is office prides itself on a rich tradition of protecting the rule of law by sticking to an unbiased, balanced, and non-partisan approach to the opinions it renders - even when these opinions conflict with the declared policy goals of the sitting president.

The torture memo powerfully disserves this tradition. Instead of providing a balanced and nuanced assessment of the President’s wartime authority, the memo is a work of pure advocacy in support of President Bush’s policy goals. It strives for plausible rationales - not persuasive, convincing arguments. Perhaps even worse, its analysis is fatally incomplete - paying no heed, for instance, to the notion that, as Justice Hugo Black put it, "great nations, like great men, should keep their word."

OLC is meant to provide a vital institutional check on the legality of presidential policy initiatives. But the memo gives every indication that it has been transformed into just another stop on a "yes man" freight train running through the Executive Branch.

The Supreme Court’s Trio of "War on Terrorism" Decisions

Which brings me to the next most important development of 2004 - the Supreme Court’s modest but correct decisions in the Guantanamo detainee cases and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. Despite their limitations, these decisions were momentous because of the legal proposition they resoundingly rejected.

These are very narrow decisions. In Hamdi, the Court held only that U.S. citizens arrested in a combat zone abroad are entitled to fair procedures to determine whether, in fact, they qualify as "enemy combatants."

And in the consolidated Guantanamo cases - Rasul v. Bush -- the Court merely declared that Guantanamo detainees have a right to challenge the legality of their detention through a habeas corpus proceeding. But it did not spell out what substantive or procedural safeguards would guide such challenges.

But if the Court left many, many questions unanswered, it did emphatically repudiate the very dangerous position of the Bush Administration. Specifically, the Administration had claimed that the Executive Branch has the unilateral, unreviewable constitutional authority to deem any person (even a U.S. citizen here in the U.S) an "enemy combatant" - and, on that basis, to detain that person indefinitely without access to lawyers or courts. Thanks to a nearly unanimous Court (only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented), this step towards despotism was avoided.

A Massachusetts Decision on Equality for Gays Had Profound National Impact

Every year, of course, the Supreme Court hands down a number of highly significant decisions, but in 2004 the next most significant ruling came from a state court - the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. In the case of Goodridge v. Dep’t of Public Health, that court declared, by a 4-3 vote, that the state’s constitution guarantees gay couples an equal right to marry.

Few legal decisions spawn national cultural phenomena. This one did. Images of gay couples joyously marrying in San Francisco and elsewhere are now indelibly imprinted in the national mind. With a political backlash against gay marriage in full swing, even if one does not subscribe to the theory that this issue cost John Kerry the presidency, the question remains: What hath Massachusetts wrought?

Will States - and Attorney Generals Like Eliot Spitzer - Now Fill a Regulation Vacuum?

Speaking of states, 2004 also saw the emergence of a state attorney general, New York’s Eliot Spitzer, as the nation’s top corporate watchdog in an era of widespread corporate malfeasance.

This is more than the story of one man’s energy, guts, and ambition. Spitzer’s popularity (outside corporate boardrooms) reflects a widespread populist yearning that someone needs to stand up for the little guy - the individual consumer, pensioner, or stockholder -- and that this someone is not to be found in Washington.

Some years ago, when the Supreme Court started cutting back on civil rights and civil liberties, a number of pro

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