Mexican AM radio, Child Porn, Goat testicles, and Blogging.
I don't feel strongly about the Small case recently decided by the Supreme Court, but I think some of the commentary about it illustrates an interesting trend of confusion and hypocrisy in international legal issues.
If someone set up shop outside U.S. territory with a website, ala thesmokinggun, but containing large amounts of sealed U.S. court documents, I doubt that the U.S. government would merely write it off since it wasn't illegal in the originating country. The CaptainEd saga was too minor and short to actually see the international legal issues play out, but I get the impression that while vigorously defending CaptainEd, many of the same bloggers would have no issues with the U.S. attempting to extradite or otherwise punish/muzzle the operators of my hypothetical website. A nice historical example would be the U.S. government's eventually success in pressuring the Mexican government to shut down cross border radio stations. (The first cross border cases involve Dr. Brinkley's goat testicle transplants, country music, and fascism broadcasts.)
We usually expect other countries to consider our laws to have some weight, such as helping to extradite child porn publishers that have never set foot in the U.S., and violated no laws in their home countries. Notice that in the regpay case, France and Spain were disinterested third parties that allowed abduction or arrest/ extradition of the defendants. International law is a matter of negotiated give and take, if we expect to be able to go after the regpay people, or whine about bobby fischer escaping to Iceland, we need to remember that the extradition treaties work both ways. (Tangent: the recent extradition treaty does NOT have dual illegality, which should have scared the living crap out of conservatives, but most were too enamored with extraditing terrorists to guantanamo bay.)
If someone set up shop outside U.S. territory with a website, ala thesmokinggun, but containing large amounts of sealed U.S. court documents, I doubt that the U.S. government would merely write it off since it wasn't illegal in the originating country. The CaptainEd saga was too minor and short to actually see the international legal issues play out, but I get the impression that while vigorously defending CaptainEd, many of the same bloggers would have no issues with the U.S. attempting to extradite or otherwise punish/muzzle the operators of my hypothetical website. A nice historical example would be the U.S. government's eventually success in pressuring the Mexican government to shut down cross border radio stations. (The first cross border cases involve Dr. Brinkley's goat testicle transplants, country music, and fascism broadcasts.)
We usually expect other countries to consider our laws to have some weight, such as helping to extradite child porn publishers that have never set foot in the U.S., and violated no laws in their home countries. Notice that in the regpay case, France and Spain were disinterested third parties that allowed abduction or arrest/ extradition of the defendants. International law is a matter of negotiated give and take, if we expect to be able to go after the regpay people, or whine about bobby fischer escaping to Iceland, we need to remember that the extradition treaties work both ways. (Tangent: the recent extradition treaty does NOT have dual illegality, which should have scared the living crap out of conservatives, but most were too enamored with extraditing terrorists to guantanamo bay.)
posted by Bob at
11:25:00 AM
2 Comments:
Thanks for the elucidation.
By
Anonymous, at 4:27 PM
Dr. Brinkley stopped transplanting goat testicle tissue while he was still in Milford, Kansas. He, and most of the rest of the medical community, came to realize that any good effect of transplantation of slices of goat testicles could be more easily accomplished by hormone injections. We're talking about 1920s medicine here, which lacked considerable sophistication in the workings of the endocrine system.
The AMA knew very well that Brinkley was not doing goat gland operations in Del Rio. They even published that fact when they published the transcript of the defamation case Brinkley brought against them in San Antonio. But it was too easy to lie about him than to admit their real problem was that he was an advertising doctor who ran a clinic claiming special abilities.
The Supreme Court decided years later that doctors have the right to advertise no matter what the AMA says. Brinkley was no angel, but that's no reason to make stuff up to attack him.
By
PBCliberal, at 8:47 PM
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