Just a few years ago, the national debate over the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, indefinite detention, secret renditions and other legal elements of the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror” happened openly in American courtrooms and in the daily newspapers. Increasingly, those debates have receded into the rearview mirror as we content ourselves with the illusion that these issues are no longer urgent, or no longer affect us. In his thoughtful new book, Habeas Corpus After 9/11, Professor Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall University School of Law, reminds us that these and other legal innovations in the War on Terror are neither resolved, nor isolated, nor benign. We are still living in the legal universe that was constructed on the fly after 9/11. We just don’t want to admit it.

Jasmine Farrier’s Congressional Ambivalence tackles a subject that is both classic and timely: delegation of policy choices to the President and the executive branch. Farrier analyzes delegation to the executive on military base closures, trade policy (“fast track”), and the “War on Terror”—the PATRIOT ACT, Iraq policy, Guantanamo, and surveillance wiretaps. She finds a recurring theme of ambivalence: expressions of reluctance before Congress cedes power, expressions of regret after the fact. But Farrier suggests that Congress nonetheless rarely reclaims power once it has been ceded to the executive, a point illustrated perfectly by the PATRIOT act.

There’s no doubting the conservative bona fides of Bruce Fein. A high-level Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration in the 1980s and previously a resident scholar with the Heritage Foundation, he is a long-time advocate for uncompromising right-wing political principles.