Fax Spam Standard

ACMA has released the 42 page draft Fax Marketing Industry Standard discussion paper [PDF], drawing on responses to its June 2010 discussion paper Developing an industry standard for the fax marketing industry.

The national telecommunications regulator is now seeking public comment on a draft national standard within that new discussion paper, which is "intended to provide the community with greater certainty regarding the minimum level of behaviour they can expect from fax marketers".

The Standard reflects the Do Not Call Register Legislation Amendment Act 2010 (Cth), in effect from 30 May this year, which amended the Do Not Call Register Act 2006 (Cth) - a statute that some marketers decried as the end of civilisation as we know it but welcomed by consumers (a welcome signalled by large-scale registration of private numbers to escape interference by telepests).

The 2010 amendments -

* extend the eligibility requirements to allow the inclusion of fax numbers on the Do Not Call Register (the Register)

* establish a general prohibition against sending of marketing faxes to numbers on the Register

* insert a new provision into the Telecommunications Act 1997 (Cth) (s.125B) requiring ACMA to "determine certain standards relating to the fax marketing industry".

The new document provides a summary of the feedback received and background information to assist people in considering the draft standard and invites comment from industry and other interested parties.

From the perspective of community engagement it is a depressing document. A mere 17 responses (including one [PDF] by the author of this blog) were received in relation to the June discussion paper, with comments as follows -

Prohibited times for the sending of faxes
Ten submissions addressed this issue, most favouring clear and enforceable rules on restricting the hours during which fax marketers can contact consumers. Those submissions included the following comments:
+ marketing faxes should be permitted to be sent Monday through to Friday, with suggested permitted times on weekdays ranging from 8.00 am to 9.00 pm
+ marketing faxes should be permitted to be sent Saturdays, between 8.00 am and 9.00 pm — with five submissions supporting reduced hours on Saturday (e.g. between 8.00 am to 6.00 pm)
+ no fax marketing to occur on Sundays and national public holidays (seven submissions). One submission supported allowing fax marketing between 9.00 am and 5.00 pm on such days
+ the prohibited faxing times should be defined in the standard so that they relate to the time zone of the receiver
+ there should be an exception to the prohibition where the receiver has provided consent to receive a marketing fax at a time which would otherwise be a prohibited time.

Provision of information within a fax
The ten submissions which addressed this issue supported a requirement upon fax marketers to provide contact information and suggested that:
+ contact details should be required to easily identify the originator (the person who authorised the sending of the marketing fax, or the advertiser)
+ the contact details required should include standard business details such as company name, phone number, email address and ABN (or similar)
+ contact details should be set out on the first page of the marketing fax
+ the minimum required font size should be stipulated in the standard.

Volume and frequency of marketing faxes to a number
Only one submission supported the introduction of volume and frequency restrictions on the number of marketing faxes that may be sent in a particular period. Several submitters suggested that regard should be had to the existing Handling of Life Threatening and Unwelcome Communications Industry Code, which currently provides some regulation in relation to ‘unwelcome’ communications.

Seven submitters indicated this type of limitation would be difficult to comply with for a variety of reasons. The submissions provided the following comments:
+ if would be technically difficult, time consuming and expensive to implement a solution for compliance
+ no other standard in the world currently includes these type of restrictions
+ the inclusion of this type of restriction could be considered a ‘restraint of trade’
+ he fax marketer has little or no control over the actual number of times a number has been ‘attempted’ (for example, when the first attempt is not successful) as the telecommunications provider is the ‘actual’ dialler
+ large organisations often have only one fax number as a point of entry, which distributes faxes automatically to recipients throughout the organisation via other channels (for example, email). This would mean the fax marketer’s fax communication frequency with a particular organisation (as opposed to an individual) would be limited.

Opt-out functionality
All fourteen submissions which addressed this area supported the inclusion of a requirement to provide opt-out functionality in marketing faxes and many noted that this is already a standard industry practice.

Many submissions favoured a requirement to provide a web based option as an easy and cost effective opt-out mechanism for fax recipients. However, other submissions proposed that a variety of contact options should be required to ensure consumers are not prevented from opting out due to lack of access to particular forms of technology. Many of the submissions suggested the information should be available on the first page of the fax and the minimum font size be prescribed in the standard.

