Military justice blogs are to blogs
as military music is to music.
5 Comments I’m in Alabama visiting the Air Force JAG School for the first time. The facility is impressive and the surrounding community is charming. On a road adjacent to the Air Force JAG School is one of the best street signs ever:
After sending a note to the CAAF webmaster about broken links to CAAF opinions caused by the new CAAF website, I received a response (in less than 24 hours). And the response was a great one. The technical team for CAAF’s website fixed all of the URLs for CAAF opinions from the old website so that you can click on a link in a pre-New CAAF webpage post and get to the opinion on the New CAAF webpage. For example, yesterday the links to the US v. Jones and US v. Girouard opinions in this April 2011 post didn’t work. But click the links for Jones or Girouard in this post and both work fine, even though the Girouard link is actually a link to the Old CAAF webpage. BZ CAAF website technical team!
I interrupt my blogging quasi-hiatus to wish Code 45ers and Code 45 alumni a happy Groundhog Day (official holiday of Code 45).
Tomorrow at 1430 EST, the 112th Army-Navy game will commence. Navy leads the series 55-49-7. I’ll be at the game at Landover, Maryland. For those of you who won’t be there, CBS is televising the game.
Go Navy! Beat Army!
Because we’re always improving, the comment system has another upgrade that makes it easier to use rich text formatting, such as italics, bold, underline, and links. These options have always been available, but now they work at the click of a button instead of requiring inline html code.
Enjoy, and please report any problems.
Comments Off This is going to be my last CAAFlog post for a while. As the No Man noted the other day, the original CAAFloggers — of which I’m one — have been at this for five years now, which is 35 years in blog years. Whoops — I’m sorry — that’s 35 in dog years. But you get the point.
The merger of NIMJ Blog with CAAFlog increased the size of the herd of commentators on this site. I look forward to reading their commentary as I concentrate on some other endeavors over the next few months. As always, I’ve very grateful to those of you who thought reading my electronic scribblings was worth the time it took to do so.
Comments Off Due to a dramatic increase in comment spam over the past few days, I have implemented a new comment spam filter. The new system requires you to copy and paste a randomly-generated password in order to submit a comment.
Unlike the old system, this method requires no math, so I anticipate more comments from Marines.
Please let us know if you have any trouble posting with this new system. As before, a valid email address (which will not be shared) is required to post a comment.
CAAFlog turns 5 today. And now that we, like No Man’s son who was born within days of starting this endeavor, are the intellectual equivalent of a Kindergartner, we think we can now relive some of our greatest hits. So, as a present to you the CAAFlog commentariat, below we give you what we consider our Top Posts of all time.
Happy Birthday, CAAFlog.
The Supremes dis the military justice system. No other post could top this because no other post has landed us on the front page of the New York Times, resulted in an invitation for re-briefing of a SCOTUS case, or drawn a supplemental SCOTUS opinion.
And the rest of our favorites in no particular order. We’ll see if we can come up with a voting system to rank the others, but for now they are just for your reading pleasure.
Today we are announcing the start of a new collaboration between CAAFlog and the National Institute of Military Justice (NIMJ). This site brings together CAAFlog contributors and NIMJ’s directors, advisors, and some law students who have been recruited along the way to help keep us current on the latest news in military justice. We hope to be your one-stop shopping site for military justice news and content. NIMJ President Prof. Beth Hillman has this to say about the new collaboration:
We’re excited to join CAAFlog on a new platform that promises to share our collective interest and expertise in military justice with a broader audience. This collaboration will help NIMJ further its mission of promoting the fair administration of military justice and public education while creating an opportunity for more synergy and interaction. We look forward to realizing the potential gains of the combined site, and we’re grateful for the support of CAAFlog’s Michael Navarre (who doubles as an NIMJ advisor), Dwight Sullivan, and Zachary Spilman for their support.
Our new site also has some new features, some of which we’ll preview here and others that we will roll out by way of later posts. However, let’s for a moment talk about the name. The name of the new blog was a highly debated issue, but we finally settled on the logo reflected above. Much like Oriole Park at Camden Yards, you can call us whatever you want, but two things will remain constant: (1) topical military justice news and knowledgeable views and (2) our web address, www.caaflog.com. If you are here because you were a fan of NIMJblog, do not fear: we’ve redirected NIMJblog to our address and archived all the old NIMJblog posts on the right side of our home page under“Categories,” just select “NIMJ Archive.”
Another constant will be our policy that posts represent the views of the author and not of CAAFlog, the other contributors, or any organization or entity with which an individual author might be associated. You can now add NIMJ and its advisors, directors, and other minions to that list. CAAFlog contributors who double as NIMJ advisors are particularly adamant that their posts don’t necessarily represent NIMJ’s views and posts by others affiliated with NIMJ in turn don’t represent the views of other NIMJ-affiliated contributors. We’ll see how widely our range of contributors expands with the new site and, maybe, some of our previously invited guest bloggers will now take up the keyboard and make a post or two (you know who you are).
We also want to take this opportunity to reiterate our comments “policy,” see here and here, that we discussed earlier this year. We will not tolerate abusive comments, uncivil comments, personal attacks, inappropriate comments, etc., etc. And we continue to prohibit anonymous comments but will permit commenters to register under a pseudonym, as described in our prior post.
