Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Davies on a Clerk's View of the Nazi Saboteurs' Case

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University School of Law, has posted Some Clerical Contributions to Ex Parte Quirin, which appears in Green Bag 2d 19 (2016): 283-325. 
This article introduces some documents relating to Ex parte Quirin and then explains where they have been for the last 70-plus years. Quirin is the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court – in a hurried summer session in July 1942 – upheld President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s creation of an unusual military commission to try eight Nazi saboteurs under a special set of rules. The documents are memos written to Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone by his senior law clerk, Bennett Boskey, while the Court was hearing and deciding and opining on Quirin.
The Library of Congress is processing Boskey's papers.  (He died on May 11, 2016.)  Davies’s appendices make facsimiles of his memos available now.