Function
The purpose of the state secrets privilege is to prevent courts from revealing state secrets in the course of civil litigation (in criminal cases, the Classified Information Procedures Act serves the same purpose). The government may intervene in any civil suit, including when it is not a party to the litigation, to ask the court to exclude state secrets evidence. While the courts may examine such evidence closely, in practice they generally defer to the Executive Branch. Once the court has agreed that evidence is subject to the state secrets privilege, it is excluded from the litigation. Often, as a practical matter, the plaintiff cannot continue the suit without the privileged information, and drops the case. Recently, courts have been more inclined to dismiss cases outright, if the subject matter of the case is a state secret.
Read more about this topic: State Secrets Privilege
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“The intension of a proposition comprises whatever the proposition entails: and it includes nothing else.... The connotation or intension of a function comprises all that attribution of this predicate to anything entails as also predicable to that thing.”
—Clarence Lewis (1883–1964)
“The information links are like nerves that pervade and help to animate the human organism. The sensors and monitors are analogous to the human senses that put us in touch with the world. Data bases correspond to memory; the information processors perform the function of human reasoning and comprehension. Once the postmodern infrastructure is reasonably integrated, it will greatly exceed human intelligence in reach, acuity, capacity, and precision.”
—Albert Borgman, U.S. educator, author. Crossing the Postmodern Divide, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1992)
“The mother’s and father’s attitudes toward the child correspond to the child’s own needs.... Mother has the function of making him secure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)