When I first heard that the Obama administration was considering whether to prosecute lawyers who crafted the “torture memos,” I was very concerned. It sounded like a witch hunt, and worse, like an impingement on the sacrosanct freedom of legal counsel to render advice. This piece by Brian Tamanaha, however, powerfully explains why my concern was to a large extent misplaced. Tamanaha, by the way, is no wishy-washy liberal. His book Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law is an important argument for the recognition of normative-moral principles for legal theory, which every Christian interested in legal theory should read.
