Hasta La Gadget!

If you think the Supreme Court is poised to expand or restrict gun rights sometime soon, don’t hold your breath.

As handwringing continues over what might have prevented the Orlando massacre — an old-time filibuster sparked by it even broke out in the Senate on Wednesday — the justices are about to consider a state gun control law enacted in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

According to its docket, the court on Thursday will weigh whether to take up Shew v. Malloy, a case with all the elements that could make it emblematic for the battle over the Second Amendment’s meaning.

It’s a dispute between a host of gun rights groups, businesses and individual gun owners against Connecticut over the constitutionality of a sweeping regulatory regime that bans so-called “assault weapons” — semiautomatic firearms and large-capacity magazines of the very sort used in Newtown and Orlando.

Back in October, an appeals court in Manhattan said the Connecticut law and a similarly restrictive law in New York were constitutional — and the plaintiffs vowed to take the battle to the Supreme Court.

Tom King, the head of New York’s biggest gun rights group, even said he was “happy” to have lost the case because that meant his organization could now ask the highest court of the land to decide the issue once and for all.

But then Justice Antonin Scalia died. And suddenly, the gun lobby’s calculations changed — including King’s, who told the New York Daily News weeks after Scalia’s death that it was “just the wrong time” to continue the fight in the absence of a reliable conservative vote at the Supreme Court.

That might explain why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) glowingly pointed to the National Rifle Association’s opposition to Merrick Garland, the president’s high court nominee, to rationalize his own refusal to hold a vote and a hearing for Garland. 

None of this matters, and yet it matters a great deal.

Because despite the pleas from gun rights advocates who still want the Supreme Court to take up the challenge to the weapons ban, the justices could wield all kinds of reasons not to touch the case with a 10-foot pole.

It’s not that they aren’t interested in clarifying the scope of the Second Amendment in the wake of Scalia’s magnum opus in District of Columbia v. Heller, which for the first time recognized a fundamental right to gun ownership in the home. But to echo King, it’s just not the right time — not with a short-staffed Supreme Court, a volatile political environment, and a nomination fight that may very well continue after President Barack Obama’s successor takes office.

As things stand now, all signs point to an extremely quiet and uncontroversial Supreme Court term beginning next October — a dry season that will stand in stark contrast to the current term’s constitutional blockbusters on affirmative action, abortion and immigration, to name only a few. The court just isn’t taking many new cases.

This paucity of potential big decisions aside, the court has sent some signals that the Second Amendment is safe, even as it has rejected dozens of cases challenging gun control measures across the country, leaving lower courts as the final decision-makers.

Over the protest of Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court refused in December to review an appeals court decision that effectively upheld an assault weapons ban in a small Illinois town. Thomas said that decision treated “the Second Amendment as a second-class right.”

The Second Amendment extends … to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding,
Supreme Court of the United States in the case Caetano v. Massachusetts

But in March, a month after Scalia’s death, the justices tipped their hand the other way, ruling that a Massachusetts ban on stun guns may violate the right to bear arms, quietly but forcefully endorsing the late justice’s Heller decision.

“The Second Amendment extends … to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding,” the court said in a very brief ruling that no justice signed his or her name to.

But writing separately, Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito said they would have gone further, asserting that indeed, gun ownership for self-defense is a “fundamental right” while making clear that Americans’ safety shouldn’t be “left to the mercy of state authorities who may be more concerned about disarming the people than about keeping them safe.”

Fighting words, as well as fodder for debate about where the court may go next on guns.

It is precisely this seeming tension within the Supreme Court — plus the political fallout from Scalia’s vacancy and all the work that other courts are doing to make some sense of the Second Amendment — that indicates why the justices probably won’t pull the trigger on the next big gun rights case soon.

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Two years after a deadly shooting at Seattle Pacific University, prosecutors have released surveillance footage showing the heroic actions of a student who disarmed the gunman.

The graphic video was released Tuesday by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office after a lengthy court battle between media outlets, the university and victims, The Seattle Times reports. 

The full video (not posted here) shows the accused gunman, Aaron R. Ybarra, 26, shoot a female student with a shotgun. When Ybarra pauses to reload, student-safety monitor Jon Meis jumps from behind a corner, pepper-sprays the assailant in the face, tackles him to the floor and takes away the shotgun. After stashing the weapon out of the view of the security camera, Meis returns and grabs the killer in a headlock.

WARNING: GRAPHIC VIDEO

Paul Lee, 19, of Portland, was killed in the June 5, 2014, attack. Two other students were wounded.

