To the Editor:
Re “Legal Acrobatics, Illegal War” (Op-Ed, June 21):
My dear colleague and friend Bruce Ackerman denounces President Obama for preferring the advice of State Department and White House lawyers over those in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and the Pentagon.
I think that Mr. Obama’s legal argument is wrong, indeed absurd, but he is politically and (in the unlikely event that a court would hear a challenge to it) legally accountable for making it. No constitutional provision or legal principle prevents the president from choosing among competing legal advisers.
President Obama is and should be free to do so; the politicians and voters will decide how they feel about his choice.
PETER H. SCHUCK
New York, June 21, 2011
The writer is professor emeritus of law at Yale University and a visiting professor at New York University Law School.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 