While Japan has been scheming to overturn IWC limitations on its whaling activities, it has also been finding new ways to annoy its neighbors. The most hilarious of these is Japan's attempt to establish Okinotori, an uninhabited series of rocks/islands in the Pacific. Japan has done this by assigning Okinotori a Tokyo address thereby making it part of the municipality...
All the major media has picked up an announcement by "UN Human Rights experts" that they have reliable allegations of torture or mistreatment at Guantanamo Bay and that the U.S. has been "stalling" and denying them access to the base.Putting aside the merits of their allegations for the moment, it is worth pointing out that the U.S. has no legal...
Contrary to what news reports were suggesting earlier, Japan has lost its attempt to shift IWC rules on the number of whales it can catch under a 19 year old moratorium. Instead, it has announced that it will expand the number of whales it catches under the "scientific research" exception to the IWC moratorium...
Opinio Juris is pleased to publish the first in an ongoing series of blog interviews with preeminent practioners, scholars and jurists in international law. We are honored that our first interview is with Justice Richard Goldstone. Justice Goldstone's stepped down last year as a Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, on which served from its establishment in 1994...
Maybe April is the cruellest month, but May and June haven’t been so great for the European Union, either. First there was the collapse of the EU Constitutional process at the hands of the French and the Dutch. And now there is a budgetary debacle that redoubles the perception that the “European project” is in crisis.In short, negotiations over the...
I'm back! Not that anyone would have missed me, with all those great Roger Alford posts from India. Still, nothing lasts forever. So back to my wacky idiosyncratic interests...
On behalf of the three of us, I wanted to thank Roger for his stint--hopefully the first of many--guest blogging at Opinio Juris. We will have other guest bloggers in the weeks and months (and years?) to come. I doubt many will be blogging while travelling around India, though.Thanks again, Roger, and we hope you blog again with...
Professor Eugene Kontorovich has kindly sent along the following comments to my earlier post:I was happy to read the thoughtful discussion here of my Green Bag article. In that article, I took issue with proponents of using foreign law in constitutional interpretation who quote as originalist support for their position the Declaration of Independence’s reference to a “decent respect for...
I had the opportunity to speak to the Madras Bar Assocation today and while I was at the High Court I came upon this quote which I liked. It is from the first Indian Judge to ever sit on the Madras High Court, Sir Muthuswamy Aiyar (1878-1895):"The Court of Justice is a sacred temple, the judges presiding over it...
That is very helpful Peggy. I think you raise some interesting arguments regarding selective appeal to foreign opinion and provide a useful critique of Kontorovich.This underscores for me yet again what is most interesting in the debate about originalist appeals to reliance on foreign opinions in constitutional adjudication. It is that the internationalists have been quite successful in using this...
Prompted by Roger's post (and also by some edits to a comment about Justice Blackmun's "internationalism" that I have been working on), I took a look at Eugene Kontorovich's essay in Green Bag about misplaced reliance by jurisprudential internationalists on the phrase "Opinions of Mankind." (I am not sure the phrase has become "a staple of the internationalist argument" as...
As noted here at the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Kontorovich has an excellent essay in Green Bag on misusing language in the Declaration of Independence to support reliance on foreign opinion in constitutional adjudication. Kontorovich argues that the function of the internationalist appeal to the Declaration is to “show that this approach has the most ancient and noble pedigree, that the...
