Language Log

Detained, not arrested

You know your legal theories are in trouble when a sports-oriented comic strip starts making fun of them.

The backstory here is that Tank McNamara, a former NFL lineman working as a sports broadcaster, has run afoul of the league's Code of Personal Conduct in a case of Road Rudeness:

The (fanciful) premise is that the league has "pseudo-police" who keep watch on players, even former players, using illegal surveillance techniques:

And (again fancifully) they don't arrest you, they "detain" you. Which, we've learned in the past six years, means no habeas corpus or other judicial recourse, plus possible waterboarding and the like.

The whole analogy between the NFL's Code of Personal Conduct, which the commissioner can use to suspend players more or less at will, and the various legal theories under which the Bush administration has claimed the right to carry out domestic surveillance without a warrant and to detain citizens indefinitely without charges, is more than a little strained. But then, so are those legal theories.

Posted by Mark Liberman at September 9, 2007 07:34 AM