“The Nuremberg trials presupposed something about the human conscience: that moral choice doesn’t take its cues solely from narrow legalisms and technicalities. The new detainee bill takes precisely the opposite stance: Technicality now triumphs over conscience, and even over common sense. The bill introduces the possibility for a new cottage industry: the jurisprudence of pain.” Also at Slate, David J. Luban argues that Dubya’s recent torture bill spells the end of the Nuremberg era, a period when the US worked hard at “codifying genuinely international humanitarian law,” to say nothing of the Great Writ.