What has been included in the draft standard (which regrettably enshrines Sunday but disregards the sensitivities of people for whom Saturday is a day on which not to be disturbed) -

Prohibited times for the sending of faxes
Under the draft standard, a sender must not send a fax, or cause a fax to be sent, on:
+ a weekday before 9.00 am or after 8.00 pm or
+ a Saturday before 9.00 am or after 5.00 pm or
+ a Sunday or
+ a national public holiday.
A reference to time is the time at the place that is the usual address of the relevant account holder.

An exemption has been provided where the relevant account holder, or nominee of the relevant account holder, has consented in advance to receiving the fax at that time.

Provision of information within a fax
Under the draft standard, a marketing fax must include the following information:
+ the name of the person who authorised the sending of the fax
+ the Australian Business Number (ABN) of the person who authorised the sending of the fax, or equivalent business number identification if the person who authorised the sending of the fax is a foreign company
+ the contact details of the person who authorised the sending of the fax (telephone or fax number, street address, postal or business address and email address)
+ the details of how the recipient can send an opt-out message including:
+ a statement to the effect that the fax recipient may opt-out of receiving any future faxes from the person who authorised the sending of the fax by conveying an opt-out message to an opt-out address and
+ an opt-out address to which fax recipients can communicate an opt-out message.

The information required must be:
+ displayed in a clear and conspicuous manner
+ included on the first page of the fax at a minimum
+ displayed using a minimum size 10 font.

Limit on number of faxes to be sent to a recipient in a period
A person who sends faxes must make reasonable efforts to ensure it does not send more than 10 faxes, which are authorised to be sent by the same fax advertiser, to a particular Australian number in any single 24 hour period.

Opt-out functionality
Under the draft standard a person who sends a fax must have in place processes to ensure that:
+ the opt-out address provided in the fax is capable of receiving opt-out messages 24 hours a day, seven days a week
+ as soon as possible, and no later than seven days, after the fax recipient has opted-out of receiving fax messages, the fax recipient’s number is removed from any list of Australian numbers used by the sender to arrange for the sending of faxes on behalf of the fax advertiser.

Operation of state and territory laws
The draft standard is not intended to exclude the operation of a law of a state or territory to the extent that the law is capable of operating concurrently with the standard.

For example, if a state/territory law prohibits a fax marketer from sending a fax on a day or at a time, other than a day or time restricted in the standard, then the more stringent state or territory law would apply.

ACMA has sought comment by early November on draft standard, particularly -

a. four areas required to be addressed in the draft standard by the Telecommunications Act
b. limit on number of faxes to be sent to a recipient in a period (should the number remain at 10 in a 24 hour period or should it be increased or decreased? should the period in which a number of faxes may be sent to a recipient remain at 24 hours or should it be increased or decreased?)
c. interpretation of words used in the draft standard.

Snark

From Lawrence Rosenthal's provocative 2010 paper 'Those Who Can't, Teach: What the Legal Career of John Yoo Tells Us about Who Should Be Teaching Law' -

Perhaps no member of the legal academy in America is more controversial than John Yoo. For his role in producing legal opinions authorizing what is thought by many to be abusive treatment of detainees as part of the Bush Administration’s “Global War on Terror,” some have called for him to be subjected to professional discipline, others have called for his criminal prosecution. This paper raises a different question: whether John Yoo – and his like – ought to be teaching law.

John Yoo provides something of a case study in the problems in legal education today. As a scholar, Professor Yoo is considered something of a superstar; he has been described as “a leading scholar on the relationship of international law to constitutional commands.” Even so; he teaches at a law school – an entity engaged in preprofessional education. Prior to tenure in the Bush Administration, Professor Yoo had little experience in the practice of the law; as we will see, this makes him typical of the current generation of legal educators. Professor Yoo also represents something of a natural experiment of a type that we rarely see – the unusual case of a leading legal scholar with the limited professional experience typical of his generation who leaves the academy and practices law on a regular basis. When Professor Yoo actually practiced law, he made quite a hash of things. It is remarkable that the legal academy could regard as something of a superstar an individual who proves unable to practice – at an acceptable level – the profession for which he is training his students. Professor Yoo’s case is unusual in that he took the rare step of leaving the academic cocoon and venturing into a position where his professional deficiencies were likely to be exposed, but there is reason to believe that his lack of professional judgment is common among the scholars of his generation. All of this suggests that there is something deeply wrong with the state of legal education today.

