Justice for Guantanamo Detainees and their Victims

Professor David Luban (Georgetown University Law Center) addressed a conference on the American legal profession sponsored by Stanford University in March of 2008. His expanded views were published under the title “Lawfare and Legal Ethics in Guantánamo” in the Stanford Law Review.

David Luban

From this reading, it is clear that David Luban’s sympathies lie with the defense counsel, who in his thinking are the only legal practitioners seeking justice for the accused terrorists. He does not credit the government counsel equally, though these are seeking justice also, but a justice that includes the victims.

Luban identifies the defense counsel as standing heroically against the all-powerful state, the “Leviathan” of Thomas Hobbes’ conception. But does Luban’s Leviathan view actually stand up before the facts?

Not really. The government dedicated twenty-nine attorneys to the defense of detainees at Guantánamo. With just twenty detainees charged with crimes, this resulted in the government supplying 1.45 defense attorneys per detainee facing a military commission.

Read a full response to Luban’s criticism of US Military Justice in the war on terror here.

Luban on Legal Ethics and Human Dignity

David Luban has a new book titiled Legal Ethics and Human Dignity. It is published as part of the Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Law (ISBN-13: 9780521862851)

Luban, a law professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC, is a recognized authority on legal ethics. This book is a collection of his most significant papers from the past twenty-five years. It represents a wide range of ethical exploration and combines philosophical argument, midrash and legal analysis, drawing on cases in actual law practice.

Luban defends a legal ethics that stress the lawyer's role in upholding human dignity and rights. The volume includes two previously unpublished papers, including a detailed critique of the US government lawyers who produced the notorious ‘torture memos’.

The Book includes: Lawyers as upholders of human dignity (when they aren’t busy assaulting it); The Jurisprudence of Legal Ethics; Natural law as professional ethics: a reading of Fuller; The torture lawyers of Washington; Moral Complications and Moral Psychology; Contrived ignorance; The ethics of wrongful obedience; Moral Messiness in Professional Life, and A midrash on Rabbi Shaffer and Rabbi Trollope.

View PDF Sample Chapter