Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Raustiala: Offshoring the War on Terror

Kal Raustiala (Univ. of California, Los Angeles - Law) has posted Offshoring the War on Terror (in Kal Raustiala, Does the Constitution Follow the Flag?: The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:
Offshoring is usually thought of in the context of globalization and economic activity. Yet a signal feature of the Bush Administration's "war on terror" was the offshoring of core security functions. The most famous example is the use of Guantanamo Bay as a detention center, but many other examples of extraterritorial activity exist, such as the practice of "extraordinary rendition." This chapter, drawn from a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press titled Does the Constitution Follow the Flag?, charts and analyzes these developments, and associated judicial decisions such as Boumediene v. Bush, with reference to larger trends in American politics and jurisprudence.