whole thing:

This Thanksgiving, I have been thinking about Rogers Albritton–the great Wittgensteinian philosopher and the single most significant influence on my intellectual development. I took every class that Albritton offered at UCLA in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Albritton taught the value of clarity, and of not giving up on a problem no matter how long it took. In the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a paper entitled “Semantic Originalism.” The roots of the paper are in a conversation that I had with Albritton more than twenty-five years ago. Albritton told me to read Paul Grice, and since that conversation I’ve returned to Grice’s work, again and again, in a long, slow, and painful effort to understand how laws mean. A lesson that Albritton taught and I have only recently begun to appreciate is that some work cannot be done in a week, a month, a year, or even a decade.
Thank you Rogers.

Let me echo Larry’s sentiments. Rogers was also my professor, and I have never stopped thinking about things he taught me, and the method he taught me, in areas ranging from metaphysics to epistemology to ethics to religion. I have thought especially hard on his lectures on the philosophy of religion across the last twenty five years. I raise them in discussions with people a lot - most recently, with a friend here in DC talking about how she, a nominal Catholic, and her husband, a nominal Jew, planned to raise their some-day un-nominal children. I thought about it when posting to this blog about the future of Buddhism a couple of weeks ago.

Apart from the substance - well, what Larry says, the idea that some things require a long, long time to think about. This sometimes makes things tough from a career standpoint - I suppose I should be cranking out books by now, and I am working on doing that. But one thing that training from Rogers, and also from Philippa Foot, instilled in me was a sense that short articles are better vehicles for thinking, most of the time, than long books - and that in writing conceptually difficult things, to tie oneself to a text was a good idea. It is hard for me to conceptualize whole books; likewise my fondness for the substantive review essay, tied to a text or set of texts. I don’t suppose it looks like intellectual progress; but in my case at least, I feel on surer ground intellectually.

I was blessed with having a whole host of world class intellectuals in my undergraduate education at UCLA, in approximately the same years as Larry - we were classmates and friends together in the philosophy department there. Rogers, Philippa Foot, Herbert Morris, David Rapoport (with whom I am still active in the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, of which he is the editor), Robert Brenner; and, passing through, Rosalind Hursthouse, Joshua Cohen, David Pears, and many others. It was a model of what a public university could offer in the way of genuinely world class intellectual life. The conversations with Rogers covered so much ground and would go on for hours after class. They were some of the great intellectual experiences of my life, and I wish that every undergraduate could have that kind of experience.

(ps. More from Larry here, on Rogers and also on his classes with Josh Cohen. And thanks Larry for the link!) Larry Solum gives thanks for Rogers Albritton, and so do I

I noticed looking at the site meter that at this moment this blog has a number of readers from the West Bank apparently researching prescriptivism and descriptivism. Welcome - and if you have particular questions, feel free to post them in the comments and I’ll try to put up some special post if it is something that I feel expert enough to answer. It’s not clear from the google queries exactly in what subject matter you mean the terms prescriptivism and descriptivism - they are used in somewhat different ways across a variety of fields ranging from grammar to moral philosophy to politics and international relations. But if your question is in an area I know something about, I’d be happy to help. To this blog’s Palestinian readers researching prescriptivism and descriptivism

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An attorney I work with sent me a link to the following Fox News article, Doctors, Hospital Workers Suspended for Viewing George Clooney’s Medical Records. For more news check out Google News search.

The article indicates that 40 employees at Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, NJ were suspended for violating the hospital’s HIPAA policies and procedures.

Based on the information in the article I suspect that the employees were found to have violated the minimum necessary provisions under the HIPAA Privacy Rule. This section of the rule provides:

For uses of protected health information, the covered entitys policies and procedures must identify the persons or classes of persons within the covered entity who need access to the information to carry out their job duties, the categories or types of protected health information needed, and conditions appropriate to such access.

As more news comes out about this I suspect this might serve as a good example of application of the minimum necessary requirements under HIPAA. If the employees further disclosed the information to third parties outside the hospital (including the media) other provisions of HIPAA might also come into play. George Clooney and HIPAA Minimum Necessary Rule

Eric Eyre reports in today’s Sunday Gazette-Mail that Governor Manchin has rejected the proposed new Certificate of Need CT Standards approved by the West Virginia Health Care Authority last month.

The article indicates Governor Manchin sent a letter to the Authority’s Board on Friday, December 7, asking that they re-examine the imaging equipment proposal and submit a revised plan. The article also indicates that Governor Manchin rejected the proposed new standards on the basis that the standards did not require physicians to accept low income patients.

For more background on the proposed new standards see my previous posts - here and here.

UPDATE (12/10/07): Governor Manchin’s December 7, 2007 letter to the WVHCA. Governor Manchin Rejects New Certificate of Need CT Standards

I am working at this very moment on a short commentary for a law review tentatively titled (the law review does not know this yet), New FAQs for the War on Terror: Questions That Counterterrorism Policy Must Answer in a New Administration.

