Recent Blogs Posts

Recently Obama declared that he had agreed to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba. There didn't seem to be any conditions on that, and I found that strange, because by law the U.S. cannot have normal relations with Cuba until the conditions in the Helms-Burton Act of 1996 (http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title22/chapter69A&edition=prelim) will be fulfilled, and Cuba has consistently refused to even consider paying for the seized property. This is a case where U.S. law is ...

I don't often think about civil forfeiture, but when it comes to mind I am bothered by it. A similar system was used by the British before the American Revolution, and it was one of the many things that led to the revolution. A couple of decades ago some clown pointed out that civil forfeiture had been used by the legal system that the U.S. adopted, so the U.S. should take up civil forfeiture. Apparently no one bothered to mention that the wording if the Forth and Fifth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution ...