MY REDUCED-BLOGGING PERIOD this week caused me not to get around to writing about the Padilla decision. Fortunately, Eugene Volokh had it covered. Start here and scroll up.

As I’ve said before, I favor treating American citizens differently from non-Americans, at least where domestic arrests are concerned. (If you’re hanging with Al Qaeda abroad, well, you take your risks as to the occasional Hellfire missile). The big risk isn’t individual injustices — those are bad, but as we’ve seen the ordinary criminal-justice system produces them in significant numbers anyway, meaning that they don’t raise any unique concerns in the antiterrorism context. The big risk is that extraordinary legal powers will be perverted from anti-terrorism to the harassment of political opponents. So long as they can’t be exercised against American citizens, that risk is virtually nil.