This article begins by illustrating the deficiencies in the legal work of Professor Yoo during his service in the Department of Justice. It then explain why those deficiencies cast grave doubt on Professor Yoo’s qualifications to teach law. The article concludes by observing that Professor Yoo's case illustrates the problems that inheres with the legal academy's decision to champion the theoretician as teacher instead of those who have developed the kind of professional judgment so critical to success in the practice of law.

Interference and indignity

Previous posts in this blog have highlighted questions about post-mortem rights, including offence to a deceased person's reputation and notions of dignity for dead celebrities. How does law treat the people who are no longer alive, in particular their remains? (Indefatigable readers will recall my impatience with nonsense from quantum mystics such as Ervin Laszlo about those who are "no longer living in the familiar form in this world but are alive nonetheless" and can therefore be contacted for two way communication via a valve radio).

The ABC, under the heading 'Drug user escapes jail on corpse charge' - I shudder to think of the expression used by the local tabloids - today reports on an obscure charge of 'offering an indignity to a corpse', distinct from the more usual conviction for 'interfering with a cadaver', apparent in for example R v Ali [2001] QCA 331, R v Surrey [2005] QCA 4, R v Jamie Chant [2009] NSWSC 290, Jones v The Queen [2009] HCA 17 and R v Youkhana [2004] NSWCCA 412.

The ABC states that -

A drug user who rummaged through a Sydney woman's unit after finding her body has escaped a jail sentence.

Chady Wazir was charged after an inquest into the death of 59-year-old Joyce Germain whose body was found in her Darlinghurst unit in 2006.

The cause of her death was not determined because the body was decomposed.

Wazir, 31, who threw blankets, a pillow and a knife onto the body after finding it, pleaded guilty to charges of offering an indignity to a corpse and remaining in a building with intent to steal.

He told police he checked Ms Germain for signs of life but found none, so sat next to her body for 10 minutes before becoming angry and screaming.

Not quite the companion you'd desire, whether living or dead.

The court heard that nobody in Australia has been charged with offering an indignity to a corpse since the 1850's, when a fine of one shilling was imposed for the offence.

Magistrate David Heilpern told Wazir that the way that he had dealt with Joyce Germain's body was "reprehensible and an insult to her".

The SMH coverage notes that -

During submissions to the court on Friday, Mr Heilpern was told by both prosecution and defence solicitors that the only sentencing reference to the charge of "misconduct with a corpse - did offer indignity to a dead human body", dated back to 1857.

Details of the historic case were not provided, only that the penalty was a fine of one shilling.

"The offence is an unusual one," Mr Heilpern said.

"Nobody has been charged with the offence for, what I can find, well beyond a century and indeed the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions) has alluded to a case from the 1850s."

Mr Heilpern went on to provide his interpretation of the offence.

"To do something with or to the body that does not involve interfering with the body, but involves doing something that members of the community find insulting, to the body," he said in way of explanation.

Overseas case law regarding the meaning of 'indignity to a corpse' includes R v Mills (1993) 4 SCR 277 (SCC) and R v Moyer (1994) 2 SCR 899 - two Canadian cases where indignity is synonymous with interference.

Maddeningly Muddystar

From a review of Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar -

The failure of Marjorie's artistic ambitions was Wouk's wild success. The novelist had already had a bestseller in The Caine Mutiny (1952), but Marjorie was a phenomenon, selling more copies than any American novel since Gone with the Wind and continuing to sell to this day. This is not attributable to Wouk's artistry. A prime example of the literary category that the critic Pearl K. Bell dubbed the "good bad book," the novel is witty and memorable to a fault — and also solidly middlebrow, clumsily written, and twice as long as it should be. In prose simultaneously flat and overwritten, the characters announce their emotions like restaurant orders, and symbols are dropped into the text like cartoon anvils. In the first twenty pages, Marjorie is thrown by a horse named Prince Charming. Pursuing her free spirit — first cigarettes, alcohol, and bad company, then shellfish, pork, and sex — she falls in love with a luftmentsh named Airman. After the two consummate their love, she gropes on the night table for cigarettes and accidentally breaks a glass—the traditional conclusion to a Jewish wedding. "Shock, shock, and it was over" is Wouk's description of the quite literal anticlimax: Marjorie's Recline and Fall.

