BBC:

A rare copy of the Magna Carta has been sold for $21.3m (£10.6m) in an auction at Sotheby’s in New York. The copy dating from 1297, one of only 17 still in existence, was bought by US businessman David Rubenstein.

The auction item had been owned by American billionaire Ross Perot’s Perot Foundation since 1984 and was on view at the National Archives in Washington.

The original Magna Carta was sealed by King John of England in 1215 and enshrined civil rights in English law.

Mr Rubenstein, co-founder of private equity firm The Carlyle Group, wants to put the document back on display at the National Archives.

He said: “I have always believed that the three most important documents were the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Magna Carta.

“This document stands the test of time. There is nothing more important than what it represents.

“I am privileged to be the new owner, but I am only the temporary custodian.

“This is a gift to the American people. It is important to me that it stays in the United States.”

The auctioned copy, the only one in private hands, had been expected to fetch $20m when it went under the hammer.

The Magna Carta was not confirmed as English law until the version sealed by Edward I in 1297.

pdf version of Sotheby’s 56-page catalogue by Nicholas Vincent (Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia in the UK), including introduction, Latin text and English translation, and discussion of related documents and the history of the sold copy.

Earlier posting -12/7

Hat tip to Dominique Poirier.

Roger Kimball describes how Western courts are being successfully used to suppress criticism of Islamic extremism.

Last summer, Cambridge University Press announced that it would pulp all unsold copies of its 2006 book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World by Robert O. Collins, a professor emeritus of history at the University of California, and J. Millard Burr, a retired employee of the State Department. Why? Because Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi banker, filed a libel claim to quash the book. According to a story in The Chronicle for Higher Education [reg req’d], Cambridge instantly capitulated, paid “substantial damages” to Mr. Mahfouz, and even went so far as to contact university libraries worldwide to ask them to remove the book from their shelves. They seem to have been successful in their request: I have searched high and low for the book in academic libraries and public libraries and have found that, although it is listed as “not checked out,” it is nowhere to be found.

Suppressing books he doesn’t like seems to be a hobby of Mr. Mahfouz’s. His web site lists successful actions against three other books Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden and Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed—and How to Stop It. As Robert Spencer explained in The Washington Times, one notable feature of Mr. Mahfouz’s legal actions is that he has sued various American authors in Britain, where libel laws favor the plaintiff.

Glenn Reynolds offers, in the New York Post, his view of the Supreme Court’s options in the DC Gun Ban case.

It can find that the Second Amendment doesn’t really do anything – that it’s merely a relic of an older era. But that’s a rather dangerous approach: What other parts of the Constitution might be considered relics? And can a judicial approach that leaves a tenth of the Bill of Rights meaningless possibly be sound?

It can find that the Second Amendment doesn’t grant individual rights, but only protects the right of states to arm their militias (or “state armies,” as some gun-control advocates put it). This would make the DC case go away, but at some cost: If states have a constitutional right, as against the federal government, to arm their militias as they see fit, then states that don’t like federal gun-control laws could just enroll every law-abiding citizen in the state militia and authorize those citizens to possess machine guns, tanks and other military gear.

Other consequences of “state armies” seem even more drastic. As Tom Lehrer put it:

We’ll try to stay serene and calm /

When Alabama gets the bomb.

Finally, the court can find – in accordance with the views of law professors as diverse as Harvard’s Laurence Tribe and, well, me – that the Second Amendment supports an individual right on the part of law-abiding citizens to possess firearms of the sort that are in ordinary use. As with other rights, such as freedom of speech, this is subject to reasonable regulation that stops well short of a ban.

This last would be the least radical approach, as it’s consistent with public opinion (most Americans think the Second Amendment gives them a right to own a gun) and with the 40-plus states whose own constitutions already provide for a right to arms. It would probably be the easiest to implement, too, as federal courts could (to a degree at least) look to state law for some guidance on how to implement it.

Finding otherwise would be ticklish for the court in another way. In recent decades, the Supreme Court has found many rights that aren’t specifically spelled out in the Constitution – rights to things like abortion, contraception or sodomy. If the court now follows up by denying a right that does seem to be spelled out, it would put its own legitimacy in the public eye at grave risk.

David Kopel explains that it also violated the 1987 Constitution of the state of “New Columbia,” adopted by the District’s Council to serve in a desired condition of future statehood, which included in its Bill of Rights, a Sec.102 whose text was identical to the federal Second Amendment.

Accordingly, when DC lawyers argue to lower federal courts, and to the U.S. Supreme Court, that the language of the U.S. Second Amendment is not an ordinary individual right, they are making an argument which is decisively contradicted by the very constitution adopted by the government whom the lawyers are representing.

