Jack Goldsmith

Jack Landman Goldsmith is a Harvard Law School professor who has written a number of texts regarding international law and the Internet. [ [http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/facdir.php?id=559 Goldsmith faculty homepage] ] From October 2003 to July 2004, [ [http://www.slate.com/id/2173488/nav/tap1/ Introduction to Excerpts from "The Terror Presidency"] ] he served under Attorney General John Ashcroft and Deputy Attorney General James Comey [ [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11079547/site/newsweek/ Palace Revolt] ] as an United States Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice. As of the 2007-08 academic year, he teaches at Harvard Law School, has been "widely considered one of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament," and has written a book called "The Terror Presidency" (September 2007).

Education and career

Goldsmith graduated from Washington & Lee University with a B.A. "summa cum laude" in 1984. He then earned a second B.A. from Oxford University, in 1986, a J.D. from Yale Law School, in 1989, an M.A., first class honours, from Oxford (which is not a separate degree, but an upgrading of the BA), in 1991, and a diploma from the Hague Academy of International Law in 1992. He clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1989 to 1990, and for Justice Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1990 to 1991. Before joining the Harvard Law faculty, he was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Virginia Law School.

Office of Legal Counsel

The office provides legal opinions and advice to the president and the executive branch on legal issues of special importance or complexity, including the limits of executive power. Goldsmith resigned after 9 months. Some claimed that he resigned after a failed attempt to moderate what he considered the constitutional excesses of the legal policies embraced by his White House superiors in the war on terror.] Goldsmith himself claims that he largely succeeded in correcting what he saw as overbroad legal opinions issued by his predecessors at OLC. In his book, The Terror Presidency, he claims he resigned partly in an attempt to ensure those corrections stuck and partly because he felt he had lost the confidence of administration leaders. He does not specify who those leaders were, but notes that White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales several times asked him to remain while David Addington, then the legal counsel to the Vice-President and an influential White House figure, was concerned with how often he had overturned previous OLC opinions.

The Terror Presidency

Goldsmith is the author of "The Terror Presidency", a book that details the legal issues the Bush administration faced and continues to face in the war on terror, including the definition of torture, the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to the war on terror and the Iraq War, the detention and trial of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, and wiretapping laws. Though he is largely sympathetic with the concerns of the Bush administration's terrorism policies, his primary claim is that the administration's focus on the hard power of prerogative rather than the soft power of persuasion had been counterproductive, both in the war on terror and in the extension of effective executive authority. Some of the assertions made in the book include that the current Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, David Addington, at one point said that "we’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court," referring to the secret FISA court that rules on warrants for secret wiretapping by the United States government.cite news |title=Conscience of a Conservative |author = Jeffrey Rosen |work = New York Times Magazine | publisher=The New York Times |url=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/magazine/09rosen.html |date=September 9, 2007 |accessdate = 2007-09-05] [ [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/magazine/09rosen.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=f195c56e871af91e&ex=118913760 Conscience of a Conservative] September 9, 2007, book review of The Terror Presidency and interview]

Goldsmith appeared on Bill Moyers' show on September 7, 2007 to discuss his work, and his time in Attorney General John Ashcroft's hospital room when Alberto Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card attempted to persuade Ashcroft to change his mind about the Bush administration's warrantless wiretap program. He reported that Mrs. Ashcroft stuck her tongue out at Gonzales and Card as they left the room. [ [http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09072007/transcript2.html Bill Moyers talks with Jack Goldsmith] ]

Books

*cite book
title = The Terror Presidency
year = 2007
month = June
publisher = W. W. Norton & Company
isbn = 978-0-393-06550-3
*"Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World" (with Tim Wu, 2006) ISBN 0-19-515266-2

Notes