And from Conrad Black's extended vent -

Murdoch, because he is probably the most successful media owner in history (so international, innovative and daring) and has, when he can be loosened up to part with them, a considerable store of astute and mordant aperçus, should be a bottomless storehouse of interest. But he is generally not overly forthcoming, rather monosyllabic, an enigma whose banter is nondescript bourgeois filler delivered in a mid-Pacific accent. His idea of humor is pretty coarse, in the Australian manner, without being very original, or very funny.

Murdoch has no discernible attachments to anyone or anything except the formidable company he has built. His periodic foraging trips for media attention (the oddly hoped-for story where he's made to seem human) usually lead to hilarious fiascoes such as the journalist Michael Wolff's effort at comradely biography combined with sophomoric mind reading, a sort of Charlie Rose approach in The Man Who Owns the News: phrases like "Rupert and I thought ..." abound. Of course no one could possibly have the least interest in what — or if — Wolff thinks, and Wolff couldn’t have had any idea what was on Rupert’s mind because Rupert never lets anyone know what he’s thinking. Murdoch's centenarian mother was "okay" (about as affectionate as it gets with Rupert); no business associate lasts long, except perhaps Michael Milken as an exotic financial guru, and economist Irwin Stelzer as a random and chatty, ersatz muse. Save for Ronald Reagan, he turned on every politician he ever supported in every country where he has operated; he discarded every loyal lieutenant, two wives and countless friendly acquaintances, as if he were changing his socks. Murdoch is a great white shark, who mumbles and furrows his brow compulsively, asks questions and listens, and occasionally breaks loose and has pictures taken of himself dressed in groovy black, pushing a baby stroller through Greenwich Village, or has stories written about his supposedly popish-leaning religiosity, published as humanizing touches, much like his orange-dyed hair, in the Sumner Redstone style.

Certainly Murdoch is interesting as a phenomenon if not as a person; a man who is airtight in his ruthlessness, unlimited in his ambition, with the iron nerves to have bet the company again and again. And although he has had some narrow escapes, he always emerges in fighting form. That story is fascinating, but he has the self-confidence never to try to impress people, is monotonous as a public speaker and unfathomable as a personality in regular conversation. Someone who could grasp and present the scope of Murdoch’s talents and ambitions could produce an interesting book, but it would have to be done by acute observation and intuition, and from a bit of altitude, because it is impossible to get anything but a banal smoke screen with occasional ripples of humor out of the man himself. I have long thought that his social philosophy was contained in his cartoon show, The Simpsons: all politicians and public officials are crooks, and the masses are a vast lumpen proletariat of deluded and exploitable blowhards. Almost all studies of Murdoch, including the reflections on him in Sarah Ellison’s book War at the Wall Street Journal on his takeover of the paper, where she was a reporter, are mosquito explorations around his shins, which is all he cares to reveal.

a list that's blacker than the agent's heart

Blacker, much blacker, and of course - thanks to the joys of digital networks - so very much bigger than the agent's heart. That might be one reaction on reading the ABC news report today that TICA, operator of one of the dominant national tenancy databases, is offering "a service that enables real estate agents to find out when a tenant is considering moving house". A tacit blacklist, anyone?

Under the heading 'Database alerts landlord when tenants consider moving' the ABC notes a service -

offered by the database company TICA [that] involves the company sending an email alert to an agent if a tenant submits an application for another property.

TICA reportedly explained that it is "merely protecting agents and landlords from being left in the lurch", standing "up for the rights of landlords and real estate agents". Let's not let any concerns regarding privacy get in the way of those rights.

The ABC states that -

TICA's website states that: "Tenants do not deserve the right to impose their habits on innocent landlords by claiming that housing is a human right."

When an individual rents a property, the website states they should regard themselves as privileged, as they were chosen over another applicant. They should not go out of their way to impact financial hardship on landlords and become a property manager's nightmare.

With that in mind, the company has devised a new product, Virtual Manager, which allows landlords and agents to see when a tenant applies for another property.

TICA managing director Philip Nounis says the service has been designed to cater for that small section of the marketplace that does "the dreaded midnight skip and things like that".

"They break their existing agreement. They apply to another property. They don't tell the new agent who they were previously renting through and they get approved without the new agent knowing how much money they previously owe," he said.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone embraces the vision of the database company - such a benign label, nu - as a public benefactor. Chris Martin of the Tenants Union of New South Wales is reported as charaterising the service as "a gross invasion of privacy", with a "really very high" potential for abuse.