We hope the new site and new contributors make us the best resource—and an occasional source of humor—for MJWs across the globe.
On 3 October 2001, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces held a memorial proceeding for the victims of the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
One of the victims, Mari-Rae Sopper, was a friend of many of us at CAAFlog from her time at the Navy-Marine Corps Appellate Defense Division. During CAAF’s memorial proceeding, Hardy Vieux spoke about Mari-Rae. Rereading what he said caused me to both smile and grieve. Here are Hardy’s very apt words:
“You are born and oh how you wail. Your first breath is a scream, not timid or low but selfish and shattering with all the force of waiting nine months under water. The rest of your life should be like that — an announcement.”
Good morning, Chief Judge Crawford, Judges of this Honorable Court. That quotation I just recited to you encapsulates the life of Lieutenant Mari-Rae Sopper. Her life was always an announcement.
Her enthusiasm was her chosen means of announcement. To know Mari-Rae was to know her enthusiasm and her insatiable spirit. She was in every sense of the word an advocate. First, as a trial counsel and then later as an appellate defense counsel, Mari-Rae, like so many others that preceded her, fought to ensure that the military justice system in which we operate produced fair and just results. Whether it was challenging the constitutionality of non-unanimous jury verdicts or concerning herself with the intricacies of the post-trial process, Mari-Rae would not yield in her attempts to advance her cause as well as that of her clients. She gave expression to their anguish, eloquence to their plight, dignity to their circumstances, and consideration to their contentions.
Time and again she announced that she stood for equality and would not tolerate those who sought to denigrate others on grounds of gender, race, ethnicity, or religion. She understood that the test of our time was being able to move from equality in the abstract to equality in significant results. From lively office exchanges to participation in community activities, Mari-Rae continually reminded us that silence is acquiescence, and she could not and would not remain silent.
She upheld the high standards of service. Her commitment to the integrity of our justice system will long be remembered by all those whose lives she touched. But Mari-Rae was more than just our colleague; she was more than just a naval officer. For many of us she was a friend, for some of us she was a teacher. By example, she taught us that compassion and humility were the ways to go and in her doggedness one could sense a determination to prove wrong all those that underestimated her Herculean heart and small frame. For that was the only thing small about Mari-Rae. Her ideas were big, her aspirations were even bigger and her sense of loyalty was boundless. With her striking hair, green eyes, and unmistakable voice, Mari-Rae set about leaving her imprints on the world.
The law was her vocation, her avocation, and her true passion was gymnastics. As a former college gymnast and a coach, Mari-Rae could express her individuality in her routines while contributing to the efforts of her team.
Although today we meet because of the death of our friend, our thoughts are not on her death but on her life and on the example and guidance and profit we get from introspection about the effervescent life. And although the national tragedy of September 11th took her from us at a mere 35 years old, she lived a full life. I have but faith, for I cannot know where she may be, but I do know that wherever she is, she has announced herself.
After the big crash on Friday we are back in the blogging business. I think the crash has our fearless leader contemplating the end of the world . . . Or has he been reading too many billborards?
For about three months now most of the contributors to this blog have been publicly and privately impressed with the public discourse that occurred after our change in comment policy. See our revised Comments Policy here. Most of our regular commenters have continued to focus on CAAFlog’s typical high-minded discourse of important issues like insisting that practitioners keep the phrase “on active duty” in their specifications, the intricacies of offenses involving a glass of milk and a sailor’s penis, and the sublime Jeopardy answer to: Tea leaves, Martians, and pink underwear.
Then, yesterday I read this Comment under our fearless leader’s post on the slow year the CCAs are having as measured in published opinions:
Maybe it’s because even they recognize that what they’re writing these days is generally worthless drivel, hence its “non-precedential” value. Most of the time they can’t even state the “facts” accurately, and it goes down hill from there.
First, I’d like to say that I encourage commenters to say what they want about the substantive merit of Courts of Criminal Appeals’ opinions, and this blog has said much about the substantive merit of many CCA opinions. But, lumping all of the CCA judges and their opinions together and calling them “worthless drivel” is not what we expected from our blog readers. I know for a fact in the last year we have commented on the quality of majority and dissenting CCA opinions, e.g. here, here, and here. And, in fact, we have elevated certain recent CCA jurists to the “The Great” status in light of their contributions to the judiciary–and I doubt Judge Ham will be the last. So I was disappointed that one of our long time commenters felt the need to make that comment.
I know that by expressing my disappointment and making this isolated comment the topic of a post I have now given it more recognition than it would have had otherwise, but I felt the need to remind our commenters that pseudonyms are not permitted here so that authors can hide behind them to take overly generalized and unwarranted pot shots at the military judiciary, or any other group for that matter. They are permitted because we know that the military judge advocate community is not homogeneous and there are disparate views about commenting or asking questions on a public blog. Please keep that in mind and don’t make comments that you wouldn’t make under your own name if that issue were not in play. Thanks.
For all those offering to pay us to stop covering the Lakin and birther issue, I give you these stats:
Someone please explain, why again would we want to stop talking about the LTC Lakin case?
Comments Off Some readers have reported difficulty getting to CAAFlog today. We don’t know the root cause of the problem, but our server is being replaced tonight and things (well, accessibility at least) should improve dramatically.
BZ to our very own Kabul Klipper, who was selected by the Naval Judicial Screening Selection Board.
