A revisionist history of habeas corpus the world's most revered legal device. Habeas corpus was not established to protect the rights of the individual but rather to protect the individual from abusive judges and jailers.

Habeas Corpus is the process by which state prisoners—particularly those on death row—appeal to federal courts to have their convictions overturned. Its proper role in our criminal justice system has always been hotly contested, especially in the wake of 1996 legislation curtailing the ability of prisoners to appeal their sentences. In this timely volume, Eric M. Freedman reexamines four of the Supreme Court’s most important habeas corpus rulings: one by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1807 concerning Aaron Burr’s conspiracy, two arising from the traumatic national events of the 1915 Leo Frank case and the 1923 cases growing out of murderous race riots in Elaine County, Arkansas, and one case from 1953 that dramatized some of the ugliest features of the Southern justice of the period. In each instance, Freeman uncovers new original sources and tells the stories of the cases through such documents as the Justices’ draft opinions and the memos of law clerk William H. Rehnquist. In bracing and accessible language, Freedman then presents an interpretation that rewrites the conventional view. Building on these results, he challenges legalistic limits on habeas corpus and demonstrates how a vigorous writ is central to implementing the fundamental conceptions of individual liberty and constrained government power that underlie the Constitution.

Committee Serial No. 2. Considers H.R. 2269 and related H.R. 3216, H.R. 4958 and H.R. 6742, to revise guidelines allowing Federal courts to hear appeals from prisoners denied release by writ of habeas corpus from state court.

"The storied writ of habeas corpus-literally, to hold the body-has enjoyed celebrated status in the common law tradition for centuries. Writing in the eighteenth century, the widely influential English jurist and commentator William Blackstone once labeled the writ of habeas corpus a "bulwark of our liberties." Soon thereafter, a member of Parliament glorified the writ as "[t]he great palladium of the liberties of the subject." Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, in the lead up to the American Revolution, the Continental Congress declared that the habeas privilege and the right to trial by jury were among the most important rights in a free society, "without which a people cannot be free and happy." A few years later, while promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution in The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton celebrated the privilege as one of the "greate[st] securities to liberty and republicanism" known. Thus, as another participant in the ratification debates wrote, the writ of habeas corpus has long been viewed as "essential to freedom.""--

For most Americans, habeas corpus is the cornerstone of our legal system: the principal constitutional check on arbitrary government power, allowing an arrested person to challenge the legality of his detention. In a study that could not be more timely, Justin Wert reexamines this essential individual right and shows that habeas corpus is not necessarily the check that we've assumed. Habeas corpus, it emerges, is as much a tool of politics as it is of law. In this first study of habeas corpus in an American political context, Wert shifts our collective emphasis from the judicial to the political-toward the changes in the writ influenced by Congress, the president, political parties, state governments, legal academics, and even interest groups. By doing so, he reveals how political regimes have used habeas corpus both to undo the legacies of their predecessors and to establish and enforce their own vision of constitutional governance. Tracing the history of the writ from the Founding to Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush, Wert illuminates crucial developmental moments in its evolution. He demonstrates that during the antebellum period, Reconstruction, Gilded Age, Great Society, and the ongoing war on terrorism, habeas corpus has waxed and waned in harmony with the interests of majoritarian politics. Along the way, Wert identifies and explains the political context of fine points of law that many political scientists and historians may not be aware of—such as the exhaustion rule requiring that a federal habeas participant must first exhaust all possible claims for relief in state court, a maneuver by which the post-Reconstruction Court abandoned supervision of race relations in the South. Especially in light of the new scrutiny of habeas corpus prompted by the Guantánamo detainees, Wert's book is essential for broadening our understanding of how law and politics continue to intersect after 9/11. Brimming with fresh insights into constitutional development and regime theory, it shows that the Great Writ of Liberty may not be so great as we have supposed-because while it has the potential to enforce conceptions of rights that are consistent with the best ideals of American politics, it also has the potential to enforce its worst aspects as well.

6 The Importance of Effective International Habeas Corpus Guarantees