We might note TICA's history of controversy, with the Federal Privacy Commissioner in 2004 noting that TICA had breached the Privacy Act and ordering TICA to rectify its information handling practices. As one indication of concerns regarding practice, the Commissioner indicated that TICA took 6 minutes at $5.45 per minute in calls to identify whether it held information on individuals, which elsewhere I have suggested is arguably in conflict with expectations that tenancy history records are accessible for a reasonable fee, up to date and otherwise accurate. [TICA may, of course, now be the embodiment of privacy best practice.]

The Tenants' Union of Queensland at that time argued that -

the exceptional number of breaches supports our view that many of TICA's practices were unlawful. It is an outrage that this behaviour has been able to continue for so many years, unfairly disadvantaging many people from accessing housing - a necessity of life. ... People were being listed inaccurately because TICA did not have adequate processes for verifying data and used overlapping listing categories. Tenants were then charged outrageous amounts if they rang TICA to find out if they were listed - $5.45 per minute, equivalent to $327 per hour. In some cases tenants could be listed for the terms of their natural lives and never get off the database.

In responding to the current criticismsTICA is reported as claiming that 'the tenants union is barking up the wrong tree' -

This is just another thing for the tenancy union to complain about ...

What the tenancy union should be doing is going out there with an education process for tenants, explaining to tenants the benefits of doing the right thing, paying the rent on time rather than trying to jump up and down and complain about databases and certainly complain about TICA.

Copping a certain amount of criticism comes with the territory when implementing problematical new profiling services.

Broader questions about tenancy data services are discussed in the 84 page Report on Residential Tenancy Databases [PDF] from 2006 by the Residential Tenancy Database Working Party of the Ministerial Council on Consumer Afffairs and Standing Committee of Attorneys-General.

It notes, among things, the suggestion that -

a factor contributing to the growth of tenancy databases was the introduction of restrictions under part IIIA of the Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988, which prohibited real estate agents from accessing the credit history of individuals through credit databases.

dancing at both ends of the ballroom ...

... or not, if we're sceptical about sexual polarities.

'Bisexuals Need Not Apply: A Comparative Appraisal of Refugee Law and Policy in Canada, the United States, and Australia' by Sean Rehaag in 13(2) International Journal of Human Rights (2009) -

offers an analysis of refugee claims on grounds of bisexuality. After discussing the grounds on which sexual minorities may qualify for refugee status under international refugee law, the paper empirically assesses the success rates of bisexual refugee claimants in three major host states: Canada, the United States, and Australia. It concludes that bisexuals are significantly less successful than other sexual minority groups in obtaining refugee status in those countries. Through an examination of selected published decisions involving bisexual refugee claimants, the author identifies two main areas for concern that may partly account for the difficulties that bisexual refugee claimants encounter: the invisibility of bisexuality as a sexual identity, and negative views held by some refugee claims adjudicators towards bisexuality as well as the reluctance of some adjudicators to grant refugee status to sexual minorities who differ from gay and lesbian identities as traditionally understood.

Rehaag comments that -

Before turning to my main argument, it is pertinent to first address the terminology used in this paper. Debates regarding appropriate labels for sexual behaviours, sexual identities, and sexual orientations are one of the mainstays of discussions about what human rights have to say about sexual minorities. One source of these debates is that, regardless of which terminology one chooses to embrace, it will inevitably fail to accord with the self-understanding of many of those who are supposed to be covered by the terminology. There have, for example, been sharp disagreements over terms such as MSM (men who have sex with men), WSW (women who have sex with women), ‘homosexual’, ‘gay’, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender), and ‘queer’. Some of the concerns expressed over such terms include whether a term occludes distinct sexual identities and complex intersectional considerations related to gender, class, race, language, religion, physical ability, HIV status, and so on; whether one inappropriately conflates (or bifurcates) sexual behaviours and sexual identities; and whether one excludes particular groups that ought to be included. Moreover, cross-cultural dimensions add a further level of complexity to these debates, because even if one’s chosen terminology is accepted within one community, it may be inappropriate in communities located in other regions of the world. In this paper, I adopt the general term ‘sexual minorities’. I choose the term because it has relatively unsettled and imprecise boundaries. This imprecision is helpful, as it allows the term to include all persons seeking protection from persecution on account of hetero-normativity, irrespective of their precise sexual identities or sexual behaviours.