I am gradually developing a list of questions that constitute questions that define the policy divide on various matters of law. In no order at all - really completely disorganized - and without trying to make the language pretty or pithy, here is the beginning of the list:

Is administration detention in principle ever permissible? Or must it always come down to, as the UN special rapporteur asserted in a debate a couple of weeks ago with me at ASIL, try them in a reasonable time or let them go, and that principle transcends whatever specific, technical legal structure you employ?

Can ordinary criminal trials, without special recourse, adequately serve counterterrorism needs?

Can you use some structure for trials that is outside the existing criminal law framework?

Note that legal conservatives Rivkin and Casey oppose the move to a national security court precisely because they believe that only commander in chief authority and the law of war provide the constitutional basis not to have ordinary criminal trials. It is the conservative analogue to the position of the rights groups: they likewise do not think that you can constitutionally have special procedures even if it is “civilian.”

Is waterboarding torture, or otherwise always impermissible?

In interrogation practices, does it matter what you know about the person - their degree of knowledge and culpability - - and the risk to others reasonably assessed - situational ethics, so to speak - in determining what you can permissibly do to them short of torture, however specifically defined? Are you allowed to do to KSM things, while still short of torture, that you are not allowed to do to someone about whom you know nothing?

Will the citizen (and resident alien, really) v noncitizen distinction continue to apply; and will the territorial v nonterritorial distinction continue to apply in counterterroism legal regimes?

The current administration position is that citizens cannot be subjected to illegal enemy combatant treatment. Increasingly, rational terrorist groups will seek to recruit Americans or American passport holders - the situation will come to resemble that of Western Europe, where the terrorists are “yours” - and a special legal regime premised on noncitizenship or nonterritoriality will not do what you intended when designed around Guantanamo Afghan prisoners.

Is it okay to change the legal criminal rules for CIA personnel midstream?

Ex post facto problems? Simple fairness? Consider how much of the wrangling in the Judiciary Committee has really had this as the predicate unstated.

What must and should be got from Congress, and what is the obligation of the judiciary to defer to the united political branches on counterterrorism and national security policy?

Will the judiciary defer? Heck if I know.

What is the application of international human rights law to all of this, apart from domestic US law?

How should it interact with the laws of war in the existing situation, and what about its application to the US domestically or abroad?

How should future detentions be governed?

Under what structure? Nearly all the existing regimes have been built around the “legacy” Afghan prisoners. Over time, however, new adminsitrations will almost certainly detain people who might or might not be citiziens, might or mght not be in the United States.

Most importantly at this moment - not a hypothetical category - the US is currently detaining thousands of people in Iraq, including a large number of foreign jihadis. A possibly unavoidable issue for a later administration is what happens to those jihadis whom the United States has concluded it cannot try for any particular crime but whom it cannot let go free - to go make jihad in Iraq again, or Afhstanistan or Pakistan or thailand or Indonesia or Malaysia etc. What should it do?

When will any of this get taken up in a serious way, if ever?

(And, most important, why can’t I use block quotes or bullets without screwing up the letter justification on Blogger?) A first draft, disorganized list of questions for counterterrorism policy to answer in a new administration

Julian Ku, over at Opinio Juris, here, mentions a conference at Brooklyn Law School on corporate liability in international law. I share much of Julian’s view, briefly expressed in this post. I’d add that in informal discussions with non-US international lawyers, they not infrequently express discomfort at the way in which ATS law in the US is evolving and going its own way - a kind of specialized US version of international law for purposes of ATS litigation. It puts them in a difficult situation, because they frequently like the results but dislike the process and what it suggests for the fragmentation of international law as US courts do their own thing with it. Hence the frequent hesitation to pronounce publicly on the issue.

I do hope the Brooklyn conference will publish something, however; the problem, of course, is that there are lots and lots and lots and lots of academic conferences on this topic, not infrequently organized by my school, consisting of academics and politically committed students announcing a political agenda in the hushed tones of academic international law, and never giving a thought to actual arguments on the other side. Whereas, in these areas, it’s not just policy arguments on the other side, there are lots of doctrinal ones, textual ones under international law.

Reaching the conclusions reached by the ATS courts on things like civil liability for corporations in these cases requires unabashedly heroic assumptions. Or else it requires what Judge Weinstein did in his last Agent Orange case: simply a lofty assertion that it would be inconceivable that a US court would avoid imposing tort liability because of the corporate form, but thereby negating the altogether quite conceivable implication, however, because that is the plainest reading of the treaty law, that international law (at least if you get away from what American professors and their students think) does not actually conceive of either corporate liability as such or civil liability for corporations as such. It is an interesting form of the sucker’s bet, really: ATS litigation today consists of wanting to have (and mostly getting) all the goodies and none of the burdens of US domestic law in international human rights litigation, while wanting to have all the of the goodies and none of the burdens of international law. Julian Ku brief note on Brooklyn conference on corporate liability in international law and ATS cases