Permanent State of Emergency

April 3, 2017
As the world watches a new U.S. president seemingly wedded to rule by executive order, this timely and prescient debut by Lakehead University law professor Alford starkly argues that America is no longer a rule-of-law state because traditional legislative and judicial checks against presidential authority have been completely corroded by War on Terror prerogatives. What could have been a dry legal text is instead a lively, informative, and at times very frightening history of tensions among the three branches of American government. First debated in the Federalist Papers of the late 18th century, these tensions have continued to resonate through crises as diverse as slavery, Japanese-American internment during World War II, and the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals. Alford convincingly argues that the 9/11 attacks created the pretext for a massive executive branch overreach that centralized decision-making on issues including indefinite detention, torture, Guantánamo Bay, drone strikes, and war declarations in the Oval Office. Concluding that the U.S. government is now an elective dictatorship where systemic violations of basic rights can be carried out with impunity, Alford’s utterly reasonable and objective study is a compelling, important call to restore democratic balance.