New Semester, New Stories...

Greetings, fellow Civil Warriors! As Managing Editor of the Civil War Institute’s student blog, The Gettysburg Compiler, I would like to welcome everyone to a new semester of exciting debate, original research, academic discourse, and on-site reporting on all things Civil War. This academic year, we look forward to expanding the range of both topics and perspectives explored on our blog as we welcome Matt LaRoche ’17, Megan McNish ‘16, Ryan Nadeau ‘16, Jacob Ross ’15, and Cassie Wells ‘16 to our team of fellows/writers. [excerpt

Cotton, Clemency, and Control: United States v. Klein and the Juridical Legacy of Executive Pardon

When the guns of war fell silent in 1865, Americans throughout the reunited states grappled with the logistics of peace. At virtually every turn lay nebulous but critical questions of race, class, allegiance, and identity. More pragmatic legal stumbling blocks could also be found strewn across the path to Reconstruction; some of them would ensnare the healing nation for decades to come. Among their number was notorious Supreme Court decision United States v. Klein (1872). Born on July 22, 1865 out of a small debate over the wartime seizure of Vicksburg cotton stores, Klein quickly evolved into a legal behemoth. In its tangles with the separation of powers, the presidential power of pardon, and the supremacy of the executive in judicial matters, United States v. Klein would ultimately amount to the very poster child of the snowball effect at work in Reconstruction law. Widely forgotten or overlooked today, the decision of United States v. Klein nonetheless stands as one of the most crucial battles of the American Civil War era

Of Civil Wrongs and Rights: \u3cem\u3eKiyemba v. Obama\u3c/em\u3e and the Meaning of Freedom, Separation of Powers, and the Rule of Law Ten Years After 9/11

This article is about the rise and fall of continued adherence to the rule of law, proper application of the separation of powers doctrine, and the meaning of freedom for a group of seventeen Uighurs—a Turkic Muslim ethnic minority whose members reside in the Xinjiang province of China—who had been held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base since 2002. Most scholars regard the trilogy of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and Boumediene v. Bush as demonstrating the Supreme Court’s willingness to uphold the rule of law during the war on terror. The recent experience of the Uighurs suggest that this commitment is either waning or was never as strong as scholars thought. About a year and a half before the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States Supreme Court was primed to hear oral arguments in the Uighurs’ case known as Kiyemba v. Obama. The issue in this case was whether the Uighurs, who were concededly being detained illegally, would be released from Guantanamo Bay. As a result of the government’s latest delay tactics, the Court never heard the merits of the case. Had it done so, the Court, arguably, would have established the contours of a constitutionally required habeas remedy for foreign nationals whose indefinite detention had been judicially declared illegal and no other option but release into the continental interior of the United States is possible. The Court’s dismissal of the Uighurs previously granted cert petition thus signaled the beginning of the end of the Court’s landmark “war-on–terror” line of precedential cases culminating in the evisceration of its 2008 seminal case of Boumediene v. Bush. With the D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision now reinstated in which the court had held in 2009 that habeas courts had no jurisdiction to order the release of foreign nationals under such circumstances because it was an immigration case triggering the political branches’ plenary power over which such matters are largely immune from judicial intervention. But Kiyemba v. Obama is not an immigration case. The Uighurs were brought here involuntarily as a result of the government’s counterterrorism policies, the implementation of which the Court had declared unlawful over the course of a four year period beginning with Rasul v. Bush in 2004. The D.C. Circuit Court holding, which still stands, was erroneous because the Uighurs never sought to immigrate to this country; their filing of writs of habeas corpus placed the matter solidly in the area of granting constitutionally required habeas relief which a habeas court has jurisdiction to decide. Through political machinations and influences at all levels of government, however, the Supreme Court has more recently decided to end its role of protecting the individual rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees with a series of denials of cert.-petitions without a single dissent authored to voice concerns about the beginning of the end of the Republic Benjamin Franklin once said we had but only if we could keep it. And although most of the original group of Uighurs has subsequently been relocated to other countries, the two still remaining have now entered their second decade of unlawful detention

The Search for an Intelligible Principle: Setting Air Quality Standards under the Clean Air Act

Heather L. Ross weighs in on the controversy surrounding the EPA's setting of National Ambient Air Quality Standards. She forcefully argues that balancing costs and benefits is the only intelligible principle that comports with common sense.

Raising the visibility of protected data: A pilot data catalog project

Sharing research data that is protected for legal, regulatory, or contractual reasons can be challenging and current mechanisms for doing so may act as barriers to researchers and discourage data sharing. Additionally, the infrastructure commonly used for open data repositories does not easily support responsible sharing of protected data. This chapter presents a case study of an academic university library’s work to configure the existing institutional data repository to function as a data catalog. By engaging in this project, university librarians strive to enhance visibility and access to protected datasets produced at the institution and cultivate a data sharing culture

Point/Counterpoint: Insidious Cycle

Heather: In our last post, Bryan and I explored the unique challenges that the reenacting hobby poses to the interpretation and public understanding of the American Civil War. In it, we touched on just a few of the many motivations that inspire individuals to reenact. As we continue our Point/Counterpoint series below, we look to explore the relationship of the reenacting hobby with a particularly complex and problematic ideology–the Lost Cause. [excerpt

Questions and Answers About the National Survey of Children\u27s Exposure to Violence.

Presents an overview of the National Survey of Children\u27s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV), the most comprehensive nationwide survey to date of the incidence and prevalence of children\u27s exposure to violence, sponsored by OJJDP and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and carried out by the Crimes Against Children Research Center of the University of New Hampshire. It outlines the survey’s objectives and key features, how exposure to violence was measured, and plans for followup surveys and publications. NatSCEV bases its estimates on a large, nationally representative sample of more than 4,500 children ages 17 and younger. The survey interviewed caregivers of children ages 9 and younger and children and youth ages 10 to 17 about 45 different kinds of violence, abuse, and victimization in the past year and over the course of their lifetime