 Defending Principles, Not Criminals
by Jonathan Rick
If in conflict, which is more important: the truth of a person’s criminality, or the way a police offer collects evidence thereof? Is genuine evidence of a robber, rapist or murderer’s actions too damning to be intentionally ignored, or does one’s constitutional right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures oblige us to acquit a few thugs? (Read more...)
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Ashcroft v. Raich
by Jonathan Rick
In a 1996 referendum, California’s voters passed Proposition 215, codified as the Compassionate Use Act (C.U.A.). The C.U.A. legalized medical marijuana for seriously ill Californians, thus placing state law in direct conflict with federal law, the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, or the Controlled Substances Act (C.S.A.). The C.S.A. classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug that is unqualifiedly illegal unless part of an F.D.A. study. While we may argue for the relevance of the constitution’s supremacy clause or of individual rights, the instant issue before the U.S. Supreme Court is whether the C.S.A. exceeds the power of Congress under the commerce clause. (Read more...)
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A Retroactive Analysis of National Security Casus Belli for the Iraq War: Part 6
by Jonathan Rick
Did deterrence fail? (Read more...)
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A Retroactive Analysis of National Security Casus Belli for the Iraq War: Part 5
by Jonathan Rick
How did the Bush administration react? (Read more...)
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Thursday
December 30, 2004 |
A Retroactive Analysis of National Security Casus Belli for the Iraq War: Part 4
by Jonathan Rick
Of course, just two years after the ceasefire, Iraq embarked on another adventure, brutally occupying and plundering Kuwait. Expressing the view of many in 2002-03, Mark Bowden, a veteran military affairs journalist, argues that Saddam’s decision ranks as “one of the great military miscalculations of modern history." (Read more...)
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Wednesday
December 29, 2004 |
A Retroactive Analysis of National Security Casus Belli for the Iraq War: Part 3
by Jonathan Rick
Hawks argued that since Saddam was “crazy,” we “could not afford to trust [his] motives or [to] give him the benefit of the doubt.” For the tyrant was irrational and therefore undeterrable. (Read more...)
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A Retroactive Analysis of National Security Casus Belli for the Iraq War: Part 2
by Jonathan Rick
But what about Saddam’s well-known collaboration with non-Al Qaeda terrorists? (Read more...)
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A Retroactive Analysis of National Security Casus Belli for the Iraq War: Part 1
by Jonathan Rick
Linz has graciously allowed me to post my senior thesis here piecemeal. Since it is a draft, not due until April, I’m hoping for your most rigorous feedback.
Please note that
1. I am still working on Iraqi Collaboration with Al Qaeda outside 9/11.
2. I address Saddam’s collaboration with Al Qaeda and his deterrability, not the advisability of the war itself.
3. All my information comes from material publicly available before the war began.
See http://students.hamilton.edu/2005/jrick/thesis.htm for updates.
Thanks, Jon
(Read more...)
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To Torture or Not to Torture?
by Jonathan Rick
We know that a large-scale terrorist attack is imminent. We probably know the general location, we probably know that it will happen in the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours, and we are eighty or ninety percent certain that the person we have apprehended knows what, where and when.[1] To torture or not to torture? (Read more...)
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Saturday
September 4, 2004 |
The Immorality of Conscription
by Jonathan Rick
No matter how one rationalizes it—duty, the Constitution, necessity, practicality, shared sacrifice—conscription abrogates a man’s right to his life and indentures him to the state. As President Reagan recognized (at least rhetorically), “[T]he most fundamental objection is moral”; conscription “destroys the very values that our society is committed to defending.”
(Read more...)
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Tolerating Intolerance: Why Hate Speech Is Free Speech
by Jonathan Rick
With words, an orator can touch your very soul, inciting a people to insurrection or moving a mob to vigilantism. Yet words are always just words, since the breaking of sound waves across one’s ears is qualitatively different from the breaking of a baseball bat across one’s back. (Read more...)
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The Greatest Happiness for the Least Deserving
by Jonathan Rick
An analysis of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. (Read more...)
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Covering Dictatorships Means Covering the Truth
by Jonathan Rick
Trustworthy news requires freedom; without freedom one cannot report the news freely. It is therefore futile and fraudulent for a news agency to operate in a dictatorship. (Read more...)
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Campaign Finance Reform in Buckley v. Valeo
by Jonathan Rick
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Congress amended existing campaign finance laws to limit the amount that could be contributed to, or spent by, political campaigns. The Supreme Court considered these regulations in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and made a momentous hash of the legislation. The verdict therefore bot... (Read more...)
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Thursday
February 26, 2004 |
 A Free Market of, by and for Human Life
by Jonathan Rick
In a free country, who should have the moral-and hence legal-right to decide what an individual does with his own body: the state or the individual? Whose body-and hence whose life-is it? (Read more...)
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Reflections from the 2004 NH Democratic Primary
by Jonathan Rick
With eleven other Hamilton students this past weekend, I volunteered for Senator John Kerry's (D-MA) presidential campaign in Keene, New Hampshire. (Read more...)
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Wednesday
January 28, 2004 |
The Pious Politics of George W. Bush
by Jonathan Rick
There are many good people in the world who accept religion, and many of them hold the right ideas. But religion, which drives much of what is bad in the Bush Administration, is not the solution to America's problems; religion, namely, the President's fundamentalist policies, is the problem. For in converting the Oval Office into the Pulpit Office, Bush abdicates his duty to uphold the godless Constitution in order to smuggle the church into American politics. (Read more...)
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