Politics and the Tortured Question of Dignity: Maintaining the Separation of Powers in Times of Emergency

Volume 91, No. 3, Spring 2019

By Timothy Lockwood Kelly [PDF]

The alien torture plaintiff faces a litany of barriers to entry to U.S. courts. These barriers include the state secrets privilege, the Alien Tort Statute’s (ATS) territoriality and well-established cause of action requirements, and immunities of all sorts. Even once a torture plaintiff’s foot is in the courthouse door, he faces the difficult task of establishing that the conduct at issue meets the torture standard and that the defendant is legally responsible for the conduct. This Comment, however, will focus on just one of the obstacles faced by the torture plaintiff: the political question doctrine (PQD).

Timothy Lockwood Kelly is a J.D. Candidate, Temple University Beasley School of Law, 2019. He earned his M.A. in Philosophy from The New School for Social Research in 2016.

Tags: spotlight

By Fiona Burke, Temple Law Review Volume 96 Staff Editor Liberals have, as exit polls and Bernie Sanders point out, largely lost the working class and, in fact, most of America. There are many reasons for this, all of which have been dissected and analyzed ad nauseum in the past few weeks and likely will be for even years. One such […]

Author: Jasnoor Hundal In early August 2023, the Supreme Court stayed the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision, In re Purdue Pharma L.P., and granted certiorari to hear oral argument in December of 2023. The parties were asked to brief and argue “[w]hether the Bankruptcy Code authorizes a court to approve, as part of a […]

Randy Kominsky is a member of Temple Law’s Class of 1979. Mr. Kominsky was a staff editor for Volume 51 and an associate research editor for Volume 52 of Temple Law Review. His case note, Housing Discrimination – The Appropriate Evidentiary Standard for Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, was published in 1978.[1] After graduating, he moved […]