Ybarra, who had a history of mental illness, is scheduled to go on trial in September on charges of first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder. Ybarra and his attorney are reportedly pursuing an insanity defense.

Meis quickly emerged as a hero, credited with saving other students’ lives.

“I knew that if I didn’t stop him, he would keep going,” Meis said of the gunman, in an interview with NBC News.

Seattle Pacific University said in statement Monday it was “disappointed” by the release of surveillance videos. 

“We, along with others, have pursued legal action to stop the videos’ release in order to protect individual privacy and prevent the emotional distress these images will have on our community,” the university said. “Seattle Pacific University remains strong and resilient as a result of God’s faithfulness to us. Our foremost concern continues to be the welfare and safety of not only our students, faculty, and staff, but of the victims and witnesses of the tragedy.”

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Apple confirmed that it’s giving you the power to drop native mobile apps on iOS 10 when it published an official support page detailing the feature for beta testers. What that page didn’t mention is that you can’t really delete stock apps, you can o…

By Lily Lousada

Strict Bedouin legal codes often overpower civil law in Jordan, drawing the state’s most basic sovereignty into question. To this day honor killings, revenge killings, and forced displacements occur frequently and often without official legal proceedings. In order to ensure internationally recognized human rights and uphold the constitution, the justice system requires structural reform. Jordan should work towards institutionalizing these informal practices by codifying customary tribal law into a legally pluralistic system that aims to respect, and regulate, long-standing principles of tribal justice and traditions of arbitration.

There are three main court systems in Jordan: civil, religious, and military. Tribal law, though rampantly in use, remains informal since its abolishment in 1976. Customary tribal or Bedouin law is predominantly organized around clear reactions to disturbances of social order and family honor. It runs parallel – and at times in direct opposition to – Jordanian civil code.

Besides a monopoly of the use of force, rule of law is a theoretical cornerstone of ‘sovereignty.’ It would therefore appear that the active presence of such self-governing practices undermines the state. Yet, legal pluralism – formal or otherwise – is not necessarily symptomatic of a weak state. The challenge comes in integrating and applying pluralism in a way that recognizes long-standing alternative notions of justice and yet creates and upholds a fair system for all.

The United States, Canada, and Australia for example, all maintain customary bodies of law governing indigenous populations: Federal Indian law, Canadian Aboriginal Law, and Australian Customary Aboriginal Law, respectively. As a result, there is strong precedent and significant pre-existing discourse on reconciling multiple legal systems – the Australian Human Rights Commission for example, continues to consult with top international legal scholars to address the unique challenges of legal pluralism and indigenous law.

Informal legal pluralism is already in practice in Jordan. Frequently police act to contain conflict, and then hand the issue over to the involved tribes to resolve the crime or move toward reconciliation. In January of this year, for example, the gendarmerie was called into the northern Governorate of Irbid to control riots that had broken out as a result of a 14-year-old boy being fatally shot by his neighbor. According to the Jordan Times, Irbid Police Department Director Brig. Gen. Ali Hamlan stated “no one was injured in the [riot] fires because the families of the suspect were evicted to a remote location based on tribal laws [jalwa]”. This is just one example of the common, unofficial collaboration between state and tribes.

Jalwa, one of the more striking contemporary practices of Bedouin law, is the forced relocation of a clan to protect against revenge killings in the case of pre-meditated murder or rape between two neighboring tribes. Jalwas are usually reached through third party arbitration of a ceasefire, atwa, and negotiations by a perceived neutral authority, such as another tribe’s sheikh.

Atwas illustrate a practice in which government and tribes sometimes more formally merge authority and legal codes. In January 2016, for example, there was a direct state-sponsored atwa, resulting in a large jalwa. The atwa delegation was led by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education Mohammad Thneibat, and guaranteed the victim’s family’s conditions, including, as the Jordan Times reported, “sentencing the killer to death, dropping the right of the suspect to hire a defense lawyer, evacuating the suspect’s tribe (all those related to the suspect through the fifth paternal ancestor) and giving the victim’s clan the right to kill the perpetrator’s father, children, grandchildren, uncles, and their children if they pass by Mutah town at any time.”

This practice violates a number of international human rights, as well as elements of the Jordanian constitution. The government has made small efforts to limit jalwas, such as to only apply them to the immediate family for example, but these efforts have been met with only varied success. Ironically, much of the progress in limiting jalwas that has been achieved has relied on tribal code, such as the honor pact in Salt.

