Excessive and indefensible

Yesterday's mail brought the 1267-page 2021 edition of Military Court Rules of the United States: Procedure, Citation, Professional Responsibility, Civility, and Judicial Conduct (7th ed. Matthew Bender & Co.), by Frank Rosenblatt, Jonathan Potter, Jocelyn Stewart, and the Editor. Readers of Global Military Justice Reform may find this excerpt from the Foreword of interest:

    Since the publication of the first edition of this book, the number of divergent sets of rules emanating from the four small military jurisdictions and the military commissions has, most unfortunately, continued to grow. The sheer size of this compendium is clear and convincing evidence that the proliferation of rules has become excessive and indefensible. As in the past, and remaining optimists, we hope the current edition will spark efforts to reverse that process and that it will lead to greater uniformity, in keeping with the spirit of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. This would be a good time for such efforts, given the many changes wrought by the Military Justice Act of 2016, the promulgation of an updated Manual for Courts-Martial in 2019, and the likelihood of significant corresponding changes in the rules of the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces in the next year or two. The many challenges the military justice and military commissions systems have faced as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic may lead to further changes of a more permanent nature than the flurry of ad hoc issuances in the first months of 2020.