Speaker Sheds Light On Jackson's Views On Current Issues
(article is
from the news section of the Jamestown Post Journal)
11/2/2004 - By JOHN WHITTAKER
Robert H. Jackson has been dead for 60 years, but Jeffrey Hockett can still
hear Jackson's voice discussing contemporary issues through several of Jackson's
landmark Supreme Court opinions.
Hockett spoke Monday to nearly 60 people at the Robert H. Jackson Center, including
several Allegheny College students who made the trip from Meadville to hear
the University of Tulsa political science professor.
In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Justice Department officials
circulated a memorandum saying President George W. Bush isn't bound by laws
outlawing the use of torture during interrogation while the Supreme Court later
ruled in a separate matter that the president is violating the Fifth Amendment
guarantee of due process of law in treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
As legal scholars debated the legality of prisoner treatment at Guantanamo Bay,
Hockett could hear Jackson's disapproval through landmark opinions in Korematsu
v. United States and Youngstown Steele and Tubing v. United States.
''I'm especially pleased with this opportunity because I'm of the opinion that
Jackson is of much more than mere historical interest,'' Hockett said. ''I hope
to demonstrate that Jackson's thought speaks, and speaks powerfully, to several
contemporary political issues. Specifically I will argue that Jackson's writings
on executive power are much food for thought in post-Sept. 11 age.''
Jackson, in both cases, placed the need to protect individual rights above the
concerns of the military and president. In both cases, Jackson cautioned moving
away from the democratic principles in the Declaration of Independence in favor
of shoring up the national defense. The Korematsu case shows Jackson urging
citizens to harbor a strong distrust of actions that decrease the rights of
individuals without due process of law while the Youngstown case says that even
a time of war provides limit on executive authority.
''Korematsu illuminated Jackson's position on protecting individual rights during
the war,'' Hockett said. ''His concurrence in the Youngstown Sheet and Tube
Co. v. Sawyer case illuminated as well his belief in the need to preserve constitutional
limitations on executive power when the nation is at war.''
Hockett said Jackson's views on the need to limit presidential power are similar
to those held by James Madison, widely said to be the father of the Constitution.
Madison wrote that war threatens liberty and that the instruments of war are
instruments of tyranny.
For Madison - and Jackson - citizens have to be vigilant when Congress and the
president try to use the power to make war because the costs are taken from
the national treasury and fought with the lives of citizens.
''What we have, in short, is a rejection of the Bush administration's claim
that a person loses their constitutional right to due process when the president
declares that person an enemy combatant,'' Hockett said. ''We also have a rejection
of the argument put forward by some Justice Department lawyers that necessity
during war liberates the president from having to obey domestic or international
laws.''