Steve Vladeck on the "short-martial"

Global Military Justice Reform contributor Prof. Steve Vladeck's One First substack is must reading about the Supreme Court of the Uniuted States. Today's installment, No. 114, History, Tradition, and the "Short-Martial," is one of his best. Excerpt:

I wanted to use today’s “Long Read” to go into a bit more detail about a cert. petition that my co-counsel and I filed on Friday—which asks the justices to take up a constitutional challenge to the military’s novel use, starting in 2019, of mandatory bench trials for an array of serious offenses. The petition presents (what we think is) an interesting test case for the justices’ recent commitment to “history and tradition” in constitutional analysis. Here, the “history and tradition” of military justice unambiguously support a right to be tried by a multi-member panel of fellow servicemembers dating all the way back to (indeed, before) the Founding. And, as noted below, whether there are any circumstances in which Congress should be allowed to depart downward from what had historically been the court-martial’s irreducible procedural minimum, our view is that the Court ought to take up the case, captioned Wheeler v. United States, because the only justification Congress mustered for departing from that history and tradition here was “efficiency.”