1s and 0s: The Digital Nuts and Bolts

Crovitz, Darren; Devereaux, Michelle D.; Moran, Clarice M.

doi:10.4324/9781003154709-5

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“…It might have been an exaggeration to claim, as one defender of the administration did, that "no prosecutions were envisioned in the wildest congressional imagination," but it remained that dragging Boland into a court of law proved challenging. 108 Were one found guilty of violating it, how would a judge determine a proper sentence? Walsh's chief Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent once lamented, "The Boland amendment?…”

Section: Attitudes Under Scrutinymentioning

confidence: 99%

“Above the Written Law”: Iran-Contra and the Mirage of the Rule of Law

McPherson

2024

Law hist. rev.

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Why have scandalous sprees of lawbreaking by U.S. government officials proven so seductive yet so difficult to prosecute? This article takes the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan–Bush era as an instructive case study and red flag in the attitudinal erosion of the belief in the rule of law among American conservatives. Before the scandal broke, officials and legal counsels willfully mis-interpreted a clear prohibition to fund counter-revolutionaries and fabricated a post-facto presidential permission in order to sell weapons to Iran without congressional oversight. Congress's assumption that government officials would obey its statutes resulted in neither wrongdoing being punishable by criminal sanctions. Conservatives therefore argued that ends justified neglecting certain laws while also denying they had broken any laws. Prosecutors found themselves compelled to prosecute Iran-Contra's defendants over more prosaic crimes such as lying and stealing rather than more abstract and damaging ones. President George H. W. Bush's pardon of Iran-Contra defendants contributed to an impunity that further eroded the American rule of law to this day.

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Section: Attitudes Under Scrutinymentioning

confidence: 99%

“Above the Written Law”: Iran-Contra and the Mirage of the Rule of Law

McPherson

2024

Law hist. rev.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

1s and 0s: The Digital Nuts and Bolts

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

“Above the Written Law”: Iran-Contra and the Mirage of the Rule of Law

“Above the Written Law”: Iran-Contra and the Mirage of the Rule of Law

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