Elizabeth L. Hillman, a professor of law and the provost and academic dean at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, is the president of the National Institute of Military Justice.

The Manning court-martial is shaping perceptions of U.S. military justice in much the same way as the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. Both have focused worldwide attention on the extraordinary lengths to which the United States will go to prosecute certain offenses in military courts. A zeal to prosecute, and a willingness to commit resources to a relentless trial strategy, comes through loud and clear in the Manning case.

Manning's defense did manage to prevent the government from succeeding on its most aggressive charge, "aiding the enemy," an almost entirely unused part of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The unusual nature of that charge reflects the atypical nature of the situation in which the government found Pfc. Bradley Manning. He's an odd outlier in a military justice system that itself is an outlier.

Within and outside the military, we should consider writing less archaic laws to reckon with the potential for mass disclosure of information.

Unlike a prosecutor who decides to bring a charge in a civilian criminal court, at court-martial it is a convening authority, an officer in the chain of command of the accused, who makes the decision to prosecute. That distinction — under considerable fire from critics of the military's processes of dealing with sexual assault — places military justice apart from civilian criminal courts. The distance between civil and military courts makes it unlikely that the Manning court-martial will set far-reaching precedent in civilian criminal law. And in a professionalized, all-volunteer force, conduct like Manning's is likely to remain a rare occurrence.

His case may well, however, hasten the process of updating our criminal codes. Within and outside the military, we should consider writing less archaic laws to reckon with the potential for mass disclosure that information technology and government classification have created. The "aiding the enemy" statute doesn't even mention the release of information, and the Espionage Act of 1917 was conceived long ago. The modern trend toward specifying crimes with definitions that meaningfully distinguish the wrongfulness of various acts has not yet transformed this area of criminal law.