One further terminological matter remains: my use of the term ‘bisexuality’. Debates about appropriate labels are, if anything, even more pronounced with respect to bisexuality than to other sexual minority identities. Once again, cross-cultural considerations muddy the waters. Some of those characterised in one locale as ‘bisexual’ may be viewed in others as ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’. In the context of this paper, it is necessary to note in particular that a person who would otherwise identify as exclusively homosexual may be coerced into different-sex sexual relations or into adopting bisexual identities through hetero-normative persecution.

This paper attempts to sidestep some of these debates over the definition of ‘bisexuality’ because my interest is not to set out a particular definition and advocate its use by refugee claims adjudicators. Rather, my interest is to explore how sexual minority refugee claimants whose cases involve allegations of non-gender-exclusive sexuality are treated in the refugee determination systems in several major host states. In this paper, therefore, I use the term ‘bisexual’ loosely to mean a person whose sexual orientation, sexual identity, or sexual behaviour is not directed exclusively towards persons of one particular sex or gender.

RIP Louis Henkin

The NY Times reports the death of US human rights scholar Louis Henkin - "often credited with creating the field of human rights law and the author of classic works on constitutional law and the legal aspects of foreign policy".

The Times comments that -

Professor Henkin, unusual in combining equal expertise in constitutional law and international law, moved easily between academia and government. His legal scholarship was a fundamental resource for other scholars involved in human rights and international law, and his books addressed to a broader audience — notably Foreign Affairs and the Constitution, The Rights of Man Today, How Nations Behave and The Age of Rights — became required reading for government officials and diplomats.

Through his teaching at Columbia University, where he founded the Center for the Study of Human Rights in 1978 and the Human Rights Institute in 1998, and through seminars run by the Aspen Institute's Justice and Society Program, he trained hundreds of legal specialists and advocates in the field of human rights law.

"It is no exaggeration to say that no American was more instrumental in the development of human rights law than Lou", said Elisa Massimino, the president and chief executive officer of Human Rights First, an organization Professor Henkin helped found in 1978 under the name Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights. "He literally and figuratively wrote the book on human rights." ...

[H]e served as a law clerk for Justice Felix Frankfurter of the United States Supreme Court.

Mr. Henkin, an ardent New Dealer, worked for the State Department's United Nations bureau and its Office of European Regional Affairs from 1948 to 1956. He played a main role in negotiating the United Nation’s 1951 Refugee Convention, which set forth the standards defining refugees, their rights and the legal obligations of nations toward them.

In 1956 he was invited by Columbia University to spend a year studying the legal issues involved in the control and verification of nuclear weapons, the subject of his first book, Arms Control and Inspection in American Law (1958).

Several works on law, foreign policy and diplomacy followed, including The Berlin Crisis and the United Nations (1959) and Disarmament: The Lawyer's Interests (1964).

After teaching law at the University of Pennsylvania for five years beginning in 1958, he returned to Columbia, where he taught at the law school into his 80s.

His highly influential Foreign Affairs and the Constitution (1972) explored the Constitution's division of power between the president and Congress on matters pertaining to foreign affairs, a quest that took on particular urgency against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, then still in progress. ...

He returned to the subject in 1990 with Constitutionalism, Democracy and Foreign Affairs, a much more impassioned book, that warned of the dangers of an imperial presidency and insisted on the importance of human rights as a cornerstone of American foreign policy. Professor Henkin waged a multifront struggle to extend universalist ideas of human rights and the reach of the law. “He pushed back forcefully against the Roman observation that in war — and perhaps in foreign relations generally — the law is silent,” Sarah H. Cleveland, a law professor at Columbia, said in an interview with the Columbia Human Rights Law Review in 2007.

In his books, he took on such issues as compliance with international law (How Nations Behave, 1968) and the underlying principles of human rights (The Rights of Man Today, 1978). ... Professor Henkin's close ties to the United States government allowed him to serve as a go-between for human rights organizations and Congressional committees drafting rights legislation. He also filed numerous amicus briefs in Supreme Court cases including, most recently, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a 2006 case in which the court rejected the Bush administration’s plan to try Guantánamo Bay detainees before military commissions.