So suggests an Irish parliamentarian in the Irish Times (text available here). I don't think so, for two reasons. First, law in any form is going to be uneven in its coverage. Gerald Neuman had a wonderful 1996 piece in the Stanford Law Review entitled "Anomalous Zones," about the geographically and temporally discontinuous application of the law. ...
Today will be Peter Spiro's final day guest-blogging. On behalf of all of us, I want to thank him for his stint -- which was, by any account, a smashing success. We wish him well in his new position at Temple! ...
For years, researching U.S. treaty-making was a daunting task. Publication of U.S. treaties and other international agreements in the United States Treaties (UST) and Treaties and Other International Agreements (TIAS) series lagged years (if not decades) behind. Other materials (e.g., reservations, instruments of ratification, the travaux preparatoire) were often unavailable, incomplete, or required checking multiple sources. And...
After leaving the White House this week during his consultations with President Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair met with California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to announce an agreement to start a global-warming-reducing emissions-trading market. Wait a minute, even though California often seems like a foreign country to many of us in the States, can California actually sign an agreement with a...
An Old Bailey judge involved in the Official Secrets Act prosecution of Leo O'Connor and David Keogh ruled on July 18th that the public cannot learn the contents of the infamous leaked document detailing a conversation between Bush and Blair in which Bush allegedly expressed his desire to bomb al-Jazeera's headquarters in Iraq: Any discussion of an already partially leaked...
For those who are interested, Steve Clemons of The Washington Note is actively covering John Bolton's confirmation hearings. If Clemons' first few posts are any indication, things aren't going very well for the nominee, whose disastrous interim stint at the UN seems to be rightfully coming back to haunt him:1. Senator Hagel is now undecided on whether to support...
This article in the New York Times by Thom Shanker raises a critically important question for the current conflict in the Middle East. Shanker writes, Hezbollah, with the sophistication of a national army (it almost sank an Israeli warship with a cruise missile) and the lethal invisibility of a guerrilla army, is a hybrid. Old labels, and old planning,...
According to this report by Xinhua (China's news agency), the ICC has agreed not to interfere with peace talks between Uganda and its rebel opposition the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Peace talks had previously broken down because of the ICC's arrest warrants against the LRA leaders. We'll see exactly what this means, because the ICC itself has not released...
This interesting Washington Post article on U.S. bioweapons research goes a bit too far trying to drum up a legal controversy. According to the Post, the Department of Homeland Security has a super-secret bioweapons research facility which some fear may violate the 1972 Convention Against Biological and Toxin Weapons. According to the Post article, the U.S. believes it is in...
The separatist conflict in Moldova about which I have been blogging received a brief mention by President Bush on Thursday. Reuters reports the following regarding the meeting of President Bush and Romanian President Basescu:The leaders also agreed that separatists in neighboring Moldova should not be allowed to secede from the country. "We support the territorial integrity of Moldova," Bush said.Actually...
The Human Rights Committee has released an advance copy of its report on US compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. From a quick skim, it looks highly critical. (Just like the PR-insensitive UN to issue something newsworthy like this on a late summer Friday.) A predictable number of observations address GWOT detainee issues,...
I unwisely waded into a debate between Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review and Emily Bazelon of Slate over alleged mistakes and misrepresentations in Justice Stevens’ opinion for the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. As I pointed out earlier this week, Ponnuru charged that Justice Stevens mistakenly used legislative history in the Hamdan decision and that this was a...
