Jack Jackson grapples with one of the most pressing questions in American politics over the past eight years: What constitutes lawful action? His dissertation, Critical Legal Theory Against Dark Times, examines the thin line separating law and politics today. Combining his doctoral training in Political Science with his prior experience as an attorney, Jackson challenges ideological discourse (both Right and Left) that reduces law to a "crude and simple" politics. Such rhetoric denies differences in the order and magnitude of political acts whether they are lawful or not, and can grant a semblance of legality to anti-constitutional powers. At the same time Jackson criticizes the view that the law should be entirely distinct from politics, instead arguing for a blurred distinction between them. His argument rests on analysis of a new phenomenon that he calls "law that is not a law but also not lawless." His examples include Bush v. Gore (which was not supposed to set a precedent), the doctrine of unilateralism in the invasion of Iraq, the "due-process procedures" of Guantanamo Bay, the "legal interpretations" of torture, and the congressional "law" in the Terri Schiavo case.