A good forum for a law and public policy debate

Do you enjoy debating law and public policy? If so, I’ve got both an opportunity and a challenge for you:

As I have mentioned before on this blog, I am enrolled in a National Security Law class this semester. This class is outstanding; I’m so glad I elected to take it. Currently, we are looking at the War Powers Resolution as a result of the struggles of the Separation of Powers issues during Vietnam. One of the assignments we have for Monday is to re-reread the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and consider its strengths and weaknesses. We are to figure out how to “fix” the War Powers Resolution to make it better than what we currently have – what would you add, what would you rewrite, what would you strike altogether?

While I will be doing this over the course of the week, I thought I would take this opportunity to ask those of you who are interested in manners such as this to put your thoughts on this subject in a reply to this post. I am interested not only in forming my own opinion, but seeing how my opinion matches and diverges from other opinions, and I see this as an opportunity to get input from a variety of sources while developing my opinion – which can be of great help. You can get to a link of the War Powers Resolution by clicking here, and then clicking on the section numbers at the Cornell law website that comes up.

If this question piques your interest, don’t comment here. Instead, go to Out of the Binjo Ditch and let Steve know what you think. Aside from the fact that the question is inherently interesting, I think it’s a fascinating use of the collective intelligence of the internet to flesh out a challenging intellectual assignment.

By the way, if you’ve never read a statute before, this will give you a good chance to see why we need lawyers.  This is so gibberishy nobody but someone paid to do so would want to read with it and struggle with its terms — something that applies to a disproportionate number of laws, both state and federal.  There’s a statutory style of writing that itself should be illegal.