Thanks to Beth and Julian for their insightful comments. Let me respond to a few of them. Beth suggests that the “modern position” and “revisionist” categories are exaggerated and simplistic, apparently because she perceives that no CIL qualifies as federal common law under the revisionist view while all CIL qualifies as common law under the modern position view....
I think the beer — more sought after than the Ranfurly Shield — is mine:The last pre-election loophole through which John Bolton's confirmation might have snuck through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was at 2:15 this afternoon at a previously called "business meeting" of the Committee. That meeting has been cancelled — and with it even the dimmest chance of John...
[Opinio Juris note: We are very pleased that Professor Beth Stephens of the Rutgers University School of Law at Camden, a leading scholar of the Alien Tort Statute, has offered to provide a reaction to the Bradley-Goldsmith-Moore Article and we post her thoughts in full below] Ten years after publication of their first attack on the “modern position,” Professors Bradley and...
I want to thank David again for agreeing to join us here at Opinio Juris for the next couple of days to discuss his forthcoming article (written with Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith), "Sosa, Customary International Law, and the Relevance of Erie" (the "Article"). The Article demonstrates to me that Sosa has not ended the debate about CIL that Curt...
Sometimes pictures are indeed worth a thousand words. Here are the most recent covers of Newsweek sold in Europe, Latin America, Asia — and the U.S.: And we wonder why 43% of Americans still believe Saddam is personally responsible for 9/11? Hat-Tip: Michael Froomkin at Discourse.net ...
Luis Posada Carriles, the anti-Castro Cuban terrorist who blew up a commercial airplane in 1976 that carried 73 innocent people, is inching ever closer to being released from federal detention. On September 11, U.S. Magistrate Norbert Garney, who earlier ruled that Posada could not be extradited to Cuba or Venezuela because of the possibility he would be tortured, recommended...
Nearly a decade ago, Professors Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith attacked the widely held “modern” position that customary international law is federal common law applicable by courts without the need for political branch authorization. This “revisionist” critique spurred extensive debate centered on four issues: (1) the historical status of CIL in the pre-Erie world of general common law,...
Opinio Juris is delighted to have Professor David Moore as the presenter in our first "online workshop" over the next few days. David, along co-authors Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith, has written an important article in a forthcoming issue of the Harvard Law Review assessing the status of customary international law in U.S. courts. This article will be...
Paul Volcker has issued an important call for UN reform in the introduction to a new book on the Oil-for-Food scandal. In the just published book, Good Intentions Corrupted edited by Jeffrey Meyer and Mark Califano, Volcker outlines his conclusions regarding the need for reform at the United Nations. Some of these recommendations have been reported before, but...
Waves of luminaries descended on the second annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative the end of last week in New York. On the one hand, it looks like a cult of personality, or perhaps of multiple personalities, in the sense of lots of very important people coming together to bask in each other’s reflected glory. Check out...
The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) celebrated its tenth anniversary last Monday. This week, ITLOS will host a formal ceremony and symposium in Hamburg to mark the occasion. But does ITLOS really have all that much to celebrate? I wonder whether members of the Tribunal might actually view its first ten years as...
John Kerry gave an interesting speech at Pepperdine University this week on the intersection of faith and politics. You can read the speech here or watch it here. He raised a number of important questions that are worth sharing. The Washington Post said of the speech that Kerry described "his religious life in greater candor and detail...
