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Friday, January 30, 2009

Law - "Dawn Johnsen, an IU law professor, is awaiting Senate approval"

Updating earlier ILB entries on IU-Blommington law prof Dawn Johnsen, Jon Murray of the Indianapolis Star has a lengthy feature today. Some quotes:

Dawn Johnsen, 47, joined IU in 1998 after spending five years at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, including two years as its acting assistant attorney general.

Obama nominated her this month to the same position in the influential behind-the-scenes office, pending confirmation by the U.S. Senate. No hearings have been scheduled.

Johnsen declined an interview, citing White House orders.

Her colleagues, students and legal opponents call her sharp and committed. The native New Yorker's politics lean to the left -- she once was the legal director of NARAL Pro-Choice America -- and in recent years, she has devoted her advocacy to concerns about terrorism policies under Bush. * * *

Saying "no," Johnsen told her students, is the most important role for a lawyer advising the White House on the boundaries of presidential power.

Johnsen has written critically about legal opinions under Bush that addressed the war in Iraq, interrogation methods, a military tribunal system denying certain rights to detainees captured in the war on terrorism, and Bush's use of presidential signing statements to ignore provisions of new laws.

"We must regain our ability to feel outrage whenever our government acts lawlessly and devises bogus constitutional arguments for outlandishly expansive presidential power," she wrote last year on Slate's legal blog. * * *

Conservatives expect Johnsen's team to provide legal support for much of Obama's agenda. She is a former board member of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, a liberal law group created in 2001 as a counterweight to the conservative Federalist Society.

"They're going to try to pull the office and the executive branch as a whole in a different direction," said Richard Garnett, a University of Notre Dame law professor and Federalist Society member.

But Garnett was quick to add: "Even if we disagree with the views of these appointees, we can say they are talented lawyers."

No stranger to controversy, Johnsen challenged attempts to regulate abortion in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A frequent opponent, Terre Haute attorney James Bopp Jr., general counsel to the National Right to Life Committee, said she is bright and committed but won't be an impartial adviser, the term he used to describe Bush's top attorneys. * * *

Johnsen has two young sons and teaches Sunday school. Her husband, John Hamilton, serves on the board of the Monroe County Community Schools and is president of City First Enterprises, which invests in neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. Hamilton headed the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and the Family and Social Services Administration under former Gov. Frank O'Bannon.

BTW, Hamilton, who headed IDEM under O'Bannon, is the brother of federal judge David Hamilton and both are nephews of former congressman Lee Hamilton, if I recall correctly.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on January 30, 2009 07:53 AM
Posted to General Law Related