Furthermore, if a case involving tribesmen does reach a civil or religious courthouse, the long-established notions of tribal justice are still likely to influence the ruling – as seen with reduced sentences at the victim’s family’s request for leniency – if not altogether pre-determine it. The idea that tribal power opens flexibility in the legal system, where court rulings go from firm decision to negotiation, is an undeniable degradation of the rule of law – and perhaps even state sovereignty. But, if codified correctly, the presence of these two systems of justice does not have to be a weakness.

To integrate and institutionalize tribal customary law into Jordan’s civil and religious codes requires rigorous, transparent, and continued dialogue to account for the special set of legal considerations – the most basic of which is equality – that comes with legal pluralism. Extensive outreach and consultation with local communities would also be necessary. While the government has worked to improve the existing justice system, it has thus far failed to make the necessary structural reforms. It is time for Jordan to step up and engage in deep and open dialogue as a first step to increasing transparency and finding a sustainable way to reconcile the existing systems to better protect basic human rights and uphold the constitution.

Lily Lousada is based in Amman, Jordan where she works on conflict mitigation, socio-political stability, and governance development. She also serves as a Middle East Fellow at Young Professionals in Foreign Policy.

Image Credit: Lily Lousada

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Banning the Washington Post from covering his campaign rallies isn’t just a sign of Donald Trump’s distrust of the press. Reporters are an early warning system. History shows that politicians who turn against the media and cut off their access don’t stop there.
Remember Richard Nixon. Nixon made no bones about it–he hated the press, made life difficult for reporters , put members of the press on his “enemies list.” He tried to block publication of the Pentagon Papers in the New York Times. His vice president Spiro Agnew denounced the press in a famous 1970 speech as “nattering nabobs of negativism” Recordings of Nixon’s White House conversations are filled with his attacks on the press and disparaging comments about them.
In the end, the press still uncovered his crimes. Nixon’s hatred of the press reflected his paranoia and contempt for all his opponents and for the rule of law
Several people have asked me recently if I ever had my press credential revoked. It is revealing that the only place that I have run into problems with press credentials has been China where the Chinese government monitors the overseas and domestic press closely and tries to exert control by approving and rejecting reporter visas and residence permits. That creates huge obstacles to reporters trying to do their jobs, especially when it comes to holding the Chinese government and its leaders accountable.
Sound familiar?
In 1989 I was sent to China by the Boston Globe to report on the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre. The Chinese refused to give me a reporting visa so I flew to Hong Kong and entered as a tourist. When they asked my occupation, I put down “English teacher.” I think the Chinese visa officials in Hong Kong knew that I was a journalist; many of them were angry about the massacre and wanted it reported. From 2002-2005 I was the China Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal based in Beijing. The Chinese refused to issue visa for some of our reporters whose earlier stories about China they didn’t like. At one point we feared they might shut down the Wall Street Journal office because of our aggressive reporting on the SARS outbreak, which China was covering up. In the end they backed off, though we had to be careful we didn’t imperil our Chinese sources who were giving us information. A few years ago when I was an Executive Editor at Bloomberg News, the Chinese refused to issue visas for me, other editors, and a number of our reporters because they were angry about Bloomberg’s prize-winning investigations of the hidden wealth of China’s top leaders. It made covering China much more difficult–which was what the Chinese intended. The New York Times has faced the same obstacles.
Banning the Post from his rallies can only hurt Trump. Most stories on rallies report simply what the candidate said and maybe some audience reaction. Reporters are resourceful and they will get the news. The danger for Trump is that this controversy distracts people from his political message–unless of course he sees political advantage in attacking the press, which I suspect he does.
I took my journalism class to New Hampshire in February to cover a Trump rally and was shocked when, a few minutes before Trump appeared, an announcer came on over the ioudspeaker declaring that that “while Mr. Trump respects the First Amendment” he wouldn’t tolerate any cat-calls or jeers. If anyone started protesting during his speech, the announcement said, the crowd should surround the protester and security would eject them. In all my years covering campaigns I never encountered anything like that. As we have seen, Trump rallies are now places where protesters are routinely ejected and violent clashes are now taking place
In a press conference last month, Trump noted that his approach to the press would stay the same if he were elected president. “Yeah, it is going to be like this,” said Trump, whose campaign has also banned the likes of Politico, Buzzfeed, and the Daily Beast. “You think I’m going to change? I’m not going to change.”
If you want to control a free press, chances are you want to curb other kinds of free speech and criticism as well.

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