Several years ago, I asked the civil-rights lawyer Michael Ratner, who died Wednesday at age 72, whether he thought he had any chance of prevailing when, with the Center for Constitutional Rights, he sued George W. Bush in early 2002 on behalf of some of the first Guantánamo detainees. “None whatsoever,” he replied. “We filed 100 percent on principle.” The law was against him; the Supreme Court had ruled in World War II that prisoners of war could not challenge their detention in US courts. And the politics were even worse; the World Trade Center cleanup was still ongoing, the detainees had been declared “the worst of the worst,” and, as alleged foreign terrorists, the detainees elicited little sympathy from Americans. But to Ratner, challenging the president was the right thing to do, and that was enough. ...

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