Second, DC’s cert. petition makes the novel argument that the District of Columbia (an entity over which the U.S. Constitution grants Congress plenary power) is somehow already a sovereign state for purposes of the Second Amendment; they claim that the 1886 Supreme Court decision in Presser v. Illinois, which held that under the 14th Amendment Privileges and Immunities clause, none of the Bill of Rights are enforceable against states, immunizes D.C. today from the enforcement of the Second Amendment. Yet the New Columbia Constitution shows that D.C. wants to be a state and wants the exact language of the Second Amendment to be enforceable against D.C.

Alberto Fujimori saved Peru from a bloodthirsty communist terrorist movement, the Shining Path, of which the British editorialist Theodore Dalrymple wrote:

The worst brutality I ever saw was that committed by Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru, in the days when it seemed possible that it might come to power. If it had, I think its massacres would have dwarfed those of the Khmer Rouge. As a doctor, I am accustomed to unpleasant sights, but nothing prepared me for what I saw in Ayacucho, where Sendero first developed under the sway of a professor of philosophy, Abimael Guzman.”

So, naturally, we read in today’s New York Times that Alberto Fujimori is being extradited by the socialist government of Chile (a country which was itself saved from Marxist totalitarianism by the late General Augusto Pinochet, who was also internationally hounded by leftist attempts at judicial vengeance) to Peru to stand trial on “human rights and corruption” charges.

Save a country from Marxist totalitarianism’s reign of terror, and you’ll be indicted and internationally extradited to be tried as an enemy of “human rights.”

But, if you take US diplomats hostage, and become head of a major terrorist regime which stones people to death, wages covert war against the United States, and bends every effort at acquiring nuclear weapons, why! then, you get to give a speech at Columbia.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has reversed a district court decision, ruling against Yale Law School in Burt v. Rumsfeld thereby upholding the Solomon Amendment which denies certain federal funding to a college or university if any part of the college or university refuses military recruiters equal access to its students and campuses.

Scott Johnson notes the nobility of the University administration’s commitment to the interests of “the world at large.”

I happened to be at Yale in October 2003 when Navy Judge Advocate General recruiter Brian Whitaker was scheduled to meet with students interested in serving as Navy lawyers. Virtually all Yale law students had signed a petition vowing not to meet with Whitaker or other JAG recruiters. The petition was publicly posted inside the law school as part of a protest display that included black and camouflage wall hangings. The one law student scheduled to meet with Whitaker cancelled the interview.

The ostensible cause of the consternation occasioned by Whitaker’s visit was the military’s compliance with the federal “don’t ask/don’t tell” law on homosexual conduct in the armed forces. Law schools across the country had hindered military recruiters from meeting with law students because the military’s adherence to the “don’t ask/don’t tell” law violates nondiscrimination policies enforced by the schools against on-campus recruiters.

Whitaker’s putative right to visit Yale Law School despite its nondiscrimination policy was attributable solely to the Bush administration’s enforcement of the Solomon Amendment requiring federally-funded universities to open their doors to military recruiters or risk losing federal funds. After 9/11 the Defense Department began to threaten enforcement of the amendment, and law schools began to comply. At Yale, for example, the law school has waived its nondiscrimination policy in order to preserve the university’s annual $350 million in federal funding only since the fall of 2002. Then-law school Dean Anthony Kronman explained:

We would never put at risk the overwhelmingly large financial interests of the University in federal funding. We have a point of principle to defend, but we will not defend this–at the expense of programs vital to the University and the world at large.

Dean Kronman paid a backhanded tribute to the “money talks” impetus behind the Solomon Amendment. The Kronman Doctrine provides: For the good of the world, Yale must retain access to your money.

Yale Daily News

Richard Munday, in the London Times, notes the impact of bien pensant gun control policies on British crime.

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.

Hat tip to Frank A. Dobbs.

Bryan Fischer points out one little detail which we in the blogosphere and the MSM both absentmindedly overlooked. And he’s quite right.

As word comes of Sen. Larry Craig’s reconsideration of his announced resignation from the U.S. Senate, it turns out that his best ally in getting rid of his guilty plea for his conduct in a Minneapolis airport restroom may be the United States Constitution.

If the senator had been a better student of the U.S. Constitution, his arrest may never happened at all, and if the U.S. Constitution is followed, as of course it should be, the senator’s arrest and guilty plea will have to be vacated.

This is because the Constitution, in a straightforward and unambiguous manner, states in Article 1, Section 6 that “Senators and Representatives. shall. be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same.” (emphasis mine) The only exceptions are for treason, felony and breach of peace, and the senator, of course, was charged with a misdemeanor.

Since the senator was on his way to Washington, and did in fact cast a vote on the evening of the day on which he was arrested, his arrest and subsequent questioning were, technically speaking, unconstitutional.

If the senator had flashed the Constitution at the officer as soon as the officer flashed his badge at him, the officer would have had no choice but to release the senator to go on his way.

This little detail (which I should have remembered, having discussed it myself in relation to the FBI search of Congressman Jefferson’s office) provides quite a plot twist.

It is difficult to imagine a court seeing any alternative to throwing out that Minneapolis misdemeanor on Constitutional grounds. Senator Craig, therefore, winds up with no conviction, and does not need to resign. The State of Idaho, and the rest of America, gets to retain the services of a senator with a 96 ACU rating. A happy ending for all but the democrats.

David Kurtz, at leftist Talking Points Memo, quotes a commenter who signs himself LS who doesn’t think so, and I agree.

Look at the police report. Did he directly ask a cop for sex? No. Did he expose himself lewdly (as opposed to exposing himself to use the facilities)? No. Did he do anything that was unambiguously sexual? No.

All he did was tap his foot, reach down (possibly to pick up a piece of TP), wiggle his fingers, and put his bag in front of him when he sat down. Oh, and he waited in front of an occupied stall. Even if he did everything the cop said he did, where was the lewd conduct? No actual sex happened. No actual sex was discussed. And if it wasn’t for the sheer embarrassment of the situation, you’d be writing about the overzealous cop who arrested a sitting US Senator for no apparent reason. …

The issue here is, why is the Minneapolis Airport PD arresting people for such flimsy reasons? Why do judges and prosecutors still accept these cases? Why, in 2007, 43 years after LBJ’s chief of staff, Walter Jenkins, got busted in the men’s room YMCA in DC, have we apparently moved no further in our analysis of these situations?

Where does anyone put his or her suitcase in a public lavatory stall if not in front of the door?

Unless the divider between the stalls featured a hole, I don’t see how any meaningfully lewd act was even possible.

And, like those gay leftwing guys, I too thought the days when cops were busting queers for soliciting sex in public lavatories were ancient history.

Francisco Linares of Rolling Hills Estates, California will be going to jail for six months. His crime? Getting into an argument with the authorities enforcing the Kafka-esque system of construction permits in his California town over a termite-infested fence on city property.

DailyBreeze:

The 51-year-old bought the nearly 1-acre property in the 4600 block of Palos Verdes Drive North in 1998. After tearing down an adobe house on the site and building a 3,000-square-foot French-style home, he began landscaping.

When Linares asked the city to repair the white three-railed fence behind his house, he was told it was on his property and his responsibility. So he replaced the termite-infested planks. Then the city reversed itself and said Linares had illegally built the fence on city property.

In October 2004, the city charged Linares with three misdemeanors: for not taking down the fence, having a retaining wall built higher than a 2-foot restriction and for erecting stone columns without a neighborhood compatibility analysis. Later inspections found eight other violations, including a lack of permits for plumbing and grading.

“He’s had a couple of years to correct the problems,” said Dean Pucci, a Fullerton attorney contracted as the city’s prosecutor. “His options were to obtain final permits or remove all of these structures built without permits.”

Linares lives in the house with his wife and three daughters. He contends that he didn’t remove the structures because he believed the permits would be approved.

However, Pucci said no permits are pending, since Linares failed to resubmit an application that was deemed incomplete.

At the sentencing, Hamar said his client was a good Christian man who has never committed a crime and who worked diligently – 142 hours – to try to resolve the issues with the city.

And the only reason he was not able to complete the stipulations of the plea agreement, he said, was because of the city’s confusing building codes and negligence in rendering a decision on his permit applications.

“We established that he did everything that was humanly possible to comply. And the un-rebutted evidence is that (the city) hasn’t ruled on the permits.”

AP reports, at the victims’ request.

Two 13-year-old boys accused of slapping girls’ bottoms and poking or cupping girls’ breasts at school apologized on Monday as a judge dismissed charges against the two, ending a six-month case that drew national attention. …

Four girls listed as victims by the prosecutors had asked the judge to drop the charges against Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison.

Yamhill County Judge John Collins did so on Monday, saying it was in the “interest of justice.”

A number of young girls were in the courtroom during the hearing. They included at least some of the four who asked that the charges be dropped, attorneys said.

During the brief hearing, the two boys faced the girls and apologized. …

The News-Register newspaper of McMinnville reported that a “civil compromise” reached by prosecutors and the defense called for both boys to apologize, to pay each of the four girls $250 and to complete a “boundaries education” program.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys said they could not comment on the newspaper report or release details of the settlement because they are confidential.

Pressure has been building on prosecutors to drop the charges, with critics saying they had blown the matter out of proportion and were overzealous.

The boys, apparently inspired by the movie “Jackass,” were accused in police reports of swatting girls on the bottom in a school corridor, grabbing girls’ breasts on at least two occasions, teaming up to “dry hump” girls, poking girls’ breasts and engaging in what’s known as “party boy” dancing mimicking sexual intercourse.

They were originally charged with felony and misdemeanor sex abuse charges in February. Amid growing public opposition to sending the boys to prison and putting them on a sex offenders’ registry, prosecutors dropped the felony sex abuse charges and added misdemeanor harassment charges, then later dropped all sex abuse charges, leaving only the harassment counts.

The judge dismissed the final charges following negotiations between prosecutors and the defense, and discussions with the four girls about whether they wanted the case dismissed.

Now let’s hope the people out there in Oregon go on to remove that county prosecutor from office and to fire the school officials and cops involved in embarrassing their state, county, and community. Somebody should start a “morons who should never be allowed to hold any office or position of responsibility” list.

Earlier posting.

Inside Higher Ed:

Yale University Press on Wednesday announced that a libel suit against it and one of its authors has been dropped, without any changes being made in the book or any payments to the plaintiffs. The book in question is about Hamas and comes just weeks after Cambridge University Press settled a libel case against it over a book about Islamic terrorism by promising to destroy remaining copies of the book.

The cases are notably different in that Cambridge was sued in Britain (where libel protections for authors and publishers are much weaker than those in the United States) and Yale was able to file motions in California courts, which have stronger libel protections for authors and publishers than much of the United States. But the fact that Yale took a strong legal stance on a book about Hamas is likely to cheer scholars of terrorism, some of whom have been deeply concerned that the Cambridge settlement would prompt other presses to back down if sued.

The book over which Yale was sued is Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, by Matthew Levitt, who is director of the Stein Program on Terrorism, Intelligence and Policy at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. While some observers have distinguished between Hamas’s terrorist activities and the group’s social service activities with Palestinians, Levitt’s argument is that they are in fact intertwined. Yale’s description of the book says: “Levitt demolishes the notion that Hamas’ military, political, and social wings are distinct from one another and catalogues the alarming extent to which the organization’s political and social welfare leaders support terror. He exposes Hamas as a unitary organization committed to a militant Islamist ideology, urges the international community to take heed, and offers well-considered ideas for countering the significant threat Hamas poses.”

The libel suit was filed in California in April by KinderUSA, a nonprofit group that says it raises money for Palestinian children and families, and Laila Al-Marayati, the chair of the group’s board. They sued over two passages and related footnotes in the book about charitable groups in the United States that the author believes are linked to terrorist groups. The U.S. government has investigated some Muslim charities in the United States for such links, but also said that such probes do not suggest that all Muslim charities have such links. The lawsuit specifically objected to this passage: “The formation of KinderUSA highlights an increasingly common trend: banned charities continuing to operate by incorporating under new names in response to designation as terrorist entities or in an effort to evade attention. This trend is also seen with groups raising money for al-Qaeda.”

According to the suit, suggesting that KinderUSA “funds terrorist or illegal organizations” was “false and damaging” and libelous. The suit also alleged that Yale “did not conduct any fact-checking” for the book. KinderUSA asked the court for an injunction on its request that distribution of the book be halted, and also sought $500,000 in damages.

Since the suit was filed, Yale has indicated that it and its author stood behind the book. (Levitt was out of town Wednesday and could not be reached.) But in July, Yale raised the stakes by filing what is known as an “anti-SLAPP suit” motion, seeking to quash the libel suit and to receive legal fees. SLAPP is an acronym for “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” a category of lawsuit viewed as an attempt not to win in court, but to harass a nonprofit group or publication that is raising issues of public concern. The fear of those sued is that groups with more money can tie them up in court in ways that would discourage them from exercising their rights to free speech. Anti-SLAPP statutes, such as the one in California with which Yale responded, are a tool created in some states to counter such suits.

In Yale’s response, it noted that KinderUSA has been reported to be the subject of investigation by federal authorities, that these investigations have received detailed press coverage (prior to the book), and that the views of the book were legitimate and contained no errors of fact that meet the test for libel. Yale noted that the book was subject to peer review and copy editing and that the author verified that he had fact-checked the book. A Yale editor certified that he had no knowledge that anything in the book was incorrect. Yale’s brief called the suit a “classic, meritless challenge to free expression,” and sought the suit’s dismissal and legal fees. While Yale’s motion was not heard in court, the suit was withdrawn shortly after it was filed. …

Todd Gallinger, a lawyer for KinderUSA, confirmed that the suit had been withdrawn. He said that his clients decided to do so not because of “anything we perceive in weaknesses in the actual case,” but out of a desire to focus the group’s “limited resources” on its mission of helping “Palestinian children in need.” Asked if Yale’s anti-SLAPP motion influenced the decision, Gallinger said that “Yale came at us hard.”