Richard Pildes looks on the money when you line up two recent pieces of his with the decision in Hamdan. In the most recent Harvard Law Review, he and Daryl Levinson argue that separation of powers is contingent on divided control of the political branches, and that one-party (“unified”) government should push the Supreme Court to read congressional intent...
This candid conversation between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair is one of those very rare occasions where we get to be a fly on the wall and hear a private conversation between two heads of state discussing an international crisis. The video and audio from CNN is here. Here is a transcript provided by the BBC (with a...
After two years of pre-trial activity, nearly all of the 1,545 gacaca courts in Rwanda formally began trials on Saturday. Only 118 such courts had previously conducted trials, a kind of "pilot" program for the gacaca system. Gacaca courts were introduced in 1999 as a way of dealing with the hundreds of thousands of Rwandans accused of involvement in the...
There has been a raft of really tough op-eds and editorials against the Bush Administration in the last couple of days. In the LA Times, Mort Halperin calls Bush worse than Nixon (because Bush doesn't just violate the law, he openly defies it); Rosa Brooks ridicules the Hamdan response ("Creativity means never having to say you're sorry."); in the...
CNN has a great new feature that publishes emails of personal stories of people experiencing the war in the Middle East. Here is a taste: I am a Lebanese American currently staying at my family's country residence in Shemlan, Lebanon, located in the mountains above Beirut. My fiance and I came here with the intentions of writing our graduate school...
Robert Wright has an interesting op-ed in the New York Times on "Progressive Realism." He attempts to argue for a new foreign policy that embraces both neo-con realism and liberal idealism. He calls it progressive realism. The gist of it is to redefine American self-interest broadly enough to morph national interest into concern for global human welfare. ...
Democracy: A Journal of Ideas has come out with its first issue. It looks promising, oriented along the lines of the New America Foundation (at least in terms of author affiliations), one of the best things to come out of the think tank world in recent years. There's substantial foreign policy content here, with a review by Michael...
The G-8 summit starts today and Russia is getting its star turn as it hosts for the first time. It has stated that issues such as energy security, the risk of global infectious disease, and international education initiatives will be on the agenda. The Russian government views this moment in the spotlight of global politcs as a chance to...
U. Chicago law prof Eric Posner has a typically effective op-ed in the WSJ($) today arguing that it simply doesn't make sense to apply Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (the provision at issue in Hamdan) to the conflict with Al Qaeda. His argument is pragmatic rather than formalistically legal, but it is also sensibly grounded in a...
Like many of my students, I sometimes find the law's indeterminacy and disagreement over its content disturbing and frustrating. So it is a relief to return to the very few legal rules things that (almost) everyone agrees with. As the NYT's analysis today points out, there is utter and complete consensus among legal scholars that Congress could repeal...
Here is a nice summary of the present conflict and some basic information about Hezbollah from the Council on Foreign Relations website. Bottom line is this is a political organization in Lebanon that has twenty-three seats in the 128-member Lebanese Parliament and two ministers in the Lebanese government. In this sense it is clearly not like Al Qaeda,...
Yesterday the Caspian Sea pipeline opened. As noted here, the $4 billion pipeline will deliver oil from Baku, Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. With the ability to pump one million barrels of oil per day, the pipeline is over a thousand miles long and is expected to supply 7 percent of the